May 21st, 2008
The Aftermath of Experience
Multimedia Virtuoso TJ Norris conjures 1980s Manhattan,
Even As He Embalms It
by Richard Speer
In his installation, INFINITUS, at New American Art Union, multimedia artist TJ Norris has pulled off an elegant, thought-provoking show in his hallmark aesthetic of clinical-yet-invigorating minimalism. Norris describes INFINITUS as a “multimedia video lounge,” and you enter it through gray felt curtains that block out the light. The gallery’s storefront windows have been blacked out as well, imparting a hushed, corridor-like feel to the exhibition space. The first thing you see is a light box that cryptically declaims, in wedding-invite calligraphy: “Reserve the right to remain silent.” To your right, five sloping gurneys are laid out in a row, gray and impersonal, a single roll cushion at the head of each, their one token concession to comfort. You recline upon these gurneys and watch two channels of video projected onto the ceiling: grainy images of old Lincolns and Subarus rushing in front of a chain-link fence; a disco ball rotating in a sleazy, wood-paneled room; a woozy shot of a run-down apartment hallway.... The images have a vintage urban feel, like derelict souvenirs of pre-Giuliani Manhattan, when gentrification had yet to impinge and it was still possible to get a decently priced blow job in Times Square. Along the floor at the end of the gallery extends a horizontal cutout of a skyline, eerily backlit, while to the right, the gallery’s bathroom glows red, courtesy of artist Rose McCormick’s complementary installation, Dovetail Deux. As the one flash of chromatic heat in an otherwise chromatically dead environment, the red glow is all the more effective for its singularity. Meantime, as an aural component, unseen speakers play French composer Christian Renou’s ambient soundtrack, Land of Confusion. The soundscape, commissioned for the exhibition, completes a mise-en-scène that manages both dispassion and seduction.
In the 1980s, when Norris was in his late teens and early 20s, he haunted art galleries and dance clubs along the Eastern seaboard, meeting Andy Warhol at an opening in Boston, rubbing elbows with Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York, transfixed by scrawling Jenny Holzer text and towering banners touting Diana Ross concerts. As artists are wont to do, Norris compartmentalized and fetishized the habitat of his youth in ways that continue to inform his present. His INFINITUS demonstrates the infinite ways in which the zeitgeist of our formative years can enrich and ensnare us. It is a diorama of a time and place now lapsed, re-created as in a theme park in the distant future. With maturity and deconstructionist polish, Norris has romanticized a gritty metropolitan past while also draining it of every last drop of romanticism it ever did or did not possess. He conjures the aftermath of experience—which is to say, memory—even as he embalms its corpse.
April 25th, 2007
invisible.other at New American Art Union
by Richard Speer
New American Art Union's invisible.other, curated by TJ Norris, is a well-conceived, well-executed show with diverse highlights. In Melia Donovan's Frostie Freeze, the artist rendered a Midwestern fast-food joint by poking holes onto the gallery wall with a Dremel. The piece is so subtle, you could easily walk by it without even knowing it's there. Susan Robb's Levelfivefieldrecorder is a bisected photograph with woozy green lightplay suggestive of a flower-bordered swimming pool by night. Abi Spring's Wet is perhaps the artist's most subtle piece to date, departing from her richly saturated palette in favor of delicately shaded electric yellow patterns, which suggest chlorophyll as seen under a microscope.
The show's most disturbing and enigmatic works come courtesy of Olympia-based artist Daniel Barron, whose photographic phantasmagorias are the stuff of which nightmares are made. Late at night, after he tucks his children into bed, Barron snaps digital pictures of mundane objects around the house: toys, groceries, his own elbow.... Then, using PhotoShop, he digitally manipulates this source material into horrific montages. Peasant shows an object that appears to be an uncooked chicken being sprayed with milk, the drops splattering upon impact, frozen in time like short-exposure mushroom clouds. The image, along with a companion piece, Seed, is many things: nifty, novel, shocking, disgusting. But one thing it is not is real. There is something important lacking in these works that is not lacking in photos where fantastical effects are created in-camera. For decades, Lois Greenfield has captured airborne dancers frozen in the unlikeliest of positions, sans camera tricks and with the offscreen aid of only the occasional trampoline. In 1948, Philippe Halsman created Dalí Atomicus, in which the late Surrealist appeared to float mid-air amid similarly gravity-defying paintings, a chair, an arc of water, and three cats. This well-known image was the best of 28 different exposures, each of which had assistants throwing the cats and water into the air, and Dalí himself jumping on the count of three. It is no doubt old-fashioned to suggest that doing something for real is better than doing it with the aid of PhotoShop. If Barron had squirted an actual raw chicken with milk, the finished photo might have looked exactly the same as his digital manipulation, but it would have had greater credibility and held a more authentic interest for the viewer. Then again, I can tell you from experience that squirting raw chickens with milk is really, really gross.
