March 19 to April 24, 2016
2916 NE Alberta Street, Suite B (between NE 29th and NE 30th avenues)
Portland, OR, 503 805 5458

Long before it was fashionable to glue clippings of ziggurats (to intimate exotica) from 1970s National Geographic pages, juxtaposed with some modern trope or other (to suggest time-flux), collage had already enjoyed its heyday. The many cute new versions readily found online have the attractive quality of anything else torn out of time, labeled “vintage” and mixed with contemporary imagistic trappings, but like anything novel for the sake of novelty, this kind of juvenile charm wears off pretty fast.

On the other hand, (there’s always another one) there’s “Totems & Cantos,” on view this month at Ampersand Bookshop & Gallery, featuring a selection of collage work by artist and New York gallerist Scott Zieher, created over the past five years. While wildly juxtaposed (e.g. a single glove standing in for legs), these collages aren’t composed of zany connections but diurnal, sometimes totally banal objects displaced, re-contextualized, and distorted to make for something more decorative, puzzling, strange, and often very funny. Actually, these aren’t superimpositions or replacements at all, they’re imaginary constructions. This characterizes their charm. That the figures are composed of disparate parts, giving them almost a readymade quality, makes them more convincing. But of what?

Marvelous robots and occult figurines wear hats made of images of what appear to be bowls, dishes, thimbles, and crucibles, hanging there (so to speak) on toothy white sheets or else found pages in frames, as if to pose their incipient questions from nevertheless mesmerizing appearances. Some of them have toothbrush and bottle bodies or some kind of marble plinth lower situation. Their compositions often appear to have been made up of parts decided on by pulling from a hat. One form, Wave Pattern (2015), is mostly the clipping of a colorful blue, white, and gold waveform filigree ending in a cluster of spheres (flattened, left within borders of white), while another figure in Totem #2 (2012) is made up entirely of those famous helical stripes of a barber shop’s pole.

When Totem #2, the first in this series of 18, makes its appearance near the Ampersand entrance, its four figures stand waiting like deranged poker players and you’re late to the game. But there’s neither hostility nor friendliness in these visages, nothing personal or alien for that matter, and it’s partly because of this that Zieher’s pictures are so enchanting. It’s this kind of magic within the human imagination that Bertrand Russell writes about, describing a force that comes from far off carrying with it the “vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things.” That’s what these things look like to me anyway. It’s a strange distancing relative to the so-called ordinary that causes the artifice to change a person’s perception with what amounts here to more or less simple cut-up decorations. And there’s always an odd one out. The last in the above-mentioned line of four is caught mid-sway as one of those crazed SkyDancers seen at used car dealerships, only one made of stacked electric hotplates supporting a totemic mask for a head, rather than monochrome nylon. One could posit that this work has something to say about commercial imagery, but should that be done here?

In addition to these dazzling figural compositions, here and there are other forms. Rain Cone (2015) is an ice cream with a kind of hot pink spray paint overlay, and venturing further into the exhibition is a series of multiple forms made up of fragments of type and snippets of collage, aptly called Concretude (2015) (alluding to the shaped language of concrete poetry). Looking long enough at Zieher’s cinematic collages, one begins to consider what that old stage conjurer Georges Méliès was doing when he assembled his magical films a century ago. Through a certain kind of lens, ordinary things (even letters and numbers, not out-and-out strange in their own right straightaway) are put together to make something happen that one didn’t at all expect. In the case of the Concretudes, one can scarcely make out letters at all. These compositions amount to a visual gag, turning the tables on art of the imponderable by way of common objects.

After having seen the exhibition once, a few of these odd little minions paid a visit in two successive nights’ dreams, occasioning my return to them, to guess at the origins of their constituent facets and search for deeper meanings — a totally hopeless task. Seeing this exhibition a second time, Zieher’s works seem, to me at least, to be composed only to delight, taking on the characteristics of dreams. Like some of these compositions, dreams are often cold and at some remove as they occur, but are sometimes unforgettable. Archetypes may be manifested in dreams through familiar and uncanny imagery, and these collages have that same temperament, if such a term can be used for inanimate constructions. Emotions on ice.

Zeiher’s exquisite miniature images are X-Acto’d fragments butted up against larger parts with a scarcity of imperfection, so that when a visual hiccup does appear — such as a white border corner taking a turn to brown or black toward its furthest edge — one has to wonder if it happened by mistake at all. And if not, then are these images, in keeping with their mode of curiosity cabinet on paper, really just here to delight? This is the kind of art that necessitates no further context, history, or other anecdotal information, save for the fact of their creator’s absolute painstaking and considered rendering. This singularly interesting collection of pictures is exactly enough.

