Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Fox Whitney, Alitzah Oros, Melika Sebihi, and Kaya Noteboom pick the most exciting art events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Laura Burke: The Unseelie Court and Lindsey Cuenca Walker: Simple Crumb
September 27 to October 26, 2024
CHEFAS PROJECTS, Portland, OR
Laura Burke’s Unseelie Court wades into a mystical realm that runs parallel—and occasionally into—ours. Burke studies its fae inhabitants who work mischief on humans from the other side. Consisting of oil and acrylic paintings, as well as drawings in colored pencil, Burke exhibits flower-like “gremlins” in personal environments.
The paintings capture them in proper scale mingling with commonplace bouquets on kitchen countertops. However, scale and place are manipulated in the drawings. Almost filling the frame, the gremlin anatomy materializes from the ether in great detail: twisted joints, slender feet, and effervescent skin. Spaces where paper shows through are not blank at all but the material human eyes cannot see. Rather than blame gremlins for tampering with this world, Unseelie Court feels more like a warning to watch your step.
On the other side of Chefas Projects are new still lifes by Lindsey Cuenca Walker in Simple Crumb. The paintings seem almost computational in their systematic subtraction of details. Each composition is a fuzzy blown out rendition of everyday minutia. A top view of a table setting demonstrates how Walker makes a shadow and its corollary object hold equal visual weight. As the texture and dimension of everyday objects evaporates, their shape and color are exaggerated right up to the point of obscurity.
Both shows, Simple Crumb and The Unseelie Court, seem to engage a process of meaningful defamiliarization with the personal and domestic.
Reflection: What can you see clearer when you squint your eyes?
Carson Ellis: One Day in January
September 14 to October 19, 2024
nationale, Portland, OR
In velvety gouache, Carson Ellis’s paintings depict contents of a diary Ellis kept over twenty years ago. Excerpts from the diary, along with the paintings, have been compiled into the book, One Week in January.
Ten years ago I read Wildwood—the young-adult series illustrated by Ellis and written by Ellis’ husband Colin Melloy—to my sister. We are reading another story together now that I am 25 and my sister is 15. My mother is 45, but was 25 in Portland once. She is transported to that time by a playful wrestling scene on a floor-mattress littered with emerald Heinekens and another of an especially “Portland-y” looking bar-crowd. Though they capture an age my sister hasn’t lived yet, the hand that embellished so much of her childhood has created pictures she can grow into. I try to not identify with what I see, to compare Ellis’s version of being 25 in Portland to the one I’m living in. Instead I take in how it might feel to illustrate one’s friends and whereabouts decades later. My heart aches looking at three dead-on portraits of different faces, and again at a scene of two silhouetted figures climbing a firescape at twilight, seemingly guided by the glowing ends of their cigarettes. In the decades between life and painting, some people and places have been lost irretrievably. Some love is enduring. All of it changes, mostly in predictable ways, but it’s emergently painful nonetheless.
I’m not uniformly interested in everyone’s everyday lives. I do consider the almost universal impulse to document daily details as one of the profoundly endearing qualities of humankind. I am thankful for Ellis’s contribution. It has returned me to the quotidian, more attentive and grateful. Why I felt I had to leave it, I don’t know.
Reflection: What are the stories you’ve grown up with and grown into?
Vaginal Davis and ektor garcia: There’s Something About Maria
September 20 to October 19, 2024
Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR
There’s something daunting, something sacrosanct about Vaginal Davis and ektor garcia’s, There’s Something About Maria. I confess, I haven’t been in person yet. I’m working up the courage.
Hanging throughout the reddish pink gallery walls are small portraits, each painted by Davis with makeup on paper previously used for keeping notes. These are still legible. They are portraits of women named Mary. Mary Wollencroft. Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar. Mary Stuart Queen of Scots. Mary Shelley. Marie Laveux. There are others.
Hanging around them are garcia’s floral crocheted nets of copper, wool, and ceramic. The labor of treating copper as a fiber seems impossible to me until I remember copper sponges have been used for cleaning homes for centuries. Maybe this labor is impossible and commonplace. Elsewhere, banners of black crochet lace hang and I’m reminded of my lola’s mourning clothes which have come in and out of rotation this year. She is Maria (Maria Ellena) too.
If I have a daughter, this will likely be her name.
Already, there is too much to say. Some Mary’s are prayed to more than others. When one Maria is said, you say all the others. The name indexes a holy mother who for many today is lost to secularization. In honoring all its invocations and attributions