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To further whet your appetite for the exhibition .meta…
>>Listen to an excerpt<< of Jesse Paul Miller’s work as presented at Linfield College Art Gallery through 11/29. This sound material was recorded between April and earlier this month in Indonesia, Burma, Japan and Thailand.
YOU GO GHOUL!: Get ready for a dreary Rip-City weekend (hey, I have to move tomorrow!) full of goblins, big ole bats and probably lots of Tina Fey (er, Sarah Palin) costumes. Above is a shot of me and my prize-winning paisley pumpkin back in like ‘02 I think? Tonight, instead of passing out candy (and umbrellas) to lil’ hooligans of the night, I will be wearing red and attending the SOLD OUT Blazers (vs. Spurs) season opener (sans Oden), oh, yeah - and Earth, Wind & Fire are going to be there too.
NINA HAGEN is FEARLESS!: I can’t believe it’s been twenty-five years since this gem (Angstlos) was hatched! Further, I can’t believe I had never seen this spectacle of a video until today. New York, NY, indeed…those were the days.
The Portland Mercury’s John Motley has a go @ .meta
A few single new images now available at NAAU. I’m fascinated by an inferred narrative when these are clustered. Perhaps that’s what makes Colorforms® so interesting to children (the selection, pairing process)?
TOP ROW:
LA_Sign I, LA_Sign II, unReal
MIDDLE ROW:
Me + My (#2/3 available), Snowblind, Lone
BOTTOM ROW:
(untitled) Pattern, As Above
Archival inkjet prints on Hahnemühle in editions of 3.
That’s Sam Taylor-Wood (w/Pet Shop Boys), btw.
Related: The Financial Times; London Times; The Guardian
The Linfield Review’s Editor interviewed me last week about the process of curating .meta and this was the result.
FOUR WALLS (+ Then Some…): If you are anywhere near New England after November 16th or the following months, don’t miss Sol Lewitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective! This is the big mama of nationwide exhibitions to see — the largest exhibition of Lewitt’s wall drawings, ever. The show was designed by the late artist prior to his passing in 2007. It’s nearly a mile of wall surface and has been in progress since April of this year. The show will be held in the renovated 27,000 square foot Building 7 of Mass MOCA in North Adams, MA and is free and open to the public. The exhibition consists of more than 100 wall drawings. Talk about buckets of paint! Mass MOCA does a fantastic job of bringing the work to the web as well — here you can get a sneak peek of the Beta Site before it hits the streets in mid-November (grid, floor plan and other info).
Friend and colleague Paul Schütze has worked closely with James Turrell in composing the complex sound accompaniment known as Music for Roden Crater: 147 Orbiting 1 Through 6 For 5 (listen to a 20 minute sample of this epic 5 hour+ work). Schütze also just completed his newly commissioned collaboration with Josiah McElheny called Island Universe which just opened last week at Jay Jopling’s contemporary art project space in London, White Cube. Check it out!
The Oregonian’s D.K. Row mentioned .meta in his Shows of Note in Friday’s A&E. As the Linfield College Art Gallery takes steps with me, please save the date: Wednesday, November 12 (4PM). This will be my curatorial/gallery talk with the public.
McMINNVILLE, OR: Prominent regional and international artists will be featured in ‘.meta‘, an upcoming group exhibit at Linfield College. Artist/Curator TJ Norris will realize the third and final incarnation of his “themeless” exhibitions. Both of the previous curatorial projects in this series, grey|area (Guestroom Gallery, 2006) and invisible.other (NAAU, 2007), focused on underlying thematic sub-contexts, exploring the origins of ideas, not complete thoughts. .meta continues to serve this push concept by furthering the plausible misconceptions of double entendre, cultural baggage, broken architecture, dissonance/atonality - all packaged with a generous undercurrent of social/political commentary. This exhibition will run through November 29 at the Linfield Art Gallery of the James F. Miller Fine Arts Center. An opening reception will be held Wednesday, October 15 at 6PM and an curator’s talk on Wednesday, November 12 at 4PM, both within the gallery.
“Over the past three years I’ve developed exhibitions from digested bits and pieces of found ideas. These flash moments are scrawled on receipts, shorthanded into my iPhone and sometimes based on the reliance on my own memory. Big ideas are often prefaced by even more fleeting minutiae. While building these exhibitions much became divisible through the power of imperceptible suggestion - both philosophical and rhythmic. As such .meta becomes a richer examination, drawing to some form of non-linear, barely narrative conclusion in this series.
