Tag Archives: Bullseye Gallery

It’s First Thursday tonight. Walk the walk.

Mary Ellen Mark, Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon, 1976  11x14” Vintage Silver Gelatin; Blue Sky Gallery.

By Bob Hicks

Most Portland galleries open their new shows on the first Thursday of each month, and have a little party to go along with it: They stay open, usually, from 6 to 9 in the evening on First Thursdays. This is a big deal for galleries in the Pearl/Northwest and downtown, but it’s far from the only game in town.

Jeffry Mitchell Untitled (foot vase) 2011, 10"x10"6" glazed ceramic; Pulliam Gallery.A bunch of Eastside galleries have First Friday openings instead. The renegades on Northeast Alberta opt for Last Thursdays, upsetting the applecart of neighborhood decorum in the process (although it’s not generally the gallery owners who relieve themselves drunkenly on the neighbors’ lawns). And a lot of places — the museums and college galleries, for instance — go serenely on their own schedules. Disjecta, the North Portland art center, is waiting until Saturday to open its quirky-looking show of folded miniatures, Portland Paper City.

But First Thursday includes most of the big mainstream galleries: It’s the art walk that gets the most horn-tooting. And as the guy who has sex only one time a year says excitedly, Tonight’s the night! Mr. Scatter put together a quick guide to some of the First Thursday highlights for this morning’s Oregonian; you can see it online here.

Kris Hargis, "The Fifth," 2010. Drawing: oil, conte, colored pencil, grease pencil on paper, 20.5 x 16.5 inches. Froelick Gallery. There’s more than this to it, but isn’t there always? Elizabeth Leach Gallery, for instance, holds over Matt McCormick’s historically potent video installation and photo show The Great Northwest from last month, and Bullseye Gallery does the same with Mark Zirpel’s Queries in Glass, an exhibit that merges aesthetics with the gadgetizing of 18th century and Victorian men of science.

Speaking of the Age of Reason, you don’t need to rush out to the galleries tonight unless you really enjoy the scene. The shows will be up all month. If you’re going to look, pick a time when you can see the art without being elbowed aside by the crowds. If you want to buy — well, the earlier the better. And remember that a lot of galleries let their buying customers see the stuff a night before the official opening. That’s why, sometimes, even if you’re there on First Thursday and see a piece you really like, it already has a little red dot beside it. If you think you might want to buy, ask if you can get in early. Next month, that is.

*

ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

  • Mary Ellen Mark, “Ward 81, Oregon State Hospital, Salem, Oregon,” 1976. 11×14” Vintage Silver Gelatin; Blue Sky Gallery.
  • Jeffry Mitchell, Untitled (foot vase) 2011, 10″ x10″ x 6″; glazed ceramic; Pulliam Gallery.
  • Kris Hargis, “The Fifth,” 2010. Drawing: oil, conte, colored pencil, grease pencil on paper, 20.5 x 16.5 inches. Froelick Gallery.

Sitting on the SOFA: room with a view

Geoffrey Gorman's invented creatures at SOFA West, from Jane Sauer Gallery, Santa Fe.

By Bob Hicks

“I didn’t do it!” the woman barked, pointing a long bony finger accusingly at another woman who stood in shell-shocked horror. “It was her!”

Not for the first time in his life Mr. Scatter felt a mild urge to strangle someone he’d never actually met. In moments of crisis the scramble for self-preservation is a natural human impulse, but there are times when it really ought to be held in check.

Jan Huling, "Kewpo Libre," 2010. Mixed media, beads, 16.5 x 9 x 4.5 inches. Lyons Wier Gallery, New York.For one thing, it was obvious how the accident had occurred. For another, the woman who had unknowingly swiped against the beaded kewpie doll, which was perched in a high-traffic zone in Lyons Wier Gallery‘s booth at the SOFA West art fair, obviously felt horrible: tiny little colored beads were scattered all over the floor, the doll itself was lying there smashed among the litter, and the artist who had so meticulously made it, Jan Huling, stood by gazing dejectedly at the wreckage. Stuff happens, especially in crowded rooms crammed with expensive breakable items, and a little empathy goes a lot farther than a pointing bony finger.

After attending last week’s second annual SOFA West in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Mr. Scatter can imagine a few other pointing fingers, and maybe a few pointed sniffs. Both are predictable, and say more about the mood of the art world than they do about SOFA. This popular art fair, larger versions of which are also held annually in Chicago and New York (SOFA stands for Sculpture Objects & Functional Art), represents a lot of things that much of the contemporary art world hold to be unworthy of serious attention.

Continue reading Sitting on the SOFA: room with a view

Monday scatter: Ballet blues, theater dreams, Gypsy Rose Lee

Update: After posting this I ran into Jon Ulsh, OBT’s executive director, who pointed out that OBT isn’t cutting all live music: There’ll be some, but not the full orchestra. That’s an important distinction. Even a pair of pianists can make a huge difference, as OBT’s recent premiere of Christopher Stowell’s version of The Rite of Spring showed so satisfyingly. Cutting the full orchestra, Ulsh said, saved $300,000. That still left $1.7 million to cut elsewhere. After explaining the cuts, he excused himself. “I’ve got to go raise some money,” he said.

