“Astoria Sea Lion” by Gary Sheldon

We understand. Really, we do. Every time you go outside, the mud sucks the galoshes right off your feet and you’re living inside your parka hood, so why on Earth would you consider…blech…camping? This seasonal blindness to Oregon’s natural beauty means that Oregon Wild’s photo contest comes at just the right time to remind you: Hey, there is a reason we live here! It’s friggin’ gorgeous! Sometimes.

The photo contest began five years ago, as a way to highlight beautiful, endangered Oregon places. This year, they picked the Siskiyou Wild Rivers area in Southwestern Oregon, which gave outdoor photographers plentiful material to work with. The area has been compared to Yellowstone in sheer natural beauty, and also encompasses part of the coast.

Five winners were chosen in five different categories: Wildlands, Wildlife, Waters, Endangered Places, and a Kid’s category. Pictured here are the winners from the Wildlands category (Gary Sheldon, with “Astoria Sea Lion”, top photo) and the Waters category (Jody Ellis, with “Sparks Lake”, above).

The winning photos and honorable mentions will be unveiled tonight at Tribute Gallery on Broadway. The exhibit is free and will feature beer provided by Rogue and wine provided by Lemelson Vineyards. Entrance is free, although a $5 donation is suggested. Framed prints of all the displayed photos will also be available for purchase.

Oregon Wild 2009 Photo Contest at Tribute Gallery, 328 NW Broadway #117, Thursday, Nov. 19, 5:30-7:30 pm. Free.

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With help from Klutch and WW vis arts critic Richard Speer, we picked a handful of local artists, from painters Alexis Mollomo and Josh Arseneau to installation master and tattoo artist Dan Gilsdorf, gave then the choice of using of one of five Willamette Week covers and told them they had three weeks to embellish, trash, tear apart and re-use it in any way they liked. As long as their art project used the original newspaper cover in some way, it was cool with us. Check out artist Pedro Dorsey’s version of our March 25, 2009 “Pet Sounds” cover, above.

You can check out the rest of the project’s startlingly creative results, which involve everything from oil paints and thread to wood blocks and tiny clay skeletons, when the show opens tonight at Backspace. Klutch even remixed an entire WW blue box for the show (scroll down for photos). A bunch of the show’s artists will be on hand to explain exactly how and why they totally trashed Willamette Week.

A huge thank you to all the participating artists: Josh Arseneau, Tom Cramer, Lydia Crumbley, Pedro Dorsey, Tripper Dunnigan, Dan Gilsdorf, Jason Graham, Chris Haberman, Klutch, Eva Lake, Alexis Mollomo, J. Shea, Brett Superstar.

GO: Trashed @ 35: A gallery showing of Willamette Week newspaper covers—remixed by local artists, shows at Backspace, 115 NW 5th Ave., 248-2900. Opening reception 5:30 pm Thursday, Nov. 5. Show closes Nov. 30.

Klutch’s Trashed @ 35 Willamette Week box:

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I will admit, I was a little nervous when I walked into the club, which was hosting a live life drawing event for the Portland-born artist. Not because of the handful of grandma’s walking around in stripper heels and garter belts, but because of how badly I stuck out in my seven layers of sweaters and Keds. I tried to look casual; I leaned against the bar, sipped $3 champagne, and tried so damn hard not to look directly at an old woman’s naked breasts get fondled in the corner. Oh god, I thought embarrassed, what if I see someone I know?

Plympton sat at a small desk that stood in front of a large lounge chair. One by one, dedicated fans would approach the desk, shake his hand, and strip naked to pose for an original Plympton portrait of themselves. The artist seemed completely unfazed by what was happening in front of him. Apparently he was used to being fawned over by naked fans. I guess you would be after drawing boobs and cocks for more than 30 years.

After I watched around 10 pudgy women get their pictures drawn, Portland’s favorite tattooed man, Matt Gone, stepped up to the table. He was followed by a man with a microphone who announced that Gone was having a magazine article written about him and, despite the club’s no camera policy, was going to have his picture taken for the piece. “If you wish to protect your privacy, we’ll ask you to please leave the room until after the picture is taken,” the man with the mic said.

Of course, I expected every table to immediately empty. I was surprised, and then inspired, to find that only one of the two dozen couples who were present exited the building. Club Sesso’s visitors had nothing to hide. They were proud of their presence at Club Sesso and proud of being Plympton fans. And I am too. Just as long as I can keep my clothes on.

