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NURSE WITH WOUND

BLACK & BLUE : What Not To Do

Milepost 5
900 NE 81st Ave, Portland
Lofts Building, Unit 208
Opening Reception: 6-9PM, Saturday, November 21
Hours: 3-5PM, Saturdays/Sundays and by appointment
(503-729-3223 or info@milepostfive.com)

Statement: Trying to sell condominiums is impossible with inappropriate “art” inside its communal hallways – so its all been taken down and “moved” to room 208.  The show has been renamed from Blue Humor (Funny Dirty Wrong) to Black & Blue: What Not To Do, an exhibition about what wounds us. By appointment only with limited viewing hours for the extent of its run, difficult to access works of photography, drawing and installation riff on holy terror, economic meltdowns, beat down and broken forms and the unspecific objects that fuel our divisive ism and phobia cultures.  It’s difficult to leave your door and be confronted by things that are obscene and appalling.  This curatorial intervention also continues to experiment with Live/work residencies as ritual spaces that promise to create a critical nexus of all types from our creative economy for all types in our creative class. Sometimes the violence in the hall is so loud and physical that you can hear it in every room-even behind closed doors.  Managing and controlling the random forces in life can be difficult for some.  For some the difficult forces help manage random life. Two of the original artists that appeared in Blue Humor have asked not to be included in Blue & Black as a response to being censored.

-Victor Maldonado, Curator

“YOU WANT THE BEST
YOU GOT THE BEST
THE GREATEST ROCK N’ ROLL BAND
IN THE HISTORY OF ROCK N’ ROLL…”

KISS took to the big stage at the Rose Garden last night with the urge to thrill nearly 9000 fans. They rocked the house in full-face makeup and the costumery that made them famous and then packed in two plus hours of good old theatric rock n’ roll. Generously explosive pyro, more confetti than a ticker-tape parade and video effects for days. The two leads, the blood-spitting Gene Simmons (60) and the starry-eyed Paul Stanley (57) both managed to float from one stage to other higher levels, literally (on wires). The Kiss Army were out in full force, all ages, many made-up to look like their favorite members of past and present, including spaceman replacement (and Portlander) Tommy Thayer (49) on the lead guitar (serving KISS since ‘03). They rocked the classics from Black Diamond to Lick It Up to Love Gun. Things opened with a raucous set by Buckcherry, in Portland for the second time in ‘09 having sharpened their chops moreso since they took the smaller stage at the Memorial Colliseum. Now, go lose your mind in Detroit Rock City!

The view from the Modern Hotel in Boise was just simple, lovely after the snow fell late night Friday evening. The accommodations were cozy with contemporary modern furnishings, a big old army blanket, shower water that flowed right from the ceiling (along w/Aveda lotions and potions), and an incredible mixologist in the adjacent Modern Lounge. They concocted classic cocktails with herbal liquors like absinthe and Chartreuse, bitters, ginger beer and aged bourbons. Well, their munchies were also quite good. Oh, and the plush pillows led me to wrap myself in comfort as I flipped from HGTV to the Food Network (yeah, life has some of these suburban applications in time and place). I’d recommend this place to y’all for sure. Upon arrival I was transported from directly from the airport to Boise State Visual Art Center which was kindly helping support getting me back to Idaho. There I got the opportunity to see the BFA Thesis Exhibition, Resound.

But Boise was real thick with vibrant hospitality in other parts as well. I was in town to hang SQFT with artist/assistants Amanda Hamilton and Marrissa Keith (included in Resound) who really were amazing as I directed things from outside the tight window space in the chill of the day (it was about 30 degrees on Saturday!). When I say tight window space we were concerned about fitting our hips into the step-up retail window display. It is an old-fashioned space, get this, accessed through a lil trap door that is poised inside the ladie’s room! Once all was in place the evening brought me a great opportunity to meet up with my host, artist Kirsten Furlong and her partner Bill Lewis for a nice bite to eat among friends. From there it was directly back to the Egyptian Theater where the owners kindly treated me to a performance by Emmylou Harris (who I hadn’t seen since the Lilith Fair!). They seated me in the fourth row center, it felt as though she was singing those soulful songs of loss, change and hope directly to me. Perfect way to complete a Saturday night.

