Visual arts: Ruth Ann Brown, a new kind of art dealer
by D.K. Row
The Oregonian
Sunday December 09, 2007
There's a new breed of art dealer in town, and her name is Ruth Ann Brown. The 28-year-old owner and director of the New American Art Union occupies a special perch in the city's art-world garden, and not simply because she agreed recently to finance the work of 10 local artists for solo exhibits at her gallery beginning in January.
In three years the coolly confident and enigmatic Brown has moved from college student to one of Portland's most talked-about dealers, a Peggy Guggenheim figure for Portland's often marginalized do-it-yourself generation.
Brown has earned that affection and achieved that status partly by not embracing conventional notions of power -- carefully sidestepping, for instance, the overused promise of linking artists directly to New York's power elite.
Instead, Brown has offered the most valuable kind of currency to artists who work within a local system that has limited funding, no contemporary art center and not enough serious galleries: the bonds of intimate community, complete with an air of mystery.
A different angle
How has Brown risen so quickly? By speaking softly and carefully, and by employing her own brand of philosophical judo. From the beginning, Brown has rejected the common vernacular of the art world: words like ascendance, power, dominance.
"From Day 1, the idea of her gallery has been different," says Jane Beebe, owner of PDX Contemporary Art, one of the city's most respected galleries. "It's not The Ruth Ann Brown Gallery. That shows she's had a slightly different angle."
The New American Art Union opened its doors in 2004. Open only six hours a day, four days a week, and located at 922 S.E. Ankeny St., away from the art epicenter of the Pearl District, it was named after a 19th-century American art gallery that advocated for underrepresented artists. That Victorian-era lineage has proved definitive: Brown has presented monthly shows that have tapped the restless, communal pulse of the many Portland artists working on the fringes.
The artists most favored by Brown have ended up being the ones officially represented by the Art Union -- among them painter Rose McCormick, who helped Brown start the gallery, figurative artist Ty Ennis, abstract painter Timothy Dalbow and photographer Jim Lommasson.
None of these artists, although eyed lovingly by the cognoscenti, is a major art figure yet, although Lommasson has made sterling images for some time. Their relatively humble standing doesn't concern Brown. She believes in these artists and is trying to do for them what dealers do: Produce grant projects and place their work before significant curators, critics and collectors.
But the modest financial output of these chosen few reveals one crucial characteristic about how Brown runs her gallery: She's not worried about setting sales records.
A talent scout
Brown doesn't openly treat art as a commodity or talk about the economy of art as an investment for one very good reason:
She doesn't have to.
Using an inheritance from the death of her mother when Brown was 9, the dealer bought a house in Southeast Portland, then financed the purchase and renovation of the 2,000-square-foot building that houses her gallery. Looking back, she says there was a purpose behind investing her money the way she did.
"Money messes people up, even those with good intentions," she says.
Before opening the Art Union, Brown pumped gas, slung coffee and ran errands as a gallery assistant for Gavin Shettler, director of the Portland Art Center, another organization that has seized the affection of Portland's fringe-followers. "If the money's out of sight, then it's out of mind," she says. "I don't think I need more than what I have."
That clarifying approach has also allowed her to compete in the art world in the most liberating way.
"She's a talent scout," says Nick Fish, an attorney and a former City Council candidate. Fish, who has supported the arts since the '80s, when he still lived in his native New York, has admired and visited Brown's gallery since it opened. "I don't get the sense Ruth Ann has some ambition of conquering the market," he says." The most aggressive marketing she's ever had is to send me a card about a show."
Brown's talent-scouting recently resulted in an unprecedented event, at least here, that has pushed her esteem into another realm, past the fringes and into the orbit of the mainstream art world. In October, Brown announced that she would help produce and exhibit the most adventurous, noncommercial work by 10 local artists at her gallery. The 10 artists she picked, including McCormick and three others whom she represents, were selected from 98 applicants from across the country.
While galleries often invest money in artists, Brown's "Couture" reorients the notion of investment. Six of the artists aren't represented by Brown, and none of the work in these exhibits will be for sale. Above all, Brown has given the artists what amounts to a no-strings commission: make your most daring, challenging work for the heck of it.
The response from the art community has been hugely positive, although some have complained that Brown, who will fund the $80,000 program by using some of the equity in the Southeast Ankeny property, is merely seeking media attention. "Couture," they say, is a vanity project.
A fictional character
Brown shrugs off such criticisms -- unfazed, without emotion, even. That undaunted demeanor, friends say, is how she lives her life. Rarely does she lose her temper or raise her voice. She always chooses her words carefully and is always in control. In her house, everything from vitamin bottles to drinking glasses to shoes is neatly and precisely arranged, like jewelry at Tiffany's.
"In my house, everything there is of value to me. Nothing is frivolous," she says.
Brown's confidence, friends observe, is a product of early childhood experiences that forced her to manage wildly varying worlds and types of people.
"She's a combo package of so many eras, so many sensibilities," says artist TJ Norris, who Brown represents and who is one of the artists selected for "Couture." "She's a little fictional. But it's a character you want to know. There's something romantic about her."
Brown was born into a well-to-do family in Detroit, where her father is a fourth-generation Ford automobile dealer. When her mother died, he raised Brown and her three older brothers on his own. Brown and her father forged a deep relationship that may have accounted partly for her tomboyish exploits. She was an avid athlete as a teenager: At one point, she had a single-digit golf handicap.
Though raised in relative privilege, Brown wasn't pretentious, says Tamar Jeffrey, one of her childhood friends.
"She's like my sister," says Jeffrey, who is studying to be a physician in Detroit. "She comes from money, and I don't. But she never flaunted it. She didn't care about those things."
Jeffrey says Brown was like a lot of teenagers her age -- she occasionally sought adventure in the idle arts.
"The funniest thing she ever did was at a party sophomore year," says Jeffrey. "She tried to smoke a wooden spoon."
Brown's rowdy behavior eventually got her kicked out of high school. That sent her packing to one of the oldest all-girls boarding schools in the country -- Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Conn. Founded in 1843, the school has been a blue-blood bastion for generations. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis attended Miss Porter's School, where tuition is roughly $40,000 a year.
The Midwesterner Brown embraced Miss Porter's white-shoe, patrician world. She even taught golf there.