If there were a theme at play it would be “subtext”. It’s always there, in fine print and in short, defines our technical and convenient day-to-day. The prefix ‘meta’ in its colloquial use (metamorphosis, metadata) has an instant association to fascinating phenomena. The more I realized it, the more the quest became a game of such associations to origins, a ‘chicken & the egg’ scenario. As a group exhibition of work, diverse artists were sought, who each confront the stoicism of incomplete thoughts or the sly double entendre head on. Here exists this sense of longing, of awkward limbo, like a deer caught in headlights. In ‘.meta’ you will find work that is wry, socially political and ambiguous at first. Perhaps the offering of clues muses best about the confines and construct of why we exist in the universe at all, complete with our mortal faults. Or take an extra moment to read between the lines, and what at first may seem abstract, could possibly contain the essence of something much more forbidden, or even ludicrous.”
- TJ Norris, Summer 2008
The exhibit is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12-5PM. The gallery will be closed 11/26 & 27. To reach the gallery from 99W, turn east on Keck Drive in south McMinnville. The art gallery is located in Building B. See Campus Map. Miller Fine Arts Center is number 56. For more information, call 503-883-2804 or visit the site.
***
Curating Fragments of Broken Ideas
by Regina Hackett
Seattle Post Intelligencer/Art To Go
***
Public Art Fund presents…
THE NEW MILLENNIUM PAPER AIRPLANE CONTEST
By Klara Hobza
November 1, 2008, 1-5PM
In the Great Hall/New York Hall of Science (Queens, NY)
Pre-register online now: www.publicartfund.org!
THE NEW MILLENNIUM PAPER AIRPLANE CONTEST and corresponding book by Klara Hobza is a multifaceted artwork inspired by a historic paper airplane contest that took place in 1967 at the Great Hall in what is now the New York Hall of Science. Built by Wallace K. Harrison to display rockets in the 1964 World’s Fair, the Great Hall is a secular cathedral of concrete and colored glass; for Hobza’s one-day event, this unique location will harbor aircraft of a different scale.
Commissioned by Public Art Fund, the competition is open to the public. Come with your plane or fold it on site! Submissions are welcome for all categories: distance flown, duration aloft, beauty, and spectacular failure. There will also be a surprise category and a special children’s division for participants under 13. For people unable to attend the event, airplanes can be submitted to be flown by proxies.
Qualifying airplanes may be folded from letter-size paper, up to 8.5″ x 11″ (or A4) or smaller, using average weight office paper. Cutting and minor gluing of airplanes is permitted; stapling is not. Detailed information about THE NEW MILLENNIUM PAPER AIRPLANE CONTEST as well as specific instructions for submitting airplanes, event pre-registration, contest rules, and book information may be found at www.publicartfund.org. Further questions about the project may be addressed to paperairplanes@publicartfund.org.
Notable planes and the stories behind their design will be collected in a commemorative book by the artist, THE NEW MILLENNIUM PAPER AIRPLANE BOOK, published by Public Art Fund in spring 2009. The book will consist of airplane designs that can be torn out, folded, and flown, as well as stories by their creators.
As Halloween looms I confess that I’m not scared of ghosts, but sometimes think about the invisible traces we artists leave behind. This past weekend I packed up and moved my studio to new digs. In the process the realization that every scratch, drip, snap, et al, hit me hard like an echo in a long tunnel. All these gestures made in time are still somehow contained in those four walls. Thoughts of making an indelible mark ring true for me today.
TRANSPLANTED: This ‘image of the day’ comes from Tara Donovan’s Transplanted (2003) made from ripped and stacked tarpaper originally shown here at the IBM Exhibition Space in Manhattan. I love the way this plays on the cement squared walkway environment in which it’s placed, and seen from above, as so, makes it more like an island lava flow.
TJ Norris (TJN): Hilary, how are you today?
Hilary Pfeifer (HP): Pretty good. The sun is out!
TJN: It hasn’t reached upper NE yet. But soon… So, I’d like to dive right in so we can talk about your show Natural Selection
HP: Great.
TJN: You are on view during the months of September and October, correct?
HP: Yes–there are a few more weeks left for this show at Ogle, and then it’s traveling down to San Francisco to show again in January.
TJN: That’s fantastic. A travelling solo show out of Portland! I wish there was more of that. So you’re just past the midpoint, how has the response been?
HP: I got a lot of early press, which was nice, and some sales, but I had both the Portland art market and the economy in general working against me. I have some ideas about continuing the show beyond San Francisco as well, but nothing set in stone.
TJN: Ogle is on NW Broadway on the side of the Everett Station Lofts. Where in San Francisco will you be showing?
