Curtis Knapp on KBOO

Listen to the interview here.

I’m back at Art Focus this week with Curtis Knapp of YU Contemporary. Yu has been in the news a lot lately. It’s the new non-profit with grand aims and an even grander building. You can’t help but be inspired when you walk in there. The first exhibition is an archive from PCVA.

Donivee Finnell with Wendy Webb on KBOO

For at least a year now Wendy Webb has been helping me out with Art Focus. She was already guest hosting at KBOO, doing film reviews. We met elsewhere and immediately began to fast and furiously riff about art. I realized she was the new ingredient Art Focus so badly needed. This week she will interview Donivee Finnell, who is showing at Bare Bones. Webb says the work at Bare Bones is "ironic, symbolic, semiotic and sexy." This is Finnell's first show in Portland.

Lenall Siebenaler and Judy Lindley on KBOO

Listen to the interview here.

Friends of the Library have opened up a pop-up on NW 23rd - where the beloved Music Millennium used to be. This pop-up will have revolving art shows from a huge community of artists as well as books on sale. Lenall Siebenaler is the director of the store and Judy lindley is on the board of directors - they both joined me on Art Focus tomorrow.

Transformation at P:ear Blossoms

Every year P:ear Mentor has a big fundraiser called P:ear Blossoms. It's tomorrow - and it's always a big party. The theme for this year is alchemy and bearing this in mind, they've asked me and Jeffrey Kyle to contribute to the Transformation Bar at the event. We are both fierce makeup artists who will transform you with silver and gold bodypaint. Looking forward!

Erik Saxon

Last time I was in New York I traveled to a small but very significant gallery called Minus Space. I saw some smashing work, including a great piece by Gabriele Evertz (whose work Joanna Mattera featured in a cool post about the diamond shape in art). Now I see that Minus Space is hosting a show by Erik Saxon. He means something to me as I saw his work at Modernism in San Francisco while still quite a young artist. One postcard show invite held a black and blue cross-shaped canvas (which I haven’t been able to locate online). I’ve carried that cross around with me ever since, for decades. It’s been in every studio, every bedroom. In fact some time in the early 90s I made my own black and blue cross with rag paper – sort of a collage version of the Saxon piece. I still have that construction too. It’s a mantra and icon rolled into one, valuable to no one but me. I am sure this show at Minus Space is fabulous.

Tom Cramer on KBOO

Listen to the interview here.

Tom Cramer will be my guest this week on Art Focus. His new show features Oregon landmarks. It's like he went all over the world in his technique, skills and interests and brought it all back home. Tom is always fun and I'm looking forward to the interview.

Robert Yoder on KBOO

Listen to the interview here.

Speaking of collage, tomorrow I interview Robert Yoder on Art Focus. He is showing Cover You and Smother You at the Froelick Gallery. He has an interesting history in this medium, has cut and pasted in many different ways. He also directs an exhibition space in Seattle, Season.

A New Heyday

Anonymous Woman No. 22

Posts about the show Cutters Edges at the new Gestalten Space say it signals and celebrates “a new heyday of contemporary collage.” And Ana Ibarra asked me in Elephant: Do you consider yourself as being part of a movement? I said it was always around. It’s just getting a better reception right now.

Just in NYC alone – Thornton Dial at Andrew Edlin and a fabulous Romare Bearden show at Michael Rosenfeld. Then ACA Galleries will host a Fragments of Modern and Contemporary Collage show this month. In Los Angeles Jack Rutberg Fine Arts brought us Some Assembly Required, a review of assemblage and Collage. And In San Francisco, Martin Muller at Modernism is hanging Jacques Villegle.

I’m trying to think of why collage is in this upswing. Some artists say the practice lets them reinterpret the chaos and bombardment of the current image and information overload. Sampling in everything else (like music) is a factor. But I think the computer and Photoshop play the biggest part. To reassemble is easier than ever. Everyone does it, supposedly.

Yet that would not really be me; the more I cut and paste in the old fashioned way, the more the distinction is important. Some may think it’s a “purity” discussion which need not happen, but while anyone may google, scan, inject color, whatever, I do not. It’s a marriage of what I find, not what I make up. Not even the colors are enhanced. Sometimes it’s the color itself which makes the marriage, as was the case in Anonymous Woman No. 22 above. Many things might go with her, but the juicy purple and orange nailed it.

1970- glossy glamour ads aimed at a freshman girl in high school, who’s big option in entertainment was a trip to the coast. Yes, Interview saved me, but so did Glamour in the land of hoodies and boots.

She was cut and cut as I measured my options. In another time, I might have left her in a pile because she was so cut up. But with this project I think the tracks of the process can be revealed. I’m at an age too when a woman’s face is getting sliced and diced as a matter of course - the past erased but whoa, what a future.