Weekends just keep getting busier in Portland's art scene. Here are my 3 picks:


Samantha Wall, Amelia (2013)

Samantha Wall's Indivisible at Ampersand should be a winner. A few years ago I considered Samantha Wall to be one of the most fully realized artists to come straight out of a Portland MFA program and should go far nationally if she can avoid looking anything like Storm Tharp's work (it isn't necessary and her Robert Longo meets early chuck Close realism is inherently more spartan). A Joan Mitchell Fellowship this past Summer didn't hurt either and now she has been picked up by the Laura Russo Gallery (which has needed some new blood for quite some time). But before then Ampersand is having an exhibition with a limited edition artist book of 100, with 10 deluxe signed editions which come with a small drawing by the artist.

Indivisible | October 26 to November 30, 2013
Reception: October 26 from 6 to 9PM
Ampersand
2916 NE Alberta St., B



Helmet in the shape of Fukurokujuju's forehead at PAM

It is the 4th Friday of the month and that means the Portland Art Museum is free from 5-8PM. See the Samurai! exhibition... it isnt just sword porn as this very humorous helmet (a proto Homer Simpson?) can attest. Other shows like the very handsome (if a rather safe) Contemporary Northwest Art Awards and Robert Adams wont disappoint either. The Sherrie Levine show is one of the best shows of the year (it ends this weekend).

Portland Art Museum
1219 SW Park Avenue



Josiah McElheny, Models for an abstract body (after Trockel and Walther), 2012 © Josiah McElheny, courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

Portland is chok full of talks these days but the Reflective Dialogues series by Sandra Percival (Zena Zezza project) promises to be a "performative conversation" on the ideas and influences within Josiah McElheny's work, bringing together theory, scholarship and artists' practices in the space of the exhibition at the Lumber Room. The first one, "Modernism's Utopias & Artists as Agents" by Joyce Cheng and Marek Wieczorek should be an interesting counter point to this nice very academic look at McElheny's work.

The press release asks, "What does it mean for an artist in the twenty-first century consciously to invoke early twentieth-century modernism's aesthetic-political utopias? Cheng and Wieczorek will engage this question around the work of Josiah McElheny by complicating the history of modernism in terms of not one but various utopias. In addition to addressing questions of allegory and artistic agency, the two speakers will explore the link between the materiality of glass as a medium and the immateriality of the performative, both being important aspects of McElheny's work and of modernism's utopias.

Dr. Joyce Cheng is assistant professor of modern art at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. Dr. Marek Wieczorek is associate professor of Art History at the University of Washington, Seattle, specializing in modern and contemporary art. His publications include texts on De Stijl, Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, Gerhard Richter, the Situationist International, "bioart" and the question of abstraction from the contemporary perspective."

Talk: October 26, 3-5PM | Reception 5-6PM
lumber room
419 NW 9th Avenue