The post SkyDancers and Concrete Poetry: Scott Zieher at Ampersand appeared first on artcritical.

The River Keeps Talking at Ampersand Gallery & Fine Books

July 30 to  August 25, 2015
2916 NE Alberta Street, Suite B
Portland, OR, 503 805 5458

“The River Keeps Talking,” Ampersand Gallery’s recent summer exhibition, was an engaging one in what seems to be a string of impressively curated shows to grace Portland’s Alberta Arts District. This was a show of ecological and geometric forms carrying with them iconographic meanings both straightforward and conceptual, featuring work by Matthew F. Fisher, Clayton Cotterell and Ellen McFadden.

Walking up at just the right hour, 5:30 pm on my most recent trip, I was pleased to be greeted by the shadow of palm fronds projected by the sunset via the gallery front window. Palm trees are uncommon in Portland, and for this particular show’s sequence of paintings and prints, the tree’s image is the perfect invenzioni when combined with what it provisionally flanks: the last in the sequence of Fisher’s surreal beachside acrylics.

These paintings are thick with saturated, bubblegum pop hues, nostalgia and style, recalling early summer heat and its light hazes. These and another thing: water, which is in itself becoming a rarity. (Is this an implicit reason for its center-stage position in this show?) Where there is water, it can be said, there are people there too. But not one bather is seen here. This, along with an occasion to test perception of image production, is part of the exhibition’s charm.

Looking at the paintings and what they might tell or ask of us, let’s also say that the appearance of the aforementioned palm-shadow has not only the one meaning, that the sun is low in the sky and what’s in its way’s been pinned up on the wall as a dark gray projection, but a second meaning, like that of the removal of one’s hat at a passerby to signal a hello. This show, at first glance, is just as good humored, and we can accept this meaning as a friendly handshake, paying attention to what is both obvious and also what is unknown. This was a good setup, at least for me, for the imagistic and (however loose) narratives found in Fisher’s paintings.

Taking the show on in reverse, the first acrylic is the show’s final one: Meaningless September (2014). The painting is a suitable point of entry for both Fisher’s own works and those of Cotterell and McFadden.

If Fisher’s subjects are maritime (though not specific to any era), they remain in limbo between loose and tight, specific and abstract, atmospheric and microscopic. In Meaningless, Fisher’s layer-by-layer process of painting is revealed through the curious buildup, or rollup, of the water’s edge up to a very granulated beach. This feature of water is highly strange, in that we can deduce its being water, though it also looks like something else. Plastic or rubber, in any case something you could peel away, roll back up and tuck under your arm. This version of the sea looks like daytime starlight as it ripples back toward the horizon line so famous in all of Fisher’s paintings. Fisher’s approach is presumably no-ideas, which leads him to certain subjects that might be precluded by more deliberation.

Another of Fisher’s apprehending canvases, Silly Boy, 2014, shows a single blade of seagrass as the tallest plant around. The simple leaf in this last painting, by this logic, takes on the importance of any subject ever painted. Here, by virtue of the shoot’s being presented in apparent reverence, the artist allows us to overstep the limits of

merely formal perception and imagine the ordinary as extraordinary or even otherworldly.

Likewise, the two large “drops” of water in Meaningless, hung magically aloft, loom large, and appear as mystical presences. In this way, Fisher’s simple subjects appear to us without much relation to his forebears or reference to painting itself and the impedimenta of career. In its stark everything-and-nothing, the painting recollects The Glass Bubbles (1850), by English poet Samuel Greenberg, who wrote:

The motion of gathering loops of water
Must either burst or remain in a moment.
The violet colors through the glass
Throw up little swellings that appear
And spatter as soon as another strikes
And is born; so pure are they of colored
Hues, that we feel the absent strength
Of its power. When they begin they gather
Like sand on the beach: each bubble
Contains a complete eye of water

Water is by now the overarching motif in this exhibition, and it shows up in various guises. The former imagistic synchronicity found in the Greenberg poem perhaps allows for some of the subtler and uncanny aspects of the element represented in all three of these artists’ works.

Fisher’s new imagery is cool, fun, and highly attractive to anyone keen on ocean views and graphics, and furthermore it is decisively mellow. These paintings give a more mystical sense, and, when juxtaposed with the comparatively more intense prints by Cotterell on the gallery’s facing wall, they look pretty dreamy.

Cotterell’s four collaged photographic pigment prints, in their flat-out dazzling compositional simplicity, make their subjects — water and landscape — full of surprise. In this first pigment print, Untitled (2015) Cotterell has made what looks like a wave in black, white, and silver, look like a tide is turning into a frozen tundra bedecked with stars. What appears to be the surf at another glance could then also be a snowy mountain range with charred stumps of trees at its further melted base. The prints depict movement while being compositionally static (being the prints they are), because of their effect upon the eye, which makes one guess again and again at what’s being shown. These works are reminders that what is commonly known can always become unfamiliar through experimentation, and thus contain the possibility to baffle, in a good way.