"If I ever have a daughter," she says, "I'm sending her to a single-sex school."
Building a family
After graduation, Brown moved to Portland to attend Reed College. Reed's challenging academics invigorated Brown, but she also felt bogged down there.
"People struggled with the semantics of a word for 45 minutes," Brown says. "I would never have opened a gallery if I finished at Reed."
Brown quickly transferred to Portland State University, then returned to Reed before completing her art history degree at PSU. All the while, she worked odd jobs and tried to figure out what she wanted from life.
After she graduated, Brown used her inheritance to start the New American Art Union. At the time, in 2004, Portland was in the midst of a revolutionary influx of sorts. Artists were flocking here, drawn by the city's comparatively cheap rent. Of the many galleries and nonprofit organizations to emerge during the post-Millennial era, Brown's modest gallery was one that rose above for several reasons.
From the few artists it chose to show to the spare, minimalist style of every show no matter the artist, the gallery cultivated a distinctive aura. Brown often hung out in front of her gallery and smoked a cigarette. Or held court inside, where she would spend hours with an artist, friend or visitor.
In other words, while most galleries were intent on drumming up business, Brown's gallery became a kind of personal salon -- though, increasingly, an ambitious one. Brown's choice in artists and projects began to resonate more profoundly: Ennis and Lommasson's careers have launched mightily since their affiliation with NAAU.
When Brown thinks of the art world, she thinks primarily of the artists, not museums, galleries, curators and critics. When she presents shows, she's not trying to forge a particular style or art movement or make provocative statements about art.
Instead, she's battling what she calls "the blessing and the curse of capitalism."
"The system isn't fostering anything great," she says. "A lot of people fall by the wayside."
For Brown, the artists and others associated with the gallery transcend the realm of business. They are players in the ultimate form of social practice for her: an intimate circle of friends, maybe even a family. They hang out together, show art together and much more. And within that structure, Brown is the mother.
Her own mother's death "has a great deal to do with her ethic and mission," says developer Randy Rapaport, one of Brown's closest friends and an avid collector of the gallery's art. "It's the opposite of abandonment and loss. She is the good mother of that collective. Talk about radical art dealership."
It may be one reason Brown hand-wrote personal letters to each of the 88 artists who applied but were turned down for "Couture." And it may be why the New American Art Union isn't the most ambitious, powerful or money-minded gallery in Portland. But for the artists it shows, it's the intimate gallery they call home.
Looking into the future
If Brown wants to ascend the art-world power structure, she will have much to learn, especially if she wants to become to her generation what such established dealers as Elizabeth Leach, Laura Russo and Jane Beebe have become to theirs. She'll have to learn, for example, how to cultivate careers for the long-term.
But are these Brown's objectives? It may be. She recently accepted an offer to join the unofficial fraternity of established Portland dealers, the Portland Art Dealers Association.
"She's always studying for the future," says Rapaport.
"I am competitive," says Brown. "I have a problem with not winning."
Ultimately, she says, life moves on its own course, its own nature:
"I'm 28. In life you're subject to a social osmosis. Who knows what will happen?"
Supporting arts, right at its roots
by D.K. Row
The Oregonian
Oct 10, 2007
Portland's low-budget art scene got a healthy jolt Tuesday: an investment by a single dealer that directly challenges the city's major institutions and galleries to play the art game far more seriously.
Art dealer Ruth Ann Brown of the New American Art Union announced the 10 recipients of a special artists' stipend project. Each artist will receive $8,000 --a $7,000 stipend plus $1,000 for art materials.
What makes the project even more unusual is that Brown is financing the entire project with her own money. In a city with an avalanche of artists but comparatively few patrons and supporters, that's a challenge to others to step up, too.
Called "Couture," the project will help the artists produce and then exhibit their most challenging work at Brown's gallery.
"Part of why I'm doing this is me being selfish," Brown says. "But also because I'm frustrated with what's going on here."
Brown says Portland's artists aren't being nurtured by its galleries and institutions, most of which aren't accurately reflecting the challenging nature of work in the city.
In the Age of the Billionaire, $80,000 may not be an extraordinary amount of money. But Brown's gumption and generosity, the artistic freedom afforded to the selected artists, and the project's implications for the city's art scene transcend numbers. The project also is historic: Dealers have occasionally financed small projects by artists, but Brown's "Couture" idea is more systematic.
"In many ways, Ruth Ann is becoming more than a dealer," says Stephanie Snyder, director of the art gallery at Reed College, where Brown, 28, went to college before graduating from Portland State University. "She's a producer of projects. A facilitator of talent."
The 10 artists picked by Brown are Rose McCormick, Ty Ennis, Jim Lommasson, Jacqueline Ehlis, TJ Norris, Stephen Slappe, Vanessa Renwick, Laura Fritz, Ethan Jackson and three artists --Carl Diehl, Jesse England and Mack McFarland --who call themselves "The Video Gentlemen."
A few of the artists --McCormick, Ennis and Ehlis --are painters and drawers. Lommasson is a photographer. All are from the Portland area, although the 98 artists who applied for the stipend hail from around the nation, including Seattle, Los Angeles and New York.
Brown says she was attracted to these 10 artists because their work addressed two essential themes: how art and entertainment have merged into a new art form; and the political upheaval of the post-millennial era, a dialogue that Brown thinks today's artists have been reluctant to explore.
"Why is art moving away from the important contemporary issues of our times?" asks Brown, who opened her gallery three years ago.
Four of the artists --McCormick, Ennis, Lommasson and Norris --are either represented by Brown or have shown at her gallery in the past. One other, Ehlis, participated in a group show and has also curated an exhibit at the gallery. The other five weren't affiliated with Brown's gallery, though she knew of their work.
All of the artists share a few qualities: None is an established figure regionally, although critics have praised the work of Ehlis and Renwick during the past decade. None is commercially oriented. And a few, like Jackson, have been working completely outside the local system.
Brown says the $8,000 to each artist comes with "no strings." The only expectation of the artists is that they make work they might not otherwise get a chance to show in galleries.
That's one reason why the work won't be for sale. The artists will be free to produce art that pushes their respective artistic boundaries. Lommasson, for instance, finally will get to work on a long-brewing photo project documenting American soldiers returning from the Iraq war.
