Plazm on KBOO

Listen to the Interview here.

Joshua Berger and Tiffany Lee Brown of Plazm will be my guest on Art Focus this week. Plazm celebrates 20 years in print this year. Plazm, an annual publication of art, design, literary and cultural works is based in Portland.

Recology on KBOO

Listen to the interview here.

One of my happy childhood memories is going to the dump outside Jacksonville, Oregon with my dad. He had an antique store (where Bella Union is now) and often came home with great finds. Back then people wanted new, new, new, a leftover mindset from the 1950s. But my dad liked the old. I think somewhere back there was the beginning of my own collage practice.

Now there is a Recology Program where artists go to the dump and make work from it. Some of them will join me tomorrow on Art Focus. The artists involved are: Ben Dye, Jen Fuller, William Rihel, Mike Suri, and Leslie Vigeant. Rihel, Dye and Fuller will join me on the air.

the Collecting Friend

Earlier this year I caught up with a friend I hadn’t seen in years. When she saw my work in print, she immediately said: “I want to buy some.” But I think I surprised her when I was quick on the uptake, figuring how to get some work in front of her.

I think when I knew her 20 years ago, art was more my lover or my church. But it is now my business and I’m OK with that arrangement.

A few years ago in Talk is Cheap, I detailed a friendship which went south for many reasons, and a big one was the “we want to buy your work” threat. I heard this often and generally said nothing back then. I didn’t want to appear as though I used my friends - but meanwhile their generous grandeur, if only in their minds, was a use of me. (Obviously these friends are not art world people; they know better.)

Perhaps I also entertained this silly romantic idea that mere strangers and exotic collectors would descend upon me and change my life.

This recent era here in Portland has panned out much differently for me. I don’t know how typical this is, but I’ve known nearly every collector. We are friends. We talk about everything and anything but when the “I want to buy something” pitch comes up, I decide it’s true as opposed to not.

Perhaps my old friend wanted that old romance too, to live in the space of maybe, possibility and hope. But for me, I do not want to hear that too often. It’s fine if you never wanted to get anything. We can still talk dreams, how to spend money we may or may not have, etc. But not my work - because that’s what it is, my work.

50, again

The last time a friend turned 50, I made this previous collage. It turned to be right as he is a fiend for the open road. This piece tells a different story. She's a sensitive and beautiful woman who appreciates what we call the finer things in life. This is a toast to her.

I Made This at WW

Whoa, fresh in from Willamette Week, a good idea:

WW has a feature, encouraging artists to submit their work. It's their hope that I Made This will help Portland's incredibly creative artists and designers find new markets, as well as enhanced attention and respect, for their work.

The feature includes a large color image of the art for sale, information about the artist, the price of the item, how to purchase the work, and the artist's website. You can see I Made This in action in this week's issue on page 54.

Below are the submission guidelines.

Do you have art/crafts for sale and want to feature an item in Willamette Week's I Made This? Send us your submissions! If you're wondering what qualifies as art, ask yourself: Did you make it? Is it for sale? If you answered "yes" to both, send it our way.

Please include:
300+ dpi .jpg
Artist name
Name of piece
Where is this for sale?
Price
contact information/website

email submissions to imadethis@wweek.com

Lynda Ater on KBOO

Listen to the interview here.

Tomorrow Lynda Ater is my guest on Art Focus. She has a show called Inside Out up at Blackfish this month which riffs on Albers and his Hommage to the Square. Ater has embellished the square with cancer cell shapes, something she's very familiar with via a long profession in laboratory medicine.

Give a show

Responses from people walking into a pop-up can really vary. The Independent wasn’t there yesterday and has that look of transience. Sometimes they stumble in and ask me: “Is this a gallery?” It is indeed, I say. And then they walk right out. I am also a little surprised at how many come in and within 60 seconds tell me they are an artist in that rather hopeful, dodgy way which sounds like the initiation of something, rather than just a simple statement.

