6 Art Gallery and Museum Shows to See in Portland This Summer
Vacuum Chamber by Antonia Kuo from Subcycle at Adams and Ollman.
Portland’s galleries and museums look like mirrors this summer. Shiny things, reflective things, and several inspiringly inventive approaches to photography—with and without the use of cameras—make a convincing case that it’s not just personae and digital doubles out there. Though it grows easier by the day to forget that real, complicated, beautiful people do in fact exist! Among these upcoming shows are a land-focused installation about not being so self-centered, and another looking closely at the difference between creating versus capturing a photo. Themes of recording life continue in a show at ILY2 about the internet’s weird transmogrifying digestion of everything the world has ever known. Elsewhere, the Lumber Room has collected works by nearly 30 feminist artists to watch how their ideas bounce off of and change one another. Fifty years of Mariette Pathy Allen’s portraits of trans and gender-nonconforming people hang at Blue Sky, the city’s primary photography gallery. And next door, the Oregon Jewish Museum is mounting an exhibition cataloging Eugene’s long history of lesbian activism. In short, there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself, or at least something life-affirming, in the city’s various white cubes over the next few months.
Ben Buswell
Thru June 8 | Oregon Contemporary
Buswell’s installation, This Land, fills most of Oregon Contemporary’s gallery. A landscape of glossed metal bevels, reflective but angled to prevent the viewer from glimpsing their own face, covers the floor. It brings to mind themes of geographic identity and land ownership in the context of modern vanity. Accompanying photos are blurred, too: more landscapes, but this time artfully overlaid with demographic data points—another statement of seeing and not seeing and the fraught nature of letting an image or record stand in for a person.
Antonia Kuo
May 17–June 14 | Adams and Ollman
Whereas Buswell’s work conjures its own world, Antonia Kuo’s show Subcycle looks at how such created worlds come to be. Do you “take” or “make” a photo? Kuo, who’s based in New York, makes “photochemical paintings” with light-sensitive paper and replicates industrial mechanisms—turbines, chevrons, pipes—in sculpture. Thematically, these recordings, as it were, connect industry to biology. A concurrent show at Chapter New York, Milk of the Earth, compares motherhood and mining. Subcycle, which is her first solo show on the West Coast, borrows the industrial term for a small process occurring within a larger system, like a child growing inside a mother.
Morgan Buck
Thru June 21 | ILY2
Buck is similarly interested in found images, though his come from the hyper-online world. Love, Light and the Thrill of Imminent Distraction, his first solo show with ILY2, continues an ongoing taxonomy of everything gross, funny, and profound online. Rendered on large-scale canvas with the less-than-glamorous artistic medium of airbrush painting, these AI-looking collages usually bear overlaid text styled like subtitles. Essentially memes, their signature photorealistic blur gives the feeling of something you vaguely remember scrolling past last night: A Beanie Baby, tag on its ear, with an evil grin; a goth holding a small dog wearing a flowy pompadour in a rainbow of pastel hues (It’s colorful, and not everything’s like just black).
Chorus
Thru July 19 | Lumber Room
Overwhelm also hangs above Chorus, an archival show with a feminist slant around the corner at the Lumber Room. The gallery’s shows often draw from owner Sarah Miller Meigs’s collection—a heavy list of modern artists that makes the space feel, in a nice way, more like a museum than gallery. Senga Nengudi, Ana Mendieta, Rebecca Warren, and two dozen others all sing at once in Chorus. To the title’s point, there’s a different kind of power in that. One piece, a collaged swirl of nude women by Justine Kurland, from her SCUMB series, reclaims each image from the male photographer who took it—I might call these images “taken” rather than “made.”
Mariette Pathy Allen
June 5–28 | Blue Sky Gallery
While this is the most straightforward photography exhibit of this bunch, Mariette Pathy Allen’s pictures, interviews, and writings use classic forms to communicate the complexities of trans identity. Allen devoted her career to representing transgender, genderfluid, and gender variant communities through portraits she made traveling the world. Some 50 years in, Breaking Boundaries, a show drawing from her expansive body of work, is landing at Blue Sky in June. This exhibition starts with her pioneering first book, from 1989, Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them, and runs through projects made in the following years throughout the US, Thailand, Myanmar, and Cuba.
Outliers and Outlaws
June 8–Oct 26 | Oregon Jewish Museum
Another documentary show, Outliers and Outlaws is an exhibition made up of the Eugene Lesbian Oral History Project, an archive of the hippie town’s era as a so-called “lesbian mecca” between the 1960s and 1990s. There was a significant Jewish contingent to this community, which included the “Balabustas,” a group who organized a 1992 Freedom Seder in protest of antigay Oregon ballot measure 9. The project includes a physical and publicly accessible digital archive of interviews, photos, and objects as well as a documentary film. This show will house books from the famous Mother Kali’s Bookstore, protest yard signs, political buttons, as well as photos and narrative wall texts.
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