A native of Detroit, Brown says she's going to fund "Couture" by using some of the equity she's built up in the building that houses her gallery on Southeast Ankeny Street. She bought the building several years ago with money from a family inheritance. Brown's mother died when Brown was 9.
That may not be the most practical way to fund an ambitious art project. But in do-it-yourself Portland, it's an appropriately fitting way.
The few attempts to embrace the region's art activity comprehensively, such as the Portland Art Museum's Contemporary Northwest Art Awards --which will award one regional artist $10,000 and a show at the museum next year --cater to already established or late-career artists or ignore the scene's bounty of talented but under-recognized artists.
The finalists for the CNAA are bland, Brown argues: "I understand (the importance of) honoring late-career artists, but I don't know if those choices benefit the community at large."
Whether you agree with Brown's assessment, the young dealer is banking that others will follow suit or challenge her.
"What everyone in the community has to do now is pay attention and see these shows," Snyder says. "And give them the respect that such a project deserves."
Shows of Note
by D.K. Row
The Oregonian
Sep 07, 2007
It's First Friday, and time for another art walk. Eastside wanderers will surely want to check out Timothy Dalbow's show at the New American Art Union, if not for an opportunity to see the latest work by this underappreciated artist, then for a chance to visit the Art Union, which might be the most talked-about gallery in town.
Why? Not long ago, Art Union director Ruth Ann Brown announced that she would bankroll a series of specially funded artist award shows. Seven to 10 artists will be picked to present one-time-only exhibits of mostly installation work at her Southeast Portland gallery. Each artist will get a $7,000 stipend, in addition to $1,000 for materials. Aug. 25 was the due date for applications. Brown said roughly 80 artists from across the country submitted proposals. Brown hopes to decide the winners in October, with exhibitions by winning artists beginning sometime next year.
The program is an unheard-of step by a local dealer -- Brown is effectively using a commercial gallery situation to present work commonly found in noncommercial contemporary art spaces. The dealer, who recently accepted an offer to become the 12th member of the Portland Art Dealers Association, says she created the awards series, unofficially dubbed "Couture," to give artists the rare chance to produce work unfettered by commercial constraints. She also regards this ambitious project as a kind of counter-proposal to the Portland Art Museum's Contemporary Northwest Art Awards, the museum's reimagining of the now-defunct Oregon Biennial. The museum's awards, which premiere next year, will crown a single artist as the winner of a $10,000 award.
Though she acknowledges the importance of such an award by the museum, Brown thinks that $10,000 from the state's flagship art museum is a paltry sum for a major award. "$10,000 is an insulting amount," Brown says.
She also feels that the museum should have considered more under-represented artists for the awards. The few dozen finalists for the museum's award are well-established artists with extensive exhibition histories, such as James Lavadour, Richard Notkin and Fay Jones. "Most of those artists don't need the award," Brown says.
So, what kind of artists will Brown pick? The dealer says she is open to simply the best and most satisfying proposals, irrespective of media.
"I'm just going to see what's out there first," Brown says. Of the 80 proposals, the dealer is familiar with roughly half, a group that included Portlanders as well as artists from San Francisco, Texas, New York and Seattle. Brown says some of the Portland artists have representation at other local galleries, but that those galleries shouldn't misperceive: She's not trying to lure artists to join her gallery. Right now, Brown says the New American Art Union represents six local artists, including Dalbow, Ty Ennis and TJ Norris.
Subtle Arts, Subtle Effects
by Rachel Neugarten
The Oregonian
April 13 2007
This month at the New American Art Union, you'll have to use your ears as much as your eyes to experience "invisible.other," TJ Norris' latest group-curated show.
One wall drawing, for example, is made of nearly imperceptible pinholes; a pencil drawing has been covered with white paint; and a sound installation is in fact not meant to be seen.
The works by 12 Northwest and international artists -- including Portlanders Ty Ennis, Melia Donovan and Abi Spring, Springfield-based Laura Vandenburgh, Seattle's Susan Robb, Thomas Koner from Berlin and Sweden's Leif Elggren -- argue many things. They ask viewers to explore the nature of seeing, or just as often, the nature of being unable to see. The exhibit also affirms an increasingly cool, even sterile, aesthetic by Norris, a multimedia artist who has become a noteworthy presenter of emerging talent.
Artists often are accused of being intentionally obscure. Curators can be guilty of that sin, too. Advice to viewers of this show: Don't read Norris' curating statement, almost all of which reads like purposefully inscrutable rhetoric.
That's a shame because many of the artists in this show are working in the tradition of minimalism and conceptual art, movements that pushed the formal boundaries and definitions of art. Those movements also inspired a great deal of cynicism for their emphasis on abstract ideas, not the art object.
Like almost all of Norris' previous work as both curator and artist, "invisible.other" is a big bear hug to the ephemeral, albeit a thoughtful expression of that quality. As the title suggests, Norris is interested in exploring how people see art, so he's selected works that are so indirect as to virtually disappear or, in some instances, remain invisible to the eye.
The best example might be Melia Donovan's "Frostie Freeze," a work so subtle you'll have to hunt for it. Donovan has punched tiny holes into the surface of one of the gallery's walls, etching out a scene of customers at an ice-cream stand. The whole piece is below waist level; many gallery-goers the night of the opening walked right past it. Here, Donovan has interpreted the theme of invisibility literally, composing a visual arts parallel to musician John Cage's infamous "4'33" " -- his 41/2-minute work of silence.
Richard Chartier similarly plays with the notion of visibility, and the drawn image, with his three drawings. "Reference 1, 2, 3" consists of pencil drawings that were erased and then painted over in white acrylic. Even after being erased vigorously, tiny vestiges of the initial marks are still visible. Some artworks, after all, are hard to get rid of.
A far more sincere and formal counterpoint is Abi Spring's painting, "Wet," which depicts evanescent yellow-white strands on a lavender-white backdrop. The high-process painting has the luminous, veined quality of ivory or pale skin.
Each of these works implores the viewer to step closer and to adjust the eyes. Some, however, ask the viewer to listen closely and tap the ears.
In "One stone / and Arcs and Ears," Steve Roden offers a sonic analogue to Donovan's and Chartier's works. He's removed the human voices from the soundtrack of Robert Bresson's film, "Proces de Jeanne d'Arc," replacing the dialogue with the sound of footsteps, ambient music and the crackling of the record itself. Like Donovan's drawing, Roden's piece conjures the random philosophy of Cage's music, a philosophy that found kinship in the equally chance-based choreography of Cage's partner, Merce Cunningham.
One of the show's most impressive works is Michael Paulus' "Tabernacle," a black cabinet with a frosted-glass front. Inside the cabinet, a light glows, illuminating a vague pink form that, like the suitcase from "Pulp Fiction," inspires curiosity. The cabinet is slightly ajar, thus allowing viewers a peek: The pink form resembles a sacred relic, maybe an enclosed heart.
As Paulus' cabinet glows, in another part of the gallery, light bulbs flash and click. That's Ted Apel's "Potential Difference," another conceptual work that's a metaphor for creative collaboration. In this work that features photographs and written descriptions of Pierre Curie and Thomas Edison -- both of whom contributed to the discovery and application of electricity -- some light bulbs flash while others emit soft clicks. The clicks are determined by the luminosity of the flashing bulbs.
Obviously, there's much more to this show than this space allows. But one important thing: As in his previously curated show, last June's "Grey/Area," Norris is ultimately using the individual works to produce an atmosphere and state an aesthetic -- a cool, sterile, minimalist atmosphere. In a way, the entire show is really one big installation, parts of which can be seen, and parts of which can't.
PORT
portlandart.net
Off the Plane and Into Space: THE HOOK UP at the New American Art Union
Arcy Douglass
June 15 2007
By exploring the rich area of cross fertilization between painting and sculpture, the show THE HOOK UP at New American Art Union provides real insight into new ways that art can get off the wall and interact with the viewers in real space. Though these ideas are not new they are becoming increasingly relevant. You could plot a pretty clean line of development from Malevich and the Russian Constructivists through Picasso's flat metal sculptures to Ellsworth Kelly's ability to make art that interacts with the space of the room. Historically, these artists have questioned the viability and relevance to contemporary culture of using the rectangle of the picture frame as a picture window into some place else, which in the past has probably been painting's greatest strength.
If you look at The Mona Lisa, you are looking through the window set-up by the picture plane, you do not share the same space. The Renaissance invention of perspective was an attempt to make the space of the picture plane coherent with the space of the room and the way that the human body sees space. The art that is exemplified by Kelly which is the conceptual precursor to this show is about something else. It is, in a sense, post-perspective. You inhabit the picture and the space in real time.
Five hundred years of art history in two paragraphs. So what does this have to do with curator Jesse Hayward 's show?
Well, everything.
You start off looking at (PORT writer/cofounder) Jeff Jahn's piece Where We Go from Here . It does not cleanly sit on the wall but rather sits between the wall and floor. Not quite painting, not sculpture, but something else. His work creates a boundary that articulates a volume of space between the wall and the floor. The piece is made of a series of planes that are all cut in a triangular/ agave leaf shape that converge on a single center line that is supported through friction to the wall. The bright green gives the work all kinds of organic references. Because it sits adjacent to the wall but extends out over the floor, it sets up a territory that changes the experience of the room as well as changing as you walk around the room because your line of sight coincides with different parts of the work.
Next is Ellen George's beautiful LaLaLalia . Her piece is like a beautiful Hawaiian lei that is made of different shades of red polymer resin rather than flower petals. The piece works in two ways: first, it calls into question the solidity of the wall because you can imagine the the resin necklace somehow going into the wall and comes back out again. It is pretty cool that a single gesture of form and color can destabilize a space by turning a solid wall into an ephemeral plane. The second way the piece works is that it becomes an offering to the soul of the wall, if there is such a thing,in the same way that you leave flowers at the foot of a statue of the Buddha. I was surprised that such a small piece could elicit such a strong reaction and be so successful in transforming the space.
Jacqueline Ehlis's Glitter installation of powder coated spheres and half-spheres are placed in an organic way, creating connotations of either the celestial bodies in the night sky or for those of you that drink too much, bubbles in champagne. The spheres are in different sizes and the play between the full and the half spheres gives the work a great vibration and rhythm that carries through the piece and enhances the free-floating quality of the work. The powder coating is in a rainbow of different colors that range from yellows, reds, blues all the way to deep blacks. The black ones were my favorite because you get a beautiful iridescent black rainbow effect which also reflects the whole space of the gallery. In the show so far: Jeff articulates the volume of space in front of the wall, Ellen penetrates the wall to make it whole, and Jacqueline obliterates the wall by implying that the wall does not count, only spheres matter. The white space of the wall is turned into an ambiguous, almost liquid, middle ground in which float these spheres. It is fun too look at Glitter because as we are tied to our everyday lives who wouldn't want float and interact with one another as gently as those spheres.
It is important to realize that each piece in the show looks different because it shapes space differently. Sometimes a piece might change the space of the wall while another one might work with the space inside of us. TJ Norris's Placebo Complex is a beautiful digital print of drug capsules that are arranged in a way that suggests a variety of natural features from rivers to the veins in which drugs might actually do their work. You can really see TJ's hand inside the print because you can see the way that each pill was placed, lit and colored. TJ's brought a more three-dimensional quality to the piece by placing the word "complex" in clear extruded plastic that is filled with clear pills. This assemblage is tilted off the bottom of the print, bringing it more into the space of the viewer. His piece is perhaps more about an inner space, rather than an outer space.
Brenden Clenaghen's Black One is like an architectural model of a black yurt made of things like cat hair, glitter, and dust that are all pressed into wax that then sits on a mirror on a stand attached to the wall in the corner. The surface of the piece is interesting because you can see that the walls are not solid and firm, as you can see these pits and bits of cat hair. The overall effect creates a mysterious object with strange surfaces that exist outside of your perspective and won't let you in. Although the form is very sculptural, the surface reminds me more of the language found in painting. The piece blends of the language of painting and sculpture with an obvious bias towards sculpture.
(PORT staffer) Jenene Nagy's Meadow is a striking example of pushing back out of the space of the gallery. The overall effect is like an abstract trompe l'oeil in which the wall is shattered to reveal a bright and luminous space just out of reach. The effect works because the painting on the wall works well with the painting on the floor. In Jenene's case, her painting works because she turns the surface of the wall into a plane as thin as a piece of paper.
Both the paintings and the pieces on the floor would be less if they were apart as together they produce a convincing sense of an alternate-space. I was impressed with Jenene's use of darker colors along the edges of the larger green shape. It gave the space and the edges a rich, three-dimensional painterly quality. The abstract horizontal lines/ mountains that run through the middle of the painting push the space back in a way that we normally experience in a place like Death Valley. The line also prevents the large, green shape from flattening out on the wall. Meadow is a fun mix of rigorous, abstract language with reference to nature that, once blended, lie just beyond a shattered gallery wall.
Sean Healy's Neighborly which is made of cut outs of sniffing dogs lit by a bright pink fluorescent light is also very fun. One can imagine all the societal/ sexual/ clubbing references for these dogs under a pink light but I will leave that for the PORT readers to explore for themselves because I know that all of you have very vivid imaginations. The piece works because the fluorescent light provides the rosy glow that you might find at midnight on a club floor. It is like dogs, or like people. I was surprised to see that what is implied or might be read into the Ehlis' floating spheres becomes explicit and emotional in Healy's work. In Ehlis' Glitter we float along the surface of the wall bouncing into one sphere after another which is like meeting one person and then going on to the next. In Healy's work, I suppose it is more like heavy petting as we meet and examine everybody we come across with the obvious sexual undercurrent. I am not even sure if Ehlis is necessarily interested in the same sort of questions and experiences that is the basis of Healy's work, but the installation makes for an interesting dialog and Healy makes you re-read a lot of the other work in the gallery in new ways.
Stephanie Robison's Now Available is a tilted, blue, painting-panel that has these bundles exploding from the top and sides. The sticks and the tilting of the panel and the exploration of the front and back of a painting is to me coming right out of Jasper John's work. In both cases, there is a fascination with what exists behind the picture plane and how to open up that space to the viewer. The fabric bundles explode from behind the painting like pop-corn and are a nice material complement to the flatter panel. It is like combining the crushed metal language of John Chamberlain and the flat box of Donald Judd into the same piece. Looking at the panel, which is blue on the front and red/orange on the back, is like watching a dam give way. This lively, dynamic quality is a counter point to more static pieces in the show. The color on the back of the panel is also interesting because you see its color reflected on the wall. It reminds you that every plane, and potentially every painting, has two sides.
The Hook Up at the New American Union presents a new way to explore some more modern ways of taking wall-space off the wall. Jesse Hayward did a great job curating such a wide variety of work and mediums into the confines of the gallery. You can feel Jesse's steady hand behind the selection of the work, making sure that the artists provided work that was not only true to their own language but also played well with the other work in the show. The result is remarkably coherent and clear statement about the different ways that artists can work on, in, and around the plane of the wall. This show is about breaking and rebuilding.
Art Week
Ty Ennis at New American Art Union
by Daniel Duford
February 25th 2007
The seventies - that clunky, apathetic decade - has weighed surprisingly heavily on the minds of young artists. The color schemes, the naive idealism, the music all find their way into the fabric of much contemporary art. Wes Anderson's obsessive, saturated visual bric-a-brac is the most hyperbolic expression of this preoccupation. Ty Ennis's Nine Stories at his show "The Bronze Loss" at the New American Art Union brought up this comparison with Anderson. A hand-drawn replica of a Bantam paperback book with letterpress titles like 'Four or Five Beers at the End of the World' or 'Fucking Up and Down the Stairs' imitates the cover of J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories . By literally hand-drawing a book and letterpressing the titles (Inge Bruggeman did the letterpress), Ennis recclaims a ubiquitous edition of a mass-market paperback and returns it the handheld, personal realm of intimacy. The intimacy of adolescent intellectual discovery -- that moment of finding something that is yours and speaks directly to you alone. Salinger is the perfect symbol for that moment. He is the first sanctioned rush of adolescent rebellion - that first moment when you might discover that you're a bit more intellectual and effete than the Neanderthal sods around you. In The Royal Tennenbaums, book covers and book design feature prominently. Anderson perfectly captures the design of books from the seventies. To someone born in the 1980, those books speak of a prehistory of knowledge. Of course, Ennis is not without his own deadpan sense of humor. His autobiographical titles are both funny and downbeat.
The pictures could break your heart or crack you up. In the recent Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum of Art, Ennis showed a drawing of a notebook page that said, "When I grow up I am going to be an astronaut. I will be richer than shit." That always killed me. Moments in this show are unbearably sad and lonely. 'After you died yo uwere quick to haunt' shows a girl's back, her oversized sweater and long hair intricately drawn. There are many specters in the work. 'And cast into a well hidden well within my mind', a large piece for Ennis at 15.5 x 22 inches, is a haunted forest, vacant and lonely, a well in between some winter trees. There are only a few moments when Ennis turns maudlin. In 'Houseful of Emptiness' an old four-square house stands empty with colored, tied blankets leading out of the window. It's too pat and illustrative. On the other hand, 'Mt. Promise on our favorite day' is a simple ink drawing of a mountain, but the combination of titles and image speaks much more complexly of loss. 'The Bronze Loss' echoes the 'Raft of the Medusa' in its diagonally upthrusting composition. It shows a tangle of hockey players in a scuffle. This is not a heroic victory, but redolent of mythic loss and sadness.
Ennis's drawings have a poetic sensibility to them. He is a bit of a miniaturist and a diarist but without any sweaty overheated confessison. His drawings are cool and removed. The obvious visual corollaries for his work are Marcel Dzama, Raymond Pettibon and Storm Tharp. Ennis doesn't so much fill the page as nervously occupy a small bit of ground. His drawings float in white space, and rather than look tenative, they echo onto a page. His line is fine and almost hesitant, but is anchored by light washes and his dry use of language. The show begins with 'Hooray Picasso', a drawing of Picasso in old age smiling maniacally. The unabashedly cheery title suggests an admirer drawing an image of his idol with hopes of sympathetica magic: If I draw Picasso I will be more like Picasso. Of course, Ennis's work is anti-Picasso in its scale and hand.
The show is scattered with references to twenty-three-year-old Timothy L. Cowen. Two men beat Cowen to death with baseball bats in a park in Spokane, Washington, in August 1998. In the fall of 1998 Ennis bought some albums appear in the show and their performers - Leo Kottke and Issac Hayes - stand as talismans of a bygone era of 33s and analog. Similarly, in 'How his bed was made and the hands that mad it' an empty bed and window speak of absence. An offhanded gravity separates Ennis from the current mob of doodling kids. He does not use fey surrealism or self-consciously adolescent images.
"The Bronze Loss" is the perfect title for the show. There is a sens of small-town desperation and ennui. The work shares the sensibility of James Wright's poem 'Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota', which ends with the lines, "A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life". Like Wes Anderson, Ennis's work walks the line of open sincerity, but with a smirk. Unlike Anderson's crowded detailing, Ennis is attuned to the emptiness of small town loneliness. He never gives in completely to cynicism, but neither does he give in to optimism.
- Ty Ennis: The Bronze Loss closed in December at New American Art Union, Portland, OR.
- Daniel Duford is a freelance writer based in Portland
Divide Entices Interaction
by Brian Libby
The Oregonian
February 9 2007
New American Art Union owner Ruth Ann Brown has embraced the group show, but with a twist.
She's invited five established Portland-area artists to curate shows in 2007 focusing on new talent. "Do No Harm vs. Step Up," the debut exhibit curated by Jacqueline Ehlis via an open call, features almost exclusively artists whom neither Ehlis nor Brown knew or had heard of beforehand. But many of the works demonstrate just how many young Portland artists are out there waiting for a chance to show off their talents.
Ehlis separates the group show in two. In the back of the gallery are the "Do No Harm" works, which are hung salon-style (bunched together) and are more personal, less ambiguous pieces. Facing each other on two front walls are the "Step Up" works, which largely are more minimal and abstract, but often playfully so. The idea, Ehlis says, is for the "Step Up" works to prompt interaction -- both with the audience and with each other -- while the "Do No Harm" works function as observers, mirroring society's activists and silent
The division encourages audience interaction, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the two groups. The "Do No Harm" pieces often exhibit a frank political nature that the supposedly more provocative camp doesn't necessarily have. And in two cases, each section has similar works by the same artist. But the curator seems to welcome these ambiguities and contradictions. "I was thinking of the gallery as an arena," Ehlis says.
The "Do No Harm" section is anchored by Kim McKenna's large oil-on-canvas painting "Concorde." Resembling Gerhart Richter's "Phantom Interceptor" from 1964, it portrays the now-retired supersonic passenger jet with colorful, expressive awe. But McKenna additionally inserts into the frame -- much like the picture-in-a-picture window on a TV -- a cluster of small rooms with chairs and a sofa. The juxtaposition renders the spectacle of the Concorde's fiery takeoff as an absurdity.
Similarly, another painting by McKenna called "Lounge" portrays a luxurious home, complete with Matisse painting and Mies van der Rohe-designed Barcelona daybed in the foreground. Visible through the house's floor-to-ceiling window is a massive, ominous cloud of smoke, like the Los Angeles riots seen from a Case Study House.
Hung simply, without framing, the twin watercolor paintings making up Rebecca Shelly's superb "Labor Day in the Gorge" portray in white silhouette a smattering of tourists dwarfed by a vast brown mass of subtly transforming hues and shades. In the middle a crevice of light casts a striking, godlike presence.
The "Step Up" section features numerous minimalist works by Derek Franklin. A trio of square-shaped white paper prints over steel have been stenciled with innocuous phrases: "Rabbit Drawing," "Cute Pink Doodle" and "Andy Warhol Faker." Minimalism is usually austere but these works are fun. Franklin's wall-mounted "Santa Monica Pier" resembles coffee mugs hanging over a checkerboard. Yet it's not corny because Franklin's style embodies critic Clement Greenberg's definition of minimalism as a reduction to surface and materials.
One of the artists with pieces in both halves of the exhibition, Catherine Hood, is 17 years old (Ehlis taught her at Portland Community College). Displayed wrapped around a wall in the "Step Up" section, Hood's "Migration" is a latex and acrylic painting on a rough, massive unstretched canvas. The abstract cluster of painted zigzagging angles and curves feel like tectonic plates shifting and colliding at breakneck pace.
Group shows can be difficult to pull off. If one simply chooses the best pieces, they might not go together well or share any larger sense of meaning. If too concept-focused, the curator risks leaving out superior artwork. Ehlis takes an ambitious turn by splitting the works as a commentary on art's role in its own community and the larger society. Ultimately one can take or leave that invitation because Ehlis has done her initial job well: She's chosen many gems by lesser known artists. Besides, the real debate may be over which of these lesser known artists seizes the spotlight in the future.
Lords of the Ring
by Victoria Blake
The Oregonian
March 11 2005
The image Portland photographer Jim Lommasson chose for the cover of his forthcoming photography book "Shadow Boxers" shows a man reflected in a sweat-and-spit-stained mirror, his shoulders rounded and biceps curled in the recognizably taut stance of a boxer. Behind him stretch the horizontal lines of the ropes of an empty boxing ring.
This photo, one of about 30 hanging at Lommasson's New American Art Union show called "American Fight Clubs," defines the look and feel of his 9-year photo-documentary project inside American boxing gyms. Gritty, grimy and gorgeous, Lommasson's images move beyond the easy, one-sided spectacle of boxing as a blood sport and toward a multifaceted depiction of the boxing gym as a unique and beloved American institution. Visceral and quietly dramatic, the photos are more like documentary -- a lively cross-breed of art and journalism -- than fine art.
What the jukebox was to Robert Frank, who traveled America in the 1950s photographing and codifying American culture and life, the heavy bag and spit bucket is to Lommasson, who photographed the effluvia and detritus of more than 100 gyms. Coast to coast and up to Canada, boxing gyms are places of peeling stucco, naked light bulbs and dirty mirrors, his images tell us. But they are also places of contradiction, where boxers tape their hands with the delicacy a ballerina uses to tape her feet, and where gum-ball machines coexist with broken noses.
During the years he spent on the project, Lommasson traveled to boxing gyms in 30 cities. His journey took him into the living room of boxing legend Muhammad Ali (who, Lommasson said, entertained him with magic tricks) and down the alleyways of America's most rough and tumble ZIP codes. Lommasson, a spry 54-year-old who looks more like a cruise-line passenger than a boxer, and his writing partner, Katherine Dunn, won the prestigious Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize in 2004 for their work. They also won $10,000 in prize money.
Taken as a whole, Lommasson's pictures tell a complete story, and he has done an admirable job of editing and organizing what must have been a trailer-truck full of film. Images show serious and jaunty young boys staring from the frame, alongside images of boys hunched in gym spectator seats, their legs too short to reach the ground. In some images, old-time trainers look on as young boxers with enviable muscles spar. Nearly everybody in the photos stands a little apart from one another, just out of reach of a left hook.
The photos are black-and-white and color, depending on what the particular image required, Lommasson said. Some of the prints are grainy, dated already, while others have the brilliance and clarity of stained-glass windows. Because of this, the Union show comes off as a little fragmented, its total authority diluted just a smidgen by the variance of approach.
But this could hardly be called an artistic weakness. If anything, it shows Lommasson's remarkably versatile talent. There are a couple wow images. One -- the combination of a boxing mural on the wall and a boxer with a flying fist rendered fuzzy by low light -- connects the artistic and theatrical side of the sport as seen in the mural with the movement and blurred energy of the action of the punch.
Lommasson's best images make some reference to the power behind the punch, setting a diagonal line -- a dipping boxer, a recently punched bag -- against the pure verticals of the heavy bags and the horizontals of the ropes. The effect is simple and strong, endowing the diagonal with knuckle-crushing consequence of fist against leather or flesh.
And then there's Lommasson's other images, the almost tender, classical view. In one, a black-and-white close-up of a man's face partially obscured by boxing gloves, the sweat gathers on his forehead and nose tip. This image is more than a portrait of an individual; it is an exploration of a whole category of physical exertion, a close look at sweat glands and skin.
It might have been easier to go after the bright lights and big rings, but Lommasson works on a more nuanced level. His photos pull back the curtain on the gritty, grimy and ultimately elegant world of boxing, managing not to get sucker-punched by the spectacle of the sport along the way.
Critical i
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CEID (Central Eastside Industrial District) at New American Art Union
Jeff Jahn
March 2005
Curator Rose McCormick's Central Eastside Industrial District group show was an interesting cross section of various styles. The quality of the work varied but there were two gems and some interesting teasers hinting at possible improvements. It's no secret there are a helluva lot of artists in Portland and it's true most of them have either lived in the CEID or staged shows there. It was home of the first Donut Shop, the Portland Independent Salon 2001, Meeting People, Maritime, the Best Coast, some of Core Sample and, most recently, the Affair @ the Jupiter Hotel art fair last year.
It is where a lot of the action has been. Also, now that Savage Gallery, the nationally lauded clarklewis restaurant, the Doug Fir, New American Art Union and Holocene have set up shop, it's where you go if you know what you're doing. Note: the artists knew it first - so pay attention.
First off, no stylistic arguments were made by this show (although they could be made in future curatorial projects). McCormick did a good job of being eclectic. All of the work was adequate, but four pieces rose above being OK and two were wonderful. Not bad for a semi-rookie curator.
The first thing one confronts is Greg Simons's "Untitled #43." The work is a series of blue disks on a wall. They look like nice mod-minimalist tchotchkes from far away, but up close the surfaces are somewhat crude and the work falls apart. Minimalism is hard and this piece shows why. The details absolutely matter.
There is a similar evocation of minimalism's ghost in Brad Adkins's "Architectural Drawing." Made from a clear Gatorade bottle that has been perforated relentlessly, Adkins is finally showing that he understands his own artistic impulse and process. Years ago he would say that making the work is his least favorite part. OK, valid stance. But it definitely showed and undermined his efforts.
His old joke-based work was akin to a prop comic's act and embarrassingly lacked the intellectual rigor of Carrot Top. The work needed (but was too forced to have) the absurd reflexive knowingness of Martin Creed or Charles Ray.
Now, after drilling so many holes in the bottle, it is clear that Adkins has become a process artist and accepts it. The truth was that we all saw his joke-art as a cover-up for deficiencies in education and experience.
It was obvious he'd never met with a real critique and he's been treated with kid gloves.
Besides, it's no secret that the Oregonian will rubber stamp anything that invokes the idea of "community," no matter how ill conceived. This new work is much better and I'm thrilled that progress, rather than excuses, is being made.
Still, "Architectural Drawing" isn't great. It's an over-indebted riff on Tara Donovan and Tom Friedman's jaw-dropping process work, but it sets up a motif of nonchalance and porous insinuation into space he should mine. It's also an object that objects to the object's traditional use.
Adkins's best piece shown to date was seen in January at the PDX group show. A roll of blue painter's tape coiled inward, it, too,rejects any traditional use or functionality. It also serves as a personality surrogate for the artist who recoils into himself like a turtle when startled. Charles Ray previously mined this motif very well, but was only successful by interjecting himself into the work.
Still, I like how the piece was like a passive-aggressive Richard Tuttle making an anti-painting statement while perhaps longing for painterly release. It lacked Tuttle's adventurous tidiness, but Adkins is developing a vocabulary of useless and futile gestures. It's good to see. Let's hope a little more original vocabulary in material and process tempered by self-knowledge creeps in for his solo show at the Art Gym's project room later this year.
At all costs avoid the overt prop-comic jokes. It's just a defense mechanism and it fools no one - "Defense Mechanism" might even be an OK show title. The forthcoming show will determine if Adkins is just a conflicted wannabe mediocre academic conceptualist who craves but doesn't learn from attention, or somebody who just took a while to develop. I'd say it's a 50/50 bet.
The best work in the CEID is "White Light" by Matt Cardinal. The work is a rainbow shelf of books arranged along the visible light spectrum with a rainbow of dumpsters displayed in corresponding colors above it. The titles of the books have no theme and act as totems of variety. The title, "White Light," refers to how all colors of the spectrum combine to become white light. Anecdotally, white light has associations with truth.
Some interesting questions can be raised by this arrangement: Does the information contained in the spectrum of books become knowledge in the light of day? Or does it all end up at the dump no matter what color dumpster you use?
Poetic and up front, this work makes a great impression.
Last but not least is Jesse Durost's "Compulsive, Unrestrained, Consumption and Proliferation: The Study of a Black Hole."
Just like its title, it's a study in excess.
It is a simple piece of found plastic with the word "more" painted relentlessly until the gravitational density of mores become an unintelligible black hole. It reminds me that minimalism is mostly a misnomer as its works are often comprised of studying excess through simplicity.
Reminiscent of Christopher Wool and Ed Ruscha among others, this was a smart piece executed perfectly. As a final validation for a job well done, the collector that I brought with me to the show bought it.
I'd like to see more from Durost in the future.
A new center for the 'creative class'
by Randy Gragg
The Oregonian
October 15 2004
Officer Mike Castlio recalls the social life of the inner-East Burnside beat, circa 1992.
Called to the Travel Inn by a woman reporting screams next door to her room, Castlio knocked, declaring himself as police.
A man answered, "Just a minute," then opened the door.
"Arrest me," he said, hands in the air. "I think I killed her."
He had, with bare hands and the blunt end of a beer bottle.
"And the lady next door who had called," Castlio adds, "turns out, was already in a witness protection program."
Two weeks ago, the same motel, redubbed the Jupiter Hotel, played host to more than 2,000 art patrons for an event called AFFAIR @ The Jupiter Hotel. What had long been one of East Burnside's best markets for illicit sex and drugs has become a cobalt-lit "boutique motel." And for three days, the rooms served as mini-galleries for trendy art from cities like New York, L.A., Chicago and Houston.
The refurbished motel and its new corner anchor, the Doug Fir Lounge, are merely the latest and most dramatic sign of East Burnside's renaissance. From theaters to music clubs to architecture offices and film production companies, this short stretch of the city's longest street is rapidly becoming the town center for a new Portland cultural elite: not the trust-funder, museum-patronizing, westside breed, but the bootstraps-up, build-it-yourself eastside brand.
"What's been so great is that it's been so organic," says Peter Finley Fry, a planning consultant who has long worked in the area. "It hasn't been a big redevelopment. It's been about pioneers and little guys investing money."
If the city is searching for the elusive "creative class," the highly educated, artistically inclined, go-where--they-like generators of urban ambience and economic innovation, it need look no farther than here. A sample list of neighborhood newbies includes retailers such as Ozone Records and Hattie's Vintage clothes but also architecture firms like Holst, media production companies like @Large Films and Twenty Four-7, a design/branding firm whose clients range from Kenneth Cole to Adidas.
Like so many revived Portland neighborhoods, East Burnside has always had great bones -- even if a few were partially amputated. The street's most distinctive feature -- the quintet of arcaded buildings -- is an accident. When the city widened Burnside in 1928, westside property owners simply chopped off the fronts of their buildings. East-siders, ever skeptical of city's follow-through on their side of the river, opted to carve the new sidewalks out of their ground floors, figuring they'd fill them back in when the project died.
Since those days, the neighborhood has had its ups and mostly downs. Buildings fell for parking lots, and more and more cars simply passed quickly through.
But the neighborhood's traditions continue, for good and ill. Reputedly first built as a brothel in 1909 (complete with hallway windows in the rooms and a tunnel to the Masonic Hall across the street), the Wimbledon Apartments provided prostitutes with storefront sales shops until it was purchased in 2002. The IWW hall at Burnside and Sixth has nearby kin in everything from KBOO Radio (which moved to the area in 1983) to the new Worker's Cafe next door and Citybikes collective (which arrived in 1996). Social halls built for Masons and Elks became venues for rock and raves.
The current wave of redevelopment paralleled the Portland Development Commission's 1998 Lower Burnside Redevelopment Plan plus the sprinkling of $2.5 million in street upgrades and storefront improvement grants across the neighborhood. But the biggest driver of change, according to everyone from PDC officials to the beat cop Castlio, has been small-time developers and businesses taking a chance.
"I could see the potential of the area," says Russ Ward, 48, who has long redeveloped buildings in Portland neighborhoods. "Any place that's once been great can be great again."
Ward bought a former Masonic Hall at 722 E. Burnside St., where he helped start the Viscount Ballroom, recently renamed the Bossanova. Soon after, he bought one of the neighborhood's last lonely Victorian worker shacks, bringing a new restaurant, The Farm.
Another small developer, Jeff Mincheff, who bought his first building in the area in the '80s, took on the troubled Wimbledon. With PDC storefront improvement money he transformed the first-floor streetwalker stalls into a coffee shop, two boutiques and a hair salon.
Most pivotally, Ward assembled a group of partners to buy the Travel Inn, starting the process that led to this year's transformation of the district's biggest problem into its biggest new lure: the Jupiter Hotel and the Doug Fir Lounge.
Ward describes himself as a "very pro-development" investor. But others coming to the area are more like young homeowners looking to plant roots. Architropolis, a design firm known for its high-end homes for Lenny Kravitz and the soon-to-be released MotoCzysz, a radical redesign of the motorcycle, has boldly remodeled a building at Northeast Ninth Avenue and Davis Street.
"We actually wanted to be someplace farther out in Southeast, like Milwaukie," says the firm's founder, Michael Czysz. "But all we could find is tilt-up warehouses. Around here there's a plethora of great 10,000- and 20,000-square-foot buildings. Everybody should buy one."
But bigger change is on East Burnside's horizon. Longtime neighborhood anchor Wentworth Chevrolet will soon break ground on a grand new showroom on the block surrounded by Burnside, Ankeny, Martin Luther King Jr. and Grand. And the PDC has put out a request for proposals for a 450-unit housing/retail project at the eastern Burnside bridgehead that many in the neighborhood think -- some hoping, others fearing -- will be anchored by a Home Depot.
Meanwhile, Castlio, the neighborhood's 15-year veteran beat cop, says, "I used to get several calls a night from the area; now it's just once in a while."
Indeed, it was while walking through the neighborhood alone at 2 a.m. that 25-year-old Ruth Ann Brown, 25, discovered a 2,000-square-foot former radiator shop at 922 S.E. Ankeny that she and Rose McCormick, 28, are turning into the New American Art Union to show emerging artists. It has 20-foot ceilings and a loft. But best of all, she notes, "The mortgage payment is cheaper than rent."