In another untitled print by Cotterell, the largest in the show, we get a mid-ocean view with the horizon abandoning itself for the sky. Looking at this I get the feeling of standing on the edge of a high cliff, or on a boat out to sea, that the world has taken on a characteristic of limitlessness. It’s what people since the Ancient Greeks (as far back as we have record) felt when they looked out over a cliffside, overwhelmed at all there was to take in, with simultaneous doubt with regard to possibility or passibility. We either can’t believe what we are seeing, or it’s too much to take in.

Standing as close as allowable to the print, starting at its left hand corner, one has the desire to take in the composition little by little to know its very details. Is it wind that causes the more intense wavelets in this area of the water, or has it something more to do with the chosen medium or some other texture collaged in? Moving the eye upward toward the sky, the water’s calm is described by both its smoothness and this portion of the print’s lightening shade.

Cotterell’s third untitled print is a splash, in the same black/white/silver of the previous two. This is all the intensity and energy of the second print, condensed to 18 x 22 inches. The flow is green, white, and incensed. In person, this print looks like the splash or whirlpool it is, except with the strange detail that the edges appear to be glass or plastic. What is water? It is temporarily rechanneled through what amounts to experiments with forms and mediums, into the perceptions of this show’s viewers.

In the back room of the gallery are three large acrylic paintings by McFadden. They’re brightly hued and geometric, belying a pure abstraction that they only partially contain. This exhibit is McFadden’s third exhibition in the span of a year. These works reflect McFadden’s memories and perspectives on Northwest waterways, which are in her words “nearly dead today.” Do I know this because I read the leaflet? Only partially, as this “information” is also translated into her paintings.

In these vibrant configurations of line and color, McFadden shows the icon of nuclear effect upon water, in a creative direction she describes on her website as “constructive.” For McFadden, “the paintings serving a purpose of two dimensional surface as the basis for tension and interaction with shape and the four outside edges. Color is a part of that interaction,” but because these aren’t pedantic ecological narratives, the viewer is also a part of the interaction, adding to an already congenial aesthetic experience.

In Solkuks Wanapum and Wanapum (both 2015), river water cools as the rectangular shapes (representing water) change from jasper red to salvia blue and violet, the further away they get from toxicity. In the former composition, skinny, black rectangles represent the nuclear plants the water flows among, “not unlike the confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers, downstream from where the Wanapum Indians once lived and fished before being displaced by dams in the 1950s,” McFadden says. Work and life are apparent in these canvases, but you have to take a good look. As the hues and geometries change and converge from painting to painting, a concern for the occupied, precarious, and sublime states of water are displayed and enter our experience. Ellen McFadden’s ecological concerns and keenness to the problematic of production began early on, when she worked at a cannery as a young child. This combination of idea and practice makes McFadden’s paintings part of a dialogue.

If the emblem of Modern Art was to abandon formalist conventions, then the art of our era (whatever you want to call it) takes reference in lieu of illusionist figuration, fragments in place of “clear” statements, questions over answers, and dialogue instead of solitude: all of which can be found in the pictures seen in the above exhibition. One of the pleasures of recognizable subjects like these in The River Keeps Talking, is their ability to be riven, abstracted, rearranged, and collaged all while remaining perceptible. To me, this is what accounts for the hospitableness of shows like this; there’s point of entry but we’re not told exactly what to see or how to see it.

The post A Complete Eye of Water: A Summer Show at Ampersand Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

Taking a cue from Morton Feldman’s remark that “the love of the past in art is something very different to the artist than it is to the audience,” it’s fair to assume that the audience can remain attached to their favorite masters all their lives without very much ado. For the artist, however, a fixity upon certain figures can have unforeseen ramifications. Dictums such as this one show a (not always useful) concern over invention and replication, and demands that each new creation be also novel. One way to face this essential problem, “the anxiety of art,” to borrow Feldman’s phrase, is for the artist to put his/herself in a position to create work that is outside what they already know, so that “it speaks with its own emotion” and alternates from the tides of history. In his new publication of unfinished female nudes, Unfinished Drawing (2009 – 2014), newly out from Portland Oregon’s Ampersand Editions, artist Jason Brinkerhoff’s work both pays homage to the past and speaks to the moment-to-moment creative act, crystallizing his world in a dizzying series of forms.