Sunday was dedicated to doing studio visits with regional artists, and I got to meet with both sculptor/mixed media artist Benjamin Love and painter/printmaker Sandy Marostica during their residencies with the Idaho Commission on the Arts. They were each situated in rather large spaces in separate buildings located right downtown and I enjoyed speaking with them about their work. Afterwards I met with painters Dave Thomas in Eagle, ID and finally with Bill Lewis closer into Boise. Both are veterans in their field, making large-scale work, Thomas has a penchant for abstract work using multiple approaches and materials while keeping things fairly spare and geometric. Lewis creates fables from found still life scenes, often a grittier smattering of objects and allusion. Both men were articulate and interesting to start a dialogue with. Til’ later….

Idaho Statesman on SQFT

Image ©Lorna Nakell

Hot Little Hands
Ill-Starred
@ IFCC (through 11/14)

Jim Lommasson @ NAAU
+
Powell’s (w/Inara Verzemnieks)
11/16 @ 7:30PM (reading)

Performance Works Northwest presents
BANDAGE A KNIFE
Linda Austin/Seth Nehil
Through 11/22 (tickets)

Michael Paulus‘
The Preoccupied Occupant (short film)
NW Film & Video Festival
Through 11/14

PDXPLAN.COM

SECOND TIME AROUND! + More

A year ago I was honored to curate Newspace Center for Photography’s Annual National Juried Exhibition and selected the work of Jessica Skloven to be honored as top prize, and this is the result. Opens tonight 7-10PM (not to be missed).

>>> NEWSPACE <<<

Arnold J. Kemp now featured in Just Out.
His exhibition, This Quiet Dust, Ladies and Gentlemen
opened last night at PDX Contemporary.

By the looks of it Ellen George and Jerry Mayer’s third collaboration @ Nine Gallery will most certainly be a spectacle. They seem to have this tendency towards weight, balance and the stretching of time. The promo shot suggests a floating pendulum crossing the divide of its space. Opens on 11/5 (thru the 29th) at 6PM. The gallery is located inside the Blue Sky Gallery.

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SPEKK

WAKE UP NEW YORK CITY
If anywhere even remotely in NY these next weeks you will not want to miss…

And aside from works by Arto Lindsay and a commissioned film by Guy Ben-Ner one of the major highlights for this author is entitled Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners (November 12, 8PM at Town Hall, 123 W 43rd St) complemented further by the Mike Kelley-curated: A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality: A Select History of Experimental Music (November 20/21, 6PM at Gramercy Theater, 127 E 23rd St). Makes me want to hop the next red-eye! See more on PerformaTV.

UPDATE: Milepost 5 (the “Community for Creatives”) deemed the just-opened exhibition Blue “inappropriate” and chose to move the “Funny, Dirty, Wrong” portion from the 2nd/3rd floor hallways into Unit 208 where it will remain on view into November. The ring of wrong faces what’s controversial full-frontal. An unexpected, yet situational outcome that welcomes observations. A majority of the work was curated by artist Victor Maldonado (w/intervention by Todd Johnson). Perhaps this move reserves that it is best viewed within the context of the white box, or I also offer that as work done by students in Maldonado’s PNCA class called Art, Ethics and Transgression it may just be “too cool for school”? The exhibition statement is below. Exhibition hours are listed as Saturday and Sunday, 3-5PM.

Two Halls—One Statement: Viewer Discretion Is Advised
“curated” by Victor Maldonado

Blue Humor: Funny, Dirty, Wrong is a multi-hall installation organized around notions of power, incongruity and ritual release of social etiquette and the polite terrorism associated with bazaar entertainment. For the 2nd Floor’s curatorial intersections between the shows that make up the exhibitions organized around the Lofts’ Blue theme, Todd Johnson’s commissioned gathering of Blue Velvet inspired pieces and Matthew Haggett’s sublime solo endeavor SphereLab/Blue, I asked students from my Art, Ethics and Transgression class to pen funny, dirty or politically incorrect jokes on blue note cards. The resultant products of academic inquiry on race, gender and class mix the tame and crude jokes of our time installed along the floor of the hallway. Experimental in nature this curatorial intervention is designed to negotiate the unexpected, often inappropriate confrontations with what we are conditioned to learn through over exposure and to sticky broadcast culture. The blue nature of the jokes are intended to facilitate laughter deploying the working components of an edgy stand up comedian’s craft in the service of cultural anthropology and uncovering of our dependence on jokes as entertaining coping mechanism. Situated in the nooks and crannies, where wall and ground meet, paced one at a time—making legible every color of ism and strip of phobia; in some cases all at the same time.

Each of the five artists on the 3rd floor exhibition presents work positioned within a sophisticated spectrum of comedy creating not only moments of guttural response but also of tragic insight and cultural criticism. Name-calling, linguistics and the ability to harness and manipulate language is at the center of Sarah Johnson’s “just kidding” visual and performance practices. Johnson’s text-based wall work, crafted in collaboration with artist Derek Franklin in his signature post-minimalist aesthetic, jumbles and mocks my name in a manner that ruptures the discreet, unspoken, relationship between curators and artists. In other words Johnson is making fun of me as a curator. Reading through the list of recombinant slips, substitution and mispronunciations Johnson flips the script and makes a subject of the “curator” creating an expanded form of tongue twisting tug-of-war between venue, curator, artist, art and viewer. The exhibited object becomes know-it-all examiner.

Building on his practice merging fine art and conceptual concerns, Walter Lee’s latest project DIRT literally mocks the value usually ascribed to gallery walls by soiling it. Intruding and embedding itself for the first time for this exhibition DIRT was originally conceived as a soil and water stencil tag for the exterior walls of some of Portland’s Blue-Chip galleries. Placed strategically as silent, hidden-in-the-open, rumination on seeming divides between art classes and classes of artists. Animation plays an important component in Lee’s back-and-forth interventions often enacting the uncanny through the accessibility of story telling and drawing. Alicia Gordon’s post-funny photographs are built with the residue of libidinous fantasy and open edge, on-line, social-networking sites. By enacting as scripts for her compositions Craigslist posts Gordon brings to life the unlikeliest mix of mainstream popular culture with seedy sexual deviancy. Recognizable acts, players and personas of our grand collective digital unconscious richly printed and poorly framed, images of images, serve up the most pent up or gluttonous of desires.

Town crier of what not to say, Sean Joseph Patrick Carney, Portland’s bete noire performance artist, actor, player, hater, lighting rod—speaks for himself. Carney’s edited anthology of essays, lessons and projects Social Malpractice: A Practical Guide to Making Socially Irresponsible Work builds on the irascible style usually allotted public airing through his alter ego Tanner Dobson. The xenophobic and obscene, run-a-muck, quality of his prose and performance reaches at the moral and ethical codes that design our social interactions and perceptions. As a political cartoonist Carney aligns and assails the powerful and the common in a mix of James Gillray and Jose Guadalupe Posada-like graphic characterizations: free for the taking and reading on your own time and in your own space in your own words. Stepping into the third dimension for the first time, playing MC within humor’s cutting spectacle, jD White’s costumed beer bottles stage and enact prank exchanges in what can be described as Ikea-shelf/stoop-and-corner-scenarios. Mixing Jerky Boys prank-style audio with cast glass and paper sculptures White mixes issues of class struggle/stagnation and the ability to borrow and create forms that can transcend aesthetic positioning though co-option and cultural tourism. Each of the three scenes situates themselves in front of green backdrops as contextual reminders to their unreality and talismanic forms as ultimate jokes of an underlying menace to society.

Blue (Velvet) curated by Todd Johnson and Matthew Haggett’s SphereLab: Blue will both remain situated on the first floor of the Lofts building at 900 NE 81st Avenue. Johnson asked a few colleagues from art school to respond to the David Lynch film Blue Velvet in a series of works on paper. The dark and disturbing film is sexual and violent, intensely visual and surreal in its use of bizarre and haunting symbolism. How would a group of artists go about interpreting such an interesting and significant subject in their own unique language? Artists include: Marty Ackley, Bridget Irish, Jessi Johnson, Philip Miner, William Patterson, Douglas Struble, Ryan Suther, Eric Trosko, Aaron Turner, & Phil Wagner.

Just in case you have yet to be introduced to Frieze Magazine podcasts I thought it be wise to point out two stellar talks of late, one a conversation between artist John Baldessari and curator Matthew Higgs (also an artist/writer) - the other is with philosopher (and author of Art Power) Boris Groys on The Aesthetic Responsibility where he discussed how design now functions as a medium of self-positioning in public space (read more @ e-flux). In many ways this discussion relates heavily to the layout and potential outcomes of something like Blue at MP5. In the ways that we use and re-purpose space, and how details are sublimated to infiltrate a line of dialogue between people and place.

Scenes from Matthew Haggett’s Spherelab
Now at Milepost 5 through December 27

Official Site

Point |  Counter-Point

I don’t know. Do you? I mean, what has happened to pop music over this decade coming to a close? Has the digitization of music completely altered  the listening experience permanently, both in how we perceive celebrities and consume music - and how has that effectively filtered into the overall quality and catchiness of songwriting, for instance? Is singling out yet another greatest hits package by Madonna even worth its blog weight anymore? Even within the vestiges of its retro-packaging does one buy exclusively based on image in these days of the great recession? Alive and well are the slickest, most over-produced recordings ever, but how valid is the lyric, the musicianship, the message? My guess is that cashing in on the past right now is not at all fashionable, so I’ll just continue waiting to be justified (and ancient).

BLUE through December 27
( more )

Josh Arseneau may just be one of the region’s most prolific and underappreciated artists. In The Sword of Light he’s partly played the mad social-scientist baptizing-by-fire certain wartime frictions. Yet at the same time the artist is catalyzing a truncated, tossed-off urban lingo that rings in your ears hours and hours after you take the walk-thru of Gallery Homeland at the Ford Building. In yet another one of its dramatic installations the space explodes with wry and anxious isms and questionable patriotics. Certainly Arseneau’s most accomplished work to date plays on a theoretical hopscotch where its characters’ hands are tied to the dichotomy of what may be personified as humorous, internalized fear. Our land is cast as ill-fated within the scope of street vernacular, and the pared down painting itself has come farther than ever. The artist’s penchant for use of the graffiti motif has diminished some in favor of a richer, gestural, and slyly irreverent appropriation of the unconscious power of flags and pennants. Here Arseneau stares down the length of the sword’s double edge and the viewer is challenged to find guidance in that balance. Through November 1.

1-2-3: Today marks the third anniversary of unBlogged. Soon to become newer and improved(er). But until then keep your eyes peeled and your ears atuned. What’s next?

BLUE

October 24 - December 27, 2009

PEEK-A-BLUE: Come to Milepost 5 this Saturday (7-9PM) to unveil the complete picture posed by artist/curators Victor Maldonado (Froelick Gallery) and Todd Johnson (Augen Gallery) and by Butters Gallery artist Matthew Haggett (SphereLab). Festivities are free and breaks down as follows:

FLOOR I
Blue (Velvet)
curated by Todd Johnson
Artists: Marty Ackley, Bridget Irish, Jessi Johnson, Philip Miner, William Patterson, Douglas Struble, Ryan Suther, Eric Trosko, Aaron Turner, Phil Wagner

FLOOR II
Blue :: A Curatorial Intersection

FLOOR III
Blue Humor: Funny, Dirty, Wrong
curated by Victor Maldonado
Artists: Sean Joseph Patrick Carney, Sarah Johnson, Alicia Gordon, Walter Lee, JD White

MP5 is located at 900 NE 81st Avenue in the Montavilla neighborhood.

FINISTERRE | SONAR