Besides Glen Fogel's show + the unveiling of PICA's new space (more later today) Here are my picks for the weekend:



Amy Berstein in progress at Worksound

On Saturday at Worksound for its Perceptual Control (a five artist/writer/curator residency and in process exhibit), PORT's own Warhol Art Writing award winner Amy Bernstein will talk about ''Form and Absence" and Emily Nachison will discuss her process which draws on anthropology, geology, and the decorative arts. In the past 9 months or so Bernstein has become one of the most watched painters in Portland. Here's the PR:

"'Speech is the replacement of a presence by an absence and the pursuit, through presences ever more fragile, of an absence ever more all sufficing.'- Maurice Blanchot

Amy Bernstein will discuss the ideas surrounding form as language. Culled from a history of philosophy and art theory, Bernstein will support her ideas through citing examples of the semantics of artistic choices. Form as signifier and as catalyst are the bases of all language, yet the creation of formal language in a contemporary context and within specific cultures becomes culture itself. Are these ideas cannibalistic, self propagating, or revolutionary? What freedoms do we embody in making art that will push culture forward? How free is this freedom? The answer is in the making.

Organic/Synthetic is the topic of Emily Nachison's talk. She discusses her making process and influences. Drawing from anthropology, geology, and the decorative arts, Nachison’s sculptures and installations are a hybrid of synthetic and natural accumulation. Mythology and New-Age idealism become starting points for an investigation into the cultural creation of landscape. Her process mimics organic growth and geological sediment, resulting in experiential installations using a variety of materials including glass, wood, cardboard, and foam.


Artist Talks | Saturday April 14 7-10PM
Worksound | 820 SE Alder Portland OR.
Perceptual Control | Residency/Exhibition | February 3rd through May 31 2012

Michael Reinsch's "AS-IS"

Also, on Saturday PLACE presents, 34 Years of Whiteness: Race & Ethnicity in the Work of Julie Perini and AS-IS with Michael Reinsch. Here's the spiel:

"'I have been creating white videos and white films for over fifteen years and I never even realized it. During that entire time, I thought I was just making art. I thought of my works as formal explorations, even as social interventions… Over and over, however, I also have been constructing images of whiteness based on my own experience as a white person living the United States today. Recently I have begun to wonder how this works. This new, exploratory lecture is the beginning of a longer-term investigation into whiteness, white privilege, racism, and racial identity.'

Michael Reinsch's installation examined the relationship of commerce, materiality, and performance. Reinsch made art on demand creating at the rate of $5 per minute and when not activated as a piece he would keep to himself not interacting with the attendees. He will be discussing intention, process, and the relationship of finance in performance/installation."


PLACE | Pioneer Place Mall atrium building 3rd floor
Saturday April 14th | 4:00 PM



Joe Macca from his show at NAAU

Joe Macca having a Two Man show with himself at the Art Gym isn't a surprise, it is the the fact that the Art Gym is attempting this at all. As an artist/personality Joe Macca is both incredibly shy and aggressive with zen like abstractions on one side of his schizophrenic oeuvre and hyper-competitive /self-image positioning work on the other. It has never been clear which body of work is better, though his obsession with me (w'eve made cookies together in a video) indicates he has incredibly poor taste and cooking skills in stark contrast to his formal abstraction skills... the boy is fire hazard in the kitchen! I suspect I'm just the kind of older brother he always wanted to have (I play better tennis and rock so much harder) so we'll see if I give him a wedgie at the opening? Props to curator Terry Hopkins for tackling something with a little attitude/inscrutableness here, it is likely not your usual soft edged form of off white academic conceptualism the Art Gym often presents. Here's the PR:

"Many artists work in several veins, often distinguished by medium—painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture—and sometimes by subject matter. What has puzzled me about Joe Macca’s output is that he works in ways that are polar opposites—hot/cold, perfect/messy, slow/fast, meditative/mad. This is what led me to propose the exhibition Joe Macca: Two Man Show.

Macca creates paintings that are carefully planned and perfectly executed abstractions that respond to the natural world or, as the artist puts it, that express the "literal and symbolic, ephemeral and transient." In contrast to the pulsating calm or dark interiority of those paintings, the postcards and studio flotsam run the gamut from rude and crass jabs at his fellow artists to mockingly self-aggrandizing promotions of Macca the artist, Macca the man.

Accompanying Joe Macca: Two Man Show is the P.O.’d Postcard Show, a small exhibition of postcards and other correspondence by Mack McFarland and Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen. Over the years, I have received many interesting postcards, painted envelopes and objects through the mail. For the P.O.’d Postcard show I was looking for mailed art that commented on society or the artworld or both. McFarland’s Ten-foot-pole drawings of politicians and policy makers that he presumably would not touch with a ten-foot-pole fit the bill, as did Gray and Wilson Paulsen’s series of mailed posters commenting wryly on contemporary art practice."


Joe Macca: | Two Man Show | The Art Gym | Marylhurst University
BP John Administration Building
17600 Pacific Highway (Hwy 43), Marylhurst, OR |Phone: 503.699.6243