922 SE Ankeny St., 231-8294
December 27th, 2006
Hits of 2006: The crème de la crème of the year that was.
by Richard Speer
Best Group Show: (tie) TJ Norris' grey|area at Guestroom and Blood Rainbow Family's Haunted at Disjecta.
Best Arts Website: TJ Norris' now-defunct Is It Art?? on oregonlive.com
October 2006
12X16 Gallery: TJ Norris' works
1216 SE Division St., 432-3513. Closes Oct. 29.
Pick of the Week: Visual Arts Listings for the weeks:
Wednesday, October 11 2006 thru Tuesday, October 17 2006
Wednesday, October 18 2006 thru Tuesday, October 24 2006
Wednesday, October 25 2006 thru Tuesday, October 31 2006
June 14th, 2006
Shades Of Gray
TJ Norris finds local color in a sea of gray.
by Richard Speer
TJ Norris is one of those people you don't appreciate until they go away. The erstwhile director of Soundvision gallery (Everett Station Lofts, 2002-2003), Norris was easy to take for granted. During that era, the Lofts brimmed with the diverse talents of Gavin Shettler and Michael Oman-Reagan, and Norris' own aesthetic-arid, insular, disconnected-tended to be overshadowed by Shettler's penchant for splashy abstraction and Reagan's for radical reductivism. When Norris closed the gallery and began freelance curating nationally and internationally, Everett Station entered a period of relative languor from which it has only recently recovered, and the Portland arts community began to realize what an asset Norris had been. Now, like a spectral Obi-Wan Kenobi, Norris has returned stronger, more powerful than before, with his exemplary group show, gray_area, at Guestroom.
Highlights of the show include David Eckard's Postscript, an ingenius contraption that uses smoke from a paraffin lamp to create enigmatic abstractions on panel. Abi Spring's marbleized layers of paint appear monolithic from a distance but betray rich striations up close. It's nice to see fresh work from Laura Fritz, who has forsaken her inscrutable creepy-crawlies for crystalline planes that evoke Arctic ice fields. Scott Wayne Indiana deconstructs a coffee-table book about Elizabeth Taylor's jewelry collection and also contributes one of his virtuosic paintings, which increasingly finesse the line between controlled process and gestural abandon. After a detour into cityscapes in his last outing at now-defunct Gallery 500, Troy Briggs returns to his fascination with android figures, with newfound sophistication. Washington artist Daniel Barron composites photographs to create surrealist tableaux, as in his stunning, disturbing NEST, with its dribbling fluids and eyelash/conjunctiva imagery.
Norris' own architectural photographs, also on display, are at their strongest when they're most abstract. The works are matted and framed in multiple, a more bourgeois presentation than his arresting circular statements last fall at Chambers. One of the best group shows in recent memory, gray_area demonstrates that as Norris' curatorial confidence has grown, he has evolved his aesthetic beyond the arid and into realms of the austere. After this outing, his talents are no longer likely to be taken for granted.
Guestroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8378. Closes July 28.
December 28, 2005
BEST VIS-ARTS BLOG: It's a tie between Eva Lake's juicy yet thought-provoking Lovelake.org/diary and TJ Norris' spirited, incisive Is It Art?.
November 16, 2005
TJ Norris at Chambers Gallery
Local artist keeps his head in the clouds as he kicks us in the gut.
by Richard Speer
hartreuse light, undulating as if on the waves of a night-lit Southern California pool. With the exceptions of a couple of entries that come across as too literal (Macro-axis and 11:11), these are works of strange beauty, suffused with a sensibility that pivots between grit and ether. It is precisely this oscillation that keeps Norris' work, which is undeniably conceptual, from veering too precious or academic.
The show has a sound-installation component and is meant to be viewed while listening via headphones to Tribryd, a CD compiled by Norris, featuring works by nine composers from around the world. The artworks in the show were created in response to these compositions, which points to another laudable aspect of Norris' modus operandi: He is not only a frequently collaborative artist, but one who strives toward Gesamtkunstwerk, an immersive, transdisciplinary artistic experience that was the very foundation of his now-defunct gallery, SoundVision, at Everett Station Lofts. By grounding his work in the senses, Norris has always ensured that no matter how evolved his overarching schema, he never aims over our heads, but squarely at our guts. 207 SW Pine St., #102, 939-2255. Closes Nov. 26.
October 12, 2005
PICK OF THE WEEK
CHAMBERS Randy Moe's works, TJ Norris' photographs and sound installation. 207 SW Pine St., #102, 939-2255. Oct. 13-Nov. 26.
