Rose McCormick

The final installment in NAAU's Couture series opens this weekend. Rose McCormick's Grande Ronde is an "art environment." She writes: "The achievement of this work is in it's conception, the finished show a fossil of the experience of discovery. It may be that viewing it is not enough, it may be that you have to have made it as well. But what it strives to do is offer the blueprint for you to create your own experience." The opening reception features lemon bars and lavender iced tea.

Opening reception • 12-3pm • August 30
New American Art Union • 922 SE Ankeny • 503.231.8294

It is interesting that Rose is distancing herself from painting... in past shows she turned the act of painting into an installation etc... and over the years Ive been most interested in her painted sculptural pieces. I remember her old studio on Burnside across from big pink... she would have these painted pallets etc. hanging out the windows. The dissonance between that aesthetic and big pink was really compelling.

This looks like a show packed with surprises... as well as southern hospitality.... as long as I don't hear any disconcerting dueling banjos "a play'ng" it sounds like a really interesting cap on the series. Overall, the series has worked... and I did an short analytical overview of the previous couture shows in my Ty Ennis review two weeks ago.

I should also point out that top New York galleries typically give out similar stipends (often much larger than Couture's 8k) to more experimental less commercial shows. The special thing here is that the gallery created a series and devoted the gallery space to 10 consecutive shows. In New York's hyper competitive environment galleries have to do more critically interesting shows occasionally just to claim space on the cultural map there and its very much a for profit move. In Portland Brown has done something similar but its more like cloud seeding... pushing art viewers harder as patrons, critics, curators and as fellow artists.

The big question is how Ruth Ann Brown's next move plays out... Couture is a tough act to follow. That said, in art it's how one follows up and through that often determines the effectiveness of previous actions.