HP: In San Francisco, I show at Velvet da Vinci Gallery and they are taking it next. I’ve been with them for 9 years. They are fantastic. I always try to find another place to show my installations since they take so much work to get together. Usually I do it across the country, but this time I am happy to bring it to a community who is already receptive to this work, both financially and thematically.
TJN: Care to expound on the ‘one step beyond’…?
HP: Well…..I really fell in love with working with the greenhouse as my canvas on this project and I just don’t quite feel like those explorations are done. I have always wanted to create an art installation for places like: a botanical garden, a natural history museum or a children’s museum–and I feel like it’s time to start moving on that dream–so I’m thinking about ways to work with the content, flesh out the educational aspects and make some proposals. I am really interested in non-traditional venues and audiences for art at the moment, and love the idea of art as a teaching tool too.
TJN: I really appreciate the idea that a solo show can be a work-in-progress and with the motifs you have built into this work, well, isn’t it fitting to grow it as you go so to speak?
HP: Yes. My projects always seem to build and grow off the previous ones.
TJN: Tell me briefly about that transition from your last project to this one?
HP: The very last project I did was ‘sWarm’, a site specific installation for the Fuller Museum in Massachusetts, which I showed later at the Museum of Contemporary Craft last year. (And tomorrow I’ll install a small portion of it again at Relish in the Pearl District!) The Fuller offered me a 40×18 flat wall which led me to thinking about how to “fill” the space, and I decided to research swarms for inspiration. That led me to create a story based in fact but evolving off into an imaginary scenario of love and courtship. Natural Selection also centers around themes of love, courtship, sexuality and intimacy, although I wanted to also design the structure it was shown on/within rather than relying on existing architecture as I usually do. I actually had the idea for Natural Selection about five years ago, but I had the other commitment with the Fuller first, plus I knew that I needed to raise funds to do N.S. the right way.
TJN: Says something about bio/species….about morphing perhaps? Let’s talk about the title of the show first, ‘Natural Selection’. Is this some sort of double entendre for flora, fauna and homosapiens and how the entirety of our mating process has a filter not unlike osmosis?
HP: Natural Selection is taken right from Darwin, obviously, but I kept coming back to it as a title for the show because I was interested in the use of “natural” as an adjective. I intend to ask the question “what is natural?” and hallenging people’s notions of what that word means. I did some reading on Charles Darwin’s theories, as well as his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who was actually the one who planted the seed in his grandson’s head about evolution. Charles was the one who proved the theories that his grandfather suspected. Around the same time I was reading about Darwin’s theories about natural selection in plants, I saw an article in the New York Times about a Stanford biologist named Joan Roughgarden, whose studies find that the sexual selection portions of Darwin’s findings don’t take into account the abundant examples in the animal kingdom of same-sex partners rearing their young. It got me thinking about how it would be fun to give plants the power to choose their mates the way humans can rather than strictly asexually.
TJN: Nature does have this larger effect on humanity. I see the greenhouse you had fabricated for this presentation as a metaphor for chaos container - or perhaps it works like a shield from man-made corruption to the ecosphere? Am I far off the mark?
HP: No–that’s great. I also love the connotation to the old proverb: “People who live in glass houses shouldnt throw stones.” And “greenhouse effect” as another reference.
TJN: As such, the presentation is a fabrication of wildlife. Seems like a true oxymoron, no?
HP: It’s true–I often think of it as a self-portrait of the irony of my life. I grew up hiking in the Cascade Mountains with my family a lot, went to a very rural high school, was an avid gardener in my 20’s. It’s not that I don’t go out in nature as an adult, but it does seem a little funny that I’m quite content now to spend more time indoors making fake nature than out in the real thing.
TJN: Can you talk about the balance of nature you’ve hand-crafted? There exists this fear, however general or suspect, that with development and urban domination, we are losing what’s real, which makes your installation more cutting, as if we are surrounded by the endangered unknown. Can you talk about the imaginary, the make believe here?
HP: I basically see my voice as an artist as one who steps way back, looking at the ways that humans try to control nature and how nature always finds a way to make its way back in–but I like to use humor as a vehicle rather than melancholy or fear, as if it’s a commedia del arte tableau. I love dark humor a well as silly playful things, and strive to find a place in my artwork that is both familiar and curious. Disgusting yet tempting. (Maybe it’s the hedonist in me…..)
TJN: Well, I must say your tight treatment to the space is unlike past exhibitions at Ogle. Any final thoughts?
HP: One thing I tend to do on a regular basis is work with large quantities of objects, which definitely can bring in that feeling of the endangered unknown as you mention, but I hope that it also puts humans in their place a bit. It seems so ridiculous when the right wing establishment thinks we can drill our way out of an energy crisis and that global warming is just a natural cycle rather than human caused. At what point will we realize that you “can’t fool with mother nature?” (Remember those ads from the 70’s? What was that for, margarine?)