OBT Nutcracker, 2007The news today isn’t good, and it isn’t unexpected: Oregon Ballet Theatre, faced with tumbling income because its ordinary donors don’t have the money to give anymore, is slashing its budget by 28 percent. That’s an overnight cut from $6.7 million to $4.8 million, as Grant Butler reports in The Oregonian.

These are the times we live in, and Scatter partner Barry Johnson talks about their effect on the city’s arts scene in his Portland Arts Watch column this morning on The Oregonian’s Web site, Oregon Live.

Oregon Ballet Theatre is very good: This rising company has been making a genuine mark nationally. But in today’s shell-shocked economy it’s not enough to be good. You also have to have a cushion. And that, OBT does not have. It has no endowment, and its always-thin budget is brittle to the point of breaking. Butler reports that the number of full-time dancers will drop from 28 to 25, which isn’t precipitous, although none of these dancers is exactly striking it rich, and three more high-quality artists will now be out of work.

As troubling from an artistic view is the sacrifice of live music for at least the next season. Maybe that doesn’t seem like such a big deal — maybe the world of contemporary dance has got you used to the idea of canned music — but they call it “canned” for a reason: It’s prepackaged, unchanging, from a dancer’s view metronomic, or at least predictable: It doesn’t have the edge that live musicians supply. Ballet thrives in the thrilling uncertainty of the moment, when conductor and musicians and dancers all respond to the others in real time and everyone’s attention is heightened. Great ballet requires live musicians. Now, the dozens of talented musicians who make up this orchestra are out of a job, too.

Live music, including full orchestration, has been one of the prime aspirations and foundations of Christopher Stowell’s vision for this company since he took over as artistic director. I’m sure he hasn’t changed that determination. But he’s had to put it on hold. Sometimes being able to establish a holding pattern is a triumph. At least for now, this is putting the brakes on a company that was going places. Now, it’s hunker down and survive.

*****

If a recession or a depression is something that we think ourselves into, maybe it’s something we think ourselves out of, too. For years it’s been obvious that both Oregon Ballet Theatre and Portland Opera need a better place to perform. Although both dip occasionally into the 900-seat Newmark Theatre, home base for both companies is the cavernous, 3,000-seat Keller Auditorium, a hall that puts performers and audiences alike at a disadvantage. It’s too big; it swallows sight and sound.

Over the past year I’ve talked a few times unofficially with the ballet’s Stowell and Portland Opera’s general dirctor, Christopher Mattaliano, about the possibilities of creating a new theater for the two companies to share — something actually designed for the art forms rather than as an all-purpose barn, which is essentially what Keller Auditorium is. Stowell and Mattaliano happen to get along very well, and for the long-term health of both companies, both men would love to see this happen.

A new hall would be as intimate as the economics of the business would allow it to be — somewhere between 1,400 and 2,400 seats, and if that seems like a wide range, it is: There’s plenty of room for honing this dream. It could also encourage other partnerships: the development of a full-time orchestra for the ballet and opera to share; combined marketing; even (and this last part is me speaking, not Stowell or Mattaliano) combined administrative and fund-raising services.

Is this a crazy time to be bringing this sort of thing up? Yes, and no. Obviously nobody’s going to start a bricks-and-mortar campaign now, with the economy circling into the sewer. Portland Center Stage is still roughly 9 million bucks short of paying off its move to the Armory, for crying out loud, and the meter seems stuck on that one.

But I keep remembering that Portland voters approved construction of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts in the midst of the city’s last bad recession, in the early 1980s, when the city’s and state’s economies weren’t as diverse as they are now. Sometimes people think biggest when things look the worst. And I know that if you don’t have goals even in the toughest of times, you won’t get anywhere. Call this one a dream deferred — temporarily.

*****

Gypsy Rose Lee, 1956/Wikimedia CommonsOn a lighter note, a trip to North Portland for a puppet show got me thinking about the great ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee, she of the most celebrated stage mom in show business. (That would be Momma Rose, in the musical Gypsy.) You can see the results of my puppet adventures, as related in Monday’s Oregonian, here.

The puppet company Night Shade was performing at Disjecta, the warehouse-like arts space in the shadow of the Paul Bunyan statue that marks the rapidly reviving Kenton district (a revival sparked partly by the Interstate MAX light-rail line). The district does have its holdovers, which is part of its charm, and one of them is a strip club across from Disjecta called the Dancin’ Bare.

Here’s what the club’s reader board said:

Amature Night

Hot Girls Cold Beer

Well, Gypsy Rose Lee was a literary-minded stripper (note her firm familiarity with the keyboard in the photo) and I can’t imagine that in the heyday of burlesque she’d have put up with a misspelling as glaring as that, any more than she’d have put up with any amateurs horning in on her profession.

And when Gypsy Rose danced, she danced to live music.

*****

Quick links: I’ve also been hitting the galleries lately, and have a couple of reviews in this morning’s Oregonian. The print-edition reviews are briefs. You can find the longer versions online at Oregon Live:

— Photographer Paul Dahlquist’s 80th-birthday show at Gallery 114, and photos by Terry Toedtemeier from the 1970s, at Blue Sky. Review here.

— Glass art by Steve Klein and Michael Rogers at Bullseye Gallery. Review here.