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Being quite intrigued by Conspiracy Theory, Robert Boyd’s study of “social paranoia and civil distrust in an era of questionable politics” (and who wouldn’t be), I grabbed a companion and headed over to PNCA in the Pearl at (I thought) a prime-time gallery slot, 12:45 pm on a Sunday afternoon.

Having found our way in and wandered around the sprawling white exhibition space, searching fruitlessly for a sign or two, we stumbled through a black curtain and into Boyd’s two-channel video installation.

Thus begins the awkward process of wondering how far along the show is, how can I read this handout in the dark, and is it very lazy of me to be excited by the prospect of a bench? And hang on… is it all supposed to be silent? The flashing, dramatic images are kinda interesting, but without subtitles I think I’m going to miss out on the subtle nuances of this critique and parody. After a good five minutes, I give in and sheepishly head over to the reception desk.

“Um, is the installation supposed to have sound, or is it a silent one?”

“Oh it’s supposed to the REALLY loud. But there’s a talk on so I’ve had to mute it for an hour.”

Great. To add insult to injury, on exploring the desolate complex, I stumbled across a ton of vacant classrooms, all aching to host Unpacking the Shipment chats, I’m sure. [Ed note: The TBA talk was actually at the Gerding on Sunday] So “Always Check The Scheduling Of Arts Talks” is my lesson for today, here are some pictures of what else was on show. Not nearly so exciting as international conspiracy members and the mysterious Commander X, I suspect.

(Psst: Matt Singer did make it to Conspiracy Theory with sound, read his brief take on it along with other gallery show reviews in WW’s Visual Arts listings.)

Robert Boyd’s Conspiracy Theory, PNCA Feldman Gallery, 1241 NW Johnson. Closes Oct. 24. 10 am-7 pm daily (barring any other events in the near vicinity).

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Barrow’s tour de force is notable in the way it combines many things: live narration, video, music, drawings and an overhead projector. Yes, a real, live overhead projector, unseen since your eighth grade biology class, on which Barrow layers and manipulates multiple transparencies. It is not the mere novelty of the tool that makes Barrow’s work worth it, but rather his complete and utter mastery of a machine more commonly considered a bygone clunker than a medium for high art.

During a Q&A after the performance, he described a nun-cum-professor at his art school who had been giving the same, refined lectures for nigh on 50 years, conducted via slide and overhead projectors. Barrow was inspired to riff on her method as a parody, but soon found that the medium sincerely appealed to the “control freak” and isolationist in him (”I don’t like to work with crews, or other people, really,” he admitted).

The projector is the vehicle for Barrow’s harrowing, dreamscape-like tale of an erstwhile garbage man, art school dropout and social outcast. He spends his nights picking through residents’ detritus and peeking through their windows; he’s inspired, in his own earnest and perverse way, to create a special kind of phone book based on these findings. Each citizen will get a page of info and illustration; it’s an “art project for everyone,” our garbage man intones.

For reasons that remain hazy but may include childhood trauma and psychic revenge, it is slowly revealed that a serial killer stalks our stalker, the malicious and psychotic foil to his harmless voyeurism. But by the time this oddball is thrown into the mix, the audience is too thoroughly entrenched in Barrow’s elegant, elegiac projector world to put up any sort of fight. Every Time I See Your Picture has a plot, but it is cushioned and obscured by the very narration around it, which is at once a diary entry, a cautionary tale and a philosophical tangent. A lot of it makes very little sense; some, in that illogical way personal confessions have, makes a frightening amount.

Above all, though, this performance is ultimately enjoyed in the craft of the man and his machine. If the animation potential of an overhead projector has never entered your brain, see this and prepare for revelation. Barrow is fluid and holds perfect time; his narration matches the sweeping movements of transparencies placed and replaced, and the original score by Amy Linton buoys you up and into the garbage man’s musty-sherbet-toned world.

I sat three rows behind Barrow (whose projection outpost is ensconced in the middle of the auditorium), and can heartily recommend this position. You watch the master make the product. It is a bizarre live experience, unlike any I’ve seen, unlikely to be forgotten any time soon.

Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave. 8:30 pm Tuesday, 6:30 pm Wednesday, Sept. 8-9. $10-$15.