Brinkerhoff’s work also raises questions, which upon further consideration, answer themselves. What are the historical meanings hidden beneath the aspects of Brinkerhoff’s figures? Where do all these nude women come from? If Brinkerhoff begins with a subject to which his apparently wild, half-abstract, half-representational style conforms, what on earth could it be? In the past, it wasn’t so easy to find so many naked women to draw. In Brinkerhoff’s nudes, a possible schema or constraint for Brinkerhoff seems traceable to what is found within art books and visits to the Modern wing of big city museums. The viewer is handed a certain nostalgia, an ever-shared celebration of past works, in pastiched references on subjects throughout art history. But nowhere can there be found the commentary such reference might otherwise necessitate: each piece in Unfinished Drawing maintains the appellation of “Untitled.” The female nudes in Brinkerhoff’s new publication seemed, as it were, to have been lying in wait for him throughout the entire 19th and 20th centuries, to resonate with each other through the turning of pages, rearing for a seemingly eternal return with unlimited repetition when considered in a larger context.

For the countless uncanny likenesses found in the nudes, whether explicitly or implicitly generated, neither the figures nor their famed male artists shall be named here; further attention to a fondness for past masters is simply less interesting than what’s to be gleaned from the artist’s style. And in the case of Unfinished Drawing, there is to be found a wieldy sum of sure-handed renderings of half-wrought drawings and collage beginnings, which the artist had been accumulating for years, until Ampersand proprietor Myles Haselhorst discovered them in a box during a studio visit. Flipping the page to have a look at the publication’s first reproduction, No. 58, Untitled (2009) — made using graphite, oil pastel, and acrylic on paper — one finds a pleasant if not mild introduction to what’s to follow: one demure eye, a nose, and the lips of what seems to be a woman with scribbled hair and a half-shaded face. The torn and found aspect of this piece is easily discernible. A few pages in, No. 2, Untitled (2010) in ink, graphite, and colored pencil, full of neon and gray scribbling and thinner dark ink lines, is unreadable in the figural sense, which offers relief from the veneer of resemblance found elsewhere.

The following page, print No. 159, is abstract in a different way: this figure has no face, head, or even a neck, meaning it has been whited-out using correction fluid, as a new, much larger face and androgynous body appears to be appearing in thick black ink to its right, perhaps with tongue alack. The sense of space in this composition, still early on in the book, is formally augmented by one thin line in the background to create a third, however unstable, dimension and a never-ending wall which sets our all-body figure in hot pink underwear in a rather close-up pose. A last notable aspect of this figure is that her one hand, the right, is rendered naturalistically, which makes the other, more stump-like limb seem to dissolve before its viewer, simultaneously reminding one of those little wooden modeling figurines.

Another, No. 41, possesses a similarly prosthetic figural look, which more resembles a wooden mannequin, seated with one stump of leg pointed toward the ground and the other with foot upon the surface on which she sits. This lady appears collaged, with her arm seemingly cut from another page, and a torso of blue-and-pink stripes with a circular, patterned right breast (just one) which also looks to have been cut and pasted. There is, in this piece’s textural variation, as one finds in others from the book, a curious sense of écorché, which, used for anatomical painting or sculpture, gives view of the body with the skin removed in order to display the musculature of the form.

Brinkerhoff is at his best when he’s messy, and unconcerned for representation; he possesses a remarkable ability to improvise and mix-and-match mediums, and scatter space by the use of collage and line. The carelessly brushed or “pushed” black ink lines of No. 133 Untitled take the viewer’s eye away from the act of recognition (into imagination) with a willful and wavering accent, over the surface of the page, as if to then have one feel around for raised and dried clumps of paint or wet ink spots.

Brinkerhoff’s messiness, this flourish of disorder set to a rhythmic texture via his diverse mediums, offers a highly pleasurable experience of tactility. The unpremeditated impasto — juxtaposed with sudden, finer lines — offers surprise, and is more expressive than any of the facial expressions (which are admittedly jejune) of the figures he presents. Brinkerhoff’s allowing of recurrence into his creative endeavor has, as reported by Haselhorst’s keenly penned introduction to this publication, and evinced by Brinkerhoff’s hundreds of works comme ça, signals the continuous production of new works. One can foresee the generation of even more possibility from further challenging constraints, and a rigorous consideration of figural properties that the images certainly raise. The cycle of female nudes á la the male artists of the past is closed for such talents.

Heinrich, Will. Jason Brinkerhoff: Unfinished Drawing: 2009 – 2014 (Portland: Ampersand Editions, 2014). Regular edition. ISBN: 9781941556078, 177 pages, $45 (Deluxe edition $850)

The post “Best When He’s Messy”: Jason Brinkerhoff’s Unfinished Drawings appeared first on artcritical.