A Bird’s-Eye View of Ourselves in Mako Miyamoto’s Pictures
A Chorus of Ghosts I by Mako Miyamoto from Vein of Salt at Chefas Projects.
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The photographer Mako Miyamoto’s latest show, Vein of Salt, which opens this Friday at Chefas Projects (5–8pm June 13; through July 12), bills itself as presenting “new perspectives on somewhat familiar landscapes.” Yes, yes, that’s all par for the course. But this twist gets me: The aerial landscapes are supposed to reveal “hidden cartographies just beneath the surface of our perception.” It’s not a metaphor; the newfound clarity comes from an infrared camera, its heat-sensitive images showing what we can often feel or intuit, but can’t see with the naked eye. The most evocative images blush in baby pastels, pink and blue, or noxious, lurid neons, and, free of anything in the way of a grounding horizon line, roam excitingly into the ostensibly oxymoronic world of abstract photography.
As promised, Miyamoto’s pictures show you the natural world in a literal new light, a completely unrecognizable light. Instead of landscapes, they register as curious, daring, dangerous, or liberated compositions of color. This is thanks to the dramatic hues, but also to a relatively modern tradition of photos taken from the sky: Most of us know the earth is round and we’re all just ants down here, but mountains and oceans and islands and superhighways upset our understanding of the order of things when shot from so far away and so high above.
William Garnett is perhaps the biggest name in art photographs taken from an airplane. He got the idea flying in the US Army in the 1940s, and spent the next 50 years flying his own Cessna and establishing the form by making moody, shadow-cast abstract compositions of the American landscape and suburban sprawl. I imagine Miyamoto makes his photos with a drone, but they achieve a similar effect, forcing the viewer to question where they stand in relation to the earth, gazing unmoored into its unending patterns. “Suspended between the known and the newly perceived, the viewer is invited to wonder where the self is anchored,” Miyamoto says in the show notes, “prompting a search for our own coordinates.”
More Things to Do This Week
BOOKS Justin Hocking
7PM THU, JUNE 12 | POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS, FREE
Portland was the happy ending of Hocking’s 2014 memoir The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, which won an Oregon Book Award. He washed up here after a fraught three years wrestling with the New York publishing industry, with Moby-Dick and the waves at Far Rockaway Beach as refuge. Hocking, who teaches creative writing at PSU (and is one of my former professors), turns once again to nature in his second memoir, A Field Guide to the Subterranean, which starts all the way at the beginning. Growing up in mining-ravaged Western Colorado in the 1970s, he developed a fixation with literal and metaphorical undergrounds. Personal trauma to political movements to Dante, this book combines personal healing with environmental concerns. Or as the subtitle has it, “reclaiming the deep earth and our deepest selves.”
RODEO 8 Seconds Rodeo
7PM SUN, JUNE 15 | VETERANS MEMORIAL COLISEUM, $209
Kicking off Juneteenth celebrations, Portland journalist, photographer, and rodeo organizer Ivan McClellan’s 8 Seconds Rodeo, which celebrates Black rodeo culture, is back and bigger than ever. The rodeo is expanding its scope in Portland this year and also installing a second stop in Philadelphia in October, both of which plan to host 8,000 spectators. Bull riding, bareback bronco riding, barrel racing, and no doubt mutton bustin’ (the one where kids stay on the backs of sheep for as long as they can) are on the bill.
MUSIC A Notion, A Scream
7PM TUES, JUNE 17 | TABORSPACE, FREE
A Notion, A Scream is a newer community choir organized with the goal of, literally, “raising our voices against white supremacy culture and oppressions of any kind.” Titled Give Love, this show is a benefit concert for the Marie Equi Center, which provides health care services to the trans, queer, gender diverse, and intersex communities, and Rahab’s Sisters, an organization offering meals, clothes, and community to women, trans, and nonbinary folks experiencing poverty and houselessness. The chorus performs music by living composers, and particularly those affirming queer joy at this Pride Month show, which promises plenty of chances for audience participation.
Elsewhere…
- “It’s 1992, and two young Russian men are mid-worship of a Filet-O-Fish sandwich.” (Portland Mercury)
- One hundred years of the Alberta Abbey. (Oregon ArtsWatch)
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