But as the conversation winds here and there - and yes, at least I am there for the conversation - I have much more patent and patient answers than I did a few years ago at Chambers. First off, the pop-up nature of the venture rather relieves us all of great and industrious futures, at least one we can plan together.

Otherwise, the pop-up is a fabulous intro into what any artist, small or large, busy or not, can do. Want to get a show? Give a show. And then I tell them that while I am sitting here at one artist’s show, I am actually showing my own work too this month, right down the street at Augen Gallery.

The “Give a show” almost always disarms. These are very needy times, many Portland artists need jobs as well as shows. Some are so used to being in a state of need, completely unempowered, that this idea that they have the means and the mojo to do something major for someone else is bewildering. That’s the expression I see on their faces more than anything – bewilderment. It’s not exactly what they were expecting to hear.

It’s been almost ten years since I opened a gallery called Lovelake in my own studio. The motivations behind that act were much more complex than anything I care to share right now, but let’s just say I wasn’t showing anywhere else! In 2011 there’s even more opportunity to change the landscape because it’s more decimated with empty shells. And if you don’t want an empty shell, you can look at artists like Chris Ashley with Some Walls or Robert Yoder with Season – doing something really amazing with the real estate they already have.

Busy August

Thanks to everyone who came out to Drape last week. The show runs all month at Augen Desoto.
Meanwhile you can still find me sitting at the Independent, where Brad Carlile is showing Tempus Incognitus. John Motley gave it a great review in the Oregonian. The last day of that show is Sunday, August 14th.

C.O.P.S. on KBOO

Listen to the interview here.

Last week Lisa Radon was my guest on the radio. It was so much fun to bat the ball back and forth with someone extremely savvy about stuff I am not. "No, Eva, it's not about that. And let me tell what else it's not about." I loved it and learned a lot. If I had my way, Lisa Radon would be my co-host for Art Focus.

This week at KBOO promises more of the same on-your-feet excitement. Four artists here in Portland are offering for the summer - C.O.P.S - Conceptual Oregon Performance School. From the statement:

The Conceptual Oregon Performance School (C.O.P.S.) is a free, artist-run, experimental summer school, with a focus on contemporary performance strategies. Its mandate is to engage participants in the methodologies, critical theory, and dialogue surrounding the discipline, while investigating its social and cultural role. Participants will experiment with a myriad of contemporary performance strategies, based upon formal and informal lectures, seminar-based dialogue, and structured group critique.

The guests/instructors are: Sean Carney, Matthew Green, Patrick Rock and Michael Reinsch.

Drape at Augen

This week Drape opens.

It will wrap around two walls in the back room at Augen Desoto. It was actually Bob Kochs, owner and director of Augen, who suggested the cornering idea and I liked it. All the lights are on the wrap. The darkness elsewhere lets you feel that you're coming across something.

Some say my painting is warm. Vincent Romaniello called it hot. I think we often associate geometric abstraction with a kind of coolness, but that's not the case with this. When they were photographed on the floor, leaning against the wall, Horia Boboia called them a heater.

Lisa Radon on KBOO

Listen to the interview here.

Lisa Radon will be my guest tomorrow on Art Focus. Radon is writer and poet and turned curator and we're all excited to see what she does. The group show is called Reading. Writing.

Is writing an answer to why?
By reading do we know why?
Is there an appreciable difference between writing and reading? Bordowitz, Gregg. Volition. New York: Printed Matter, 2009. 141.

Reading.Writing. is an exhibition about the intersections between the practices of reading and writing and art making. It is the möbius strip where writing is a kind of reading is a kind of writing ∞. On August 5, 2011 Reading.Writing. opens at galleryHOMELAND, the Ford Building (2505 SE 11th, corner of SE 11th and Division), with a reception from 6-9 PM. The exhibition includes work by 18 artists from Portland, San Francisco, Calgary, Belgrade, and Montreal working in video, print, paint, sculpture, embroidery, photography, and publication. .