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Having been skeptical that a mass of short pieces could find any cohesion and rhythm, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed both thematic halves of the show. Circles contained short and more abstract pieces, all built around the image of a circle, but in truly disparate ways. While Crowded Souls had longer works, fewer in number, within which the essence of the filmmaker was set up and demonstrated through their actions.

As Owen pointed out in her pre-screening introduction, each piece is quite short, so if you don’t like one, just wait a minute and chances are you’ll enjoy the next. I’m not saying every film was a masterpiece, but none were boring, and even the ones which mystified got me thinking about our need to infer logic and reason on to everything we see. The films were a veritable smorgasbord of the funny, sinister, hypnotic, and disturbing.

I will never forget Beijing artists Ma Qiusha’s interpretation of what you should do with beauty products, which impressed and repulsed me at the same time. Likewise, Liz Haley of Portland brought a whole new dimension to presenting a weather forecast, and seeing umbrellas dance in one of the later circles films made me smile all day. I wouldn’t be surprised if it got snapped up for use in a commercial in the not-too-distant future.

There were beautiful music videos, strobing graphic numbers, and one guy who couldn’t act for toffee. My favorite of the bunch would have to be fellow Portlander Alicia McDaid, whose 6 minute 15 second Pain is Fear Leaving Your Body had a beginning, a middle and an end, and made us empathize with and like her, despite knowing that she must also be really quite irritating. I’m not going to give too much away but it stands out and reels you in.

During one of the particularly peculiar earlier videos, I was convinced that someone was blowing raspberries a few rows back to voice their discontent, but now I’m fairly sure it was actually a baby. So all ages are welcome if they’ve got taste. Fully recommended.

Melody Owen’s Circles and Spinning Wheels & If I Could Crowd All My Souls Into That Mountain, NWFC Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park. 6.30 pm Thursday Sept. 10 and Saturday Sept. 12, 2.30 pm Sunday Sept. 13. $6-7.

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When the couple behind me left the TBA Festival screening of Erased James Franco after 20 (long, long) minutes, every sinew of my body berated me for not doing the same. Sitting through this concoction requires an immense feat of willpower, on a par with James Franco’s own heavy, labored attempts to show off this “favorite performance of any that I have ever done.”

And for an actor who has his name plastered 10 times across the opening credits, it must be delightful to have the stage entirely to oneself. It was no doubt great fun to act.

The 65 minute film, which aims to fracture and reconstitute narrative and identity, is perhaps best summarized by the Scene With The Armchair (props took the place of a supporting cast). The tightly-stuffed leather seat looks very much like a lightweight prop chair, but Franco struggles to make it look heavy for a painfully long time, and for very little reward. (Read WW Screen Critic Aaron’s Mesh’s take on Carter’s Erased James Franco, here.)

While the split-screen scenes, where two interpretations of a monologue are run side by side, prove vaguely interesting, this really is acting for acting’s sake. To my mind, the point of acting is to portray something, create a character, make a point. But by reconstituting bits and pieces of narrative without context and growling them inaudibly, they will look overacted no matter how hard you try. Even “I love you” isn’t confessed convincingly. I suppose the writing was on the wall when our lead man gave this quote last year:

 ”Usually one just tries to make the character he’s playing life-like, expressive, and interesting. Carter’s project worked against all these goals…”

 No shit. Highlights from my deranged notes include:

“James Franco has lazy eyes. And a hairy neck.”

“Christ, it’s not surprising he looks a little bloated, we’ve be watching him down water and crackers since forever.”

 “Oh wow, great cut between scenes there – an image of some machine instead of Franco’s face. Hope there’s more of those.” (there weren’t, for the record).

 So if you’re going to see an arts film at the NWFC, please, please go see circles and spinning wheels instead. And if anyone really enjoyed Erased, I would genuinely love to hear why.

Carter’s Erased James Franco at NWFC: Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park. 8.30 pm Thurday, Sept. 10, 4.30 pm Sunday Sept. 13. $6-$7.

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“Nattefrost of Carpathian Forest” by Peter Beste at Sugar Gallery February 2007

When First Thursday gets underway tonight, the Everett Station Lofts will be one gallery lighter, and we art-walkers will be poorer for it. Sugar Gallery has closed. Sugar  opened on New Year’s Eve 2005 with a show by transgressive painter/photographer Corey Smith. Eric Kellogg was in charge of the space back then and set the gallery’s tone by curating piquant solo shows. His photo curator was local lens-man Michael Demeo, who assumed directorship of the gallery in 2007 when Kellogg moved to New York City. Demeo often focused on gritty, sexy photography in thematically tight shows such as Elizabeth Weinberg’s moody portraits of psy-folkie Devendra Banhart and other rockers (January 2007), Peter Beste’s portraits of Scandinavian death-metal bands (see above, February 2007), and his sister Rachael Marie Demeo’s enigmatic tableaux of naked hippie chicks cavorting in desolate landscapes (July 2007).

“The art economy in Portland has a lot to do with us closing Sugar,” Demeo tells WW.  “We tailored the gallery for young, emerging art, and with Portland never really being a beacon for oddball art sales, we definitely took a hit. The recession really left us bruised.”

Demeo is nurturing plans to stay involved in the art scene Sugar helped incubate. He invites fans of the gallery to keep up with his projects via his blog (www.michaeljdemeoblog.com), and the blog of his girlfriend and Sugar employee, the talented photographer Alyssa Nicole Sanders (http://estasnoches.tumblr.com).

•

As often happens, one door closes just as another opens up. Across the river at 3619 SE Division St., painter Michael Bracamontes has opened a new gallery called PDX/LA/NY. The tongue-in-cheek moniker pokes fun at Portland’s perennial jockeying for position on the sub-L.A.-and-New-York radar. Bracamontes, himself a native Los Angelino, did extensive renovations to bring the 1,000-square-foot space up to par.

Michael Bracamontes, founder/director of PDX/LA/NY Gallery, taken in the gallery.

The current show, which closes August 30, features work by local artists Amelia Opie and Marcia D’Amico, as well as some of Bracamontes’ own reverse oil paintings on Plexiglas. While Bracamontes concedes that the gallery’s location is not in one of the established visual arts hubs, he hopes burgeoning culinary, nightlife, and retail developments in the neighborhood will draw art lovers. His attitude, he says, invoking the film Field of Dreams, is that “If you build it, they will come.” He also envisions the gallery as doing double-duty as an artist co-op. He invites artists interested in studio space to email him at pdx.la.ny@gmail.com.

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Robopocalypse Comics Collective, a group of nine Portland comics artists, has released its latest group effort—a group effort that extends beyond the collective and into the lives of all readers. That’s because Operation: R.O.B.O. Rescue is a comic book and a coloring book! In this merry melding of two literature formats, a group of kids must save the world from robots-gone-bad: “26 pages of the fun for all ages adventure of a group of kids and their quest to defeat a group of robots gone bad.”

“I think you’d be hard pressed to find an artist working today that didn’t get one of his or her first creative sparks from that first time coloring outside the lines of a coloring book,” said RCC artist BT Livermore via email. “Releasing our own felt like a good way to remember those days and perhaps inspire, or at least entertain, a younger generation.” The book is kid-friendly but, Livermore says, “everyone would probably be a little happier if they just sat down and colored every once in a while.”

Tonight at Floating World Comics, in conjunction with First Thursday, is Nuts & Bolts, the book’s release party and an art showcase for Robopocalpyse and Teenage Dinosaur members. There will also be a book signing of the new Jamie S. Rich and Joelle Jones release, You Have Killed Me, a slick and stark detective story in the noir tradition.

Nuts & Bolts and You Have Killed Me signing at Floating World Comics, 20 NW 5th Ave. Tonight, 6-10 pm. Free. All ages.

Images courtesy of BT Livermore.

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Matt McCormick—experimental-film maven, Peripheral Produce founder, Shins video wizard and the man I still consider “Portland’s next great director”—reports that he’s just about finished post-production work on his first feature film, the Carrie Brownstein and James Mercer romantic meditation Some Days are Better Than Others.

“We just got our website launched, and hope to be premiering the film this fall at some fancy international film festivals,” writes McCormick (pictured above talking with Brownstein on location).

Which fancy festivals he’s hoping for are still under wraps, but the movie has a handsome, moody website that goes into some detail about its themes and plot. It neglects to mention that a certain WW Screen editor spent most of a rainy winter night on the NoPo industrial waterfront with his back to the camera as an extra in a house-party scene. This is obviously an oversight. There are some pretty great photos, though.

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