January 2004
The Year In Review - 2003
The most-lamented gallery closing: TJ Norris' Soundvision - Richard Speer
November 12, 2003
...Field owner Michael Oman-Reagan has become, after the successive exoduses of Gavin Shettler and TJ Norris, the curatorial anchor of the Everett Station Lofts.... - Richard Speer
August 20, 2003
TJ Norris, owner of Soundvision Gallery, has announced that the gallery will close its doors on Oct. 18. The closure coincides with the gallery's last show (Norris' own Genometrics) and comes as the result of economic hard times. "As a small business trying to survive," says Norris, "and at the same time show the best-quality work I can find, at times it feels like a nonprofit endeavor, where few open their wallets." Norris became, in the eyes of many, the anchor of the Everett Station Lofts when the Gavin Shettler Gallery closed in January, also a victim to financial woes. With the departure of Soundvision, the soul of the Lofts is once again up for grabs. Norris plans to stay in Portland and concentrate on his own artistic output.
May 2003
Biennial, Schmiennial! A major sampling of West Coast artists will offer what is being billed as an alternative to the upcoming Oregon Biennial 2003. Organized by artist and NWDrizzle.com critic Jeff Jahn, The Best Coast will showcase artists from Los Angeles all the way up the coast to Vancouver, B.C.: Tim Bavington, Robert Yoder, Tom Cramer, Matthew Picton, damali ayo and TJ Norris, to name only a few. 1001 SE Water St., 998-0422. _6-9 pm daily May 19-24. $3 entry.
January 15, 2003
...Second Thursday marked another birth: the new gallery at Everett Station, Genuine Imitation, whose inaugural show featured paintings by Jason Mitchell. Mitchell paints iconic monkeys wearing different hats: pirate, wizard, Valkyrie, coonskin, bowler and, most hilariously of all, state trooper. He found his inspiration for this monkey madness during a visit to a New Orleans voodoo shop, where monkey claws are used to summon spirits. You can't help but smile at these simian multiples, which are more fun than Cary Leibowitz's forced "faggy faggy boom boom" multiples a few doors down at Soundvision.
December 11, 2002
There's also something odd about paintings that are so willfully banal that you have to be in the right clique to "get" them. New Yorker Cary Leibowitz has won a cult following for his solipsistic, post-Pop meditations on his plight as a self-avowed "self-loathing gay Jewish artist." But suppose you didn't know his reputation when you walked into Leibowitz's show at Soundvision. Suppose you'd never heard of the guy when you saw on the walls panel after pastel-painted panel, each one blank save for the scrawled words: "faggy faggy boom boom"?
In search of some kind of explanation, suppose you picked up Leibowitz's artist statement and read the following: "faggy faggy boom boom is, as Frank Stella might have said what you get-(when you see it)-get it? I like to think they are abstract (and dumb and wacky [n tacky] and goofy [n poofy]...the paintings are not aggressive-(unless you are already on the defensive--oh go away please). Hip Hip Hooray!" Now what?
First Thursday gallery-goers responded in three different ways: by admiring the fabulous pink balloon decorations of the gallery while ignoring the paintings; by seeking out dinner-jacket-dapper gallery owner TJ Norris for some much-needed context, or by ditching the place to check out the ballerinas two doors down at Gavin Shettler.
November 13, 2002
Soundvision, the new gallery at the Everett Station Lofts, is offering a "post-gay" look at the male body called disembodied/reconfigured. As owner TJ Norris explains, gay men in the 1980s developed a Jeff Stryker body ideal, muscle-bound and waxed, as an armor against oppression. Now that "AIDS has stripped that body of its sensuality," gay men are abandoning that ideal and "letting their bellies and body hair grow." The show features three photographers' take on this thesis. Chris Komater takes pictures of bears--not the grizzly or polar variety, but the rotund, hirsute male-of-a-certain-age variety. His staggered close-ups of bear bodies have a visual continuity across the wall and finely graduated black-and-white tones. Ira Tattelman's Self: Exam consists of close-ups of a nude male body, the photos taped together to show the man in toto. Despite its ambiguous imagery, the most sexually charged picture here is Bruce Eves' 15 Sheets to the Wind, which shows a man tonguing a cleft of flesh that is either another man's ass or the juncture of his own bicep and armpit.
Flushed, I head to Ogle, where Matt Proctor and Eric Franklin have installed their odd, interactive sculptures. It's like a playground in the gallery, people climbing into and out of the steel-and-wood contraptions, which are inset with neon tubing. Proctor, a former construction worker, and Franklin, a glass blower, find fascination in small spaces like children's forts and treehouses. One sculpture looks like a tiki hut, another like an igloo. The hour grows late; the igloo beckons. I squeeze myself through the narrow opening until I'm enclosed within the strange, yet vaguely familiar, interior. There is not much space here; I curl into a fetal position. The nubby walls muffle the chattering of gallery-goers outside. The night is complete. Could it have ended any other way?
October 9, 2002
It's nearing 9 pm. Galleries are beginning to close down for the night, but I've still not made it to Soundvision and PushDot, nor seen Nic Walker at Fleck (I heard he killed a guy...or was it a deer?), nor Gregory Grenon at Laura Russo, nor...I quicken my pace through the light rain, merlots to go before I sleep.
