Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Mariah Green, Vanessa Perez Winder, Jas Keimig, and Sam Wrigglesworth pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Greased
Well Well Projects, Portland, OR
August 5 to August 27
By the time this Cliff Notes reaches your inbox you have only one weekend left to see Greased by Tyler Stoll at Well Well Projects. In his first solo exhibition in Portland, Stoll (and friends) interrogate hyper-heteromasculinity found in the 1978 film Grease through protest, performance, film, writing, and a soggy cardboard cutout of John Travolta. This exhibition is part of Stoll’s longer-term project and manifesto titled the future is flaccid, in which he advocates for flaccidity not as a lack—as in a binary between potent vs impotent—but as a material condition containing its own emancipatory qualities to undermine patriarchal domination.
Reflection: What do you lose in the process of concealing, repressing, or rejecting your own vulnerabilities?
The Rose
lumber room, Portland, OR
July 29 to October 28
The Rose presents a survey of forty-four artists offering broad interpretations of collage as feminist strategy. The form of a rose evokes the yonic form, yes, but for me it also evokes circular gatherings prominent in spirituality and activism. Particularly consciousness-raising gatherings prominent in feminist movements—wherein individual issues previously misunderstood as solely personal help articulate a larger collective condition.
Sculptural forms are present through Olivia Reavey’s vertebrae formed in part from a self-portrait and Joiri Minaya’s suspended figure cut-outs. Layering in-camera is shown through Tarrah Kajnak’s cyanotypes and Janice Guy’s layering of her own hand as a portal in-frame. Slightly more traditional methods are tenderly demonstrated in AK Jenkins’s collages of Robert Giard’s photographic portraits of gay and lesbian writers. I’m barely scratching the surface here, go take a look for yourself.
Reflection: What barriers or lessons appear in your life, again and again? Is there room for cutting, purging, ripping apart, or re-contextualizing—can this be a collective effort?