***
NATURAL SELECTION
On view through November 1 at Ogle (310 NW Broadway)
October 10 is the 283rd day of the year (284th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 82 days remaining until the end of the year.
Libra is often associated with the Greek Goddess of Justice, Themis, the Greek mythological figure of Atalanta (meaning balanced), and Astraea (daughter of Themis), who ascended to heaven and became the constellation of Virgo, and carried the scales of justice, the nearby constellation of Libra. The astrological symbol for Libra represents the scales. Many modern astrologers regard it as the most desirable of zodiacal types because it represents the zenith of the year, the high point of the seasons, when the harvest of all the hard work of the spring is reaped.
Benjamin West (1738), Giuseppe Verdi (1813), Helen Hayes (1900), Thelonious Monk (1917), Peter Coyote (1942), Ben Vereen (1946), John Prine (1946), David Lee Roth (1954), Tanya Tucker (1958), Bradley Whitford (1959), Kirsty MacColl (1959), Martin Kemp (1961), Rebecca Pidgeon (1963), TJ Norris (1965)
Keep your eye on me. Or ear on them. Weezer is back (oh, this is their brand-new video). If you like nachos and custard pies you’ll per chance dig it. And if you do, come join me at the Rose Garden Arena on Thursday night. OK, I bought their first self-titled record, and with their new ‘red’ album I think they are now all color-coded. Who knows. The tour includes Angels and Airways as well as Tokyo Police Club - so, in essence, it’s the attack of the alterna-quartet men.
Other than that the past week has seen me around town at many new exhibitions and through a lot in the process of moving. And there will be plenty more this week as I clear my studio some, trading things, letting go, embracing and becoming more zen about everything around ownership. My birthday weekend is coming up, and I basically am keeping things low-key with Rob. Though part of the weekend is also dedicated to the installation of .meta which opens next Wednesday, October 15. And I want to somehow squeeze a podcast in.
IN NW ART NEWS: After culling through 524 applicants, the 30th annual Betty Bowen award, conducted with the Seattle Art Museum, goes to photographer Isaac Layman who shows at Lawrimore Project. The Kayla Skinner Special Recognition Award goes to Eric Elliott, and the PONCHO Special Recognition Award goes to Wynne Greenwood.
Further Reading: A Picture of the Disco Children
New Website: Henry Art Gallery
PS: In reference to the above image by Isaac Layman, a reader sent in this picture of Olafur Eliasson’s Take Your Time which was on view at P.S. 1 this year.
October, the month of my birth, marks two years since the inception of unBlogged.
In the balanced spirit and grace of my fellow Libran….This has been a fantastic forum for just about everything in the cultural milieu that surrounds my everyday, and was a great launchpad for some critical thought after I closed my chapter with Oregonlive.com. Since that time I have signed on to write the occasional review for a few publications, leaving that chapter to be written elsewhere. As time sways and my studio practice evolves and has become more time-critical and streamlined, it frees me less to dedicate to a daily entry. When I think about blogging as a conversation of sorts, dedicated to a personal point of view, I often wonder about the possibility of exchange. There’s a lot going on around town, new galleries and leaders (institutions, government), and most of it is imbued within a cycle of change, fresh and youthful. And I’m just as thrilled as the next guy to participate in all this good stuff. And though I get out to see exhibitions and films and fellow artists often, I am going to, for now, abandon the vestiges of cultural alliteration and digestion to be done one-on-one with my colleagues, leaving for more white space here. Room for bigger breaths, and the occasional snapshot of what’s going on out in the field when I’m curating or in my studio. Speaking of which, I am closing my current studio this month and moving to Milepost 5.
So, taking the plunge towards a future with an intelligent live/work space that blends community, and a sense of the urban street-chic unknown. I’ve been so fortunate to spend the last two years with my amazing colleagues at Today Art Studios and will miss them all very much. While under the roof in the lower Southeast Industrial District I produced more work than ever before in my career, drawings, photographs, an entire full-scale installation production, studio visits galore. Any artists’ dream. There’s also something about the process of consolidation, refining what I have, what I can leave behind. Though when all settles in what at once was a bottomless cup, I plan on spending a good chunk of the next six months to a year on a new body of work that’s only now floating around in my head in parts and pieces (just where I want to be).
PS: If you are interested - I have a sizable pro art crate (77″ x 53 1/2″ x 19″) built by ArtWork in superb shape that I am willing to sell (worth 2K, $500 or BO) or trade (contact me for more info). I’m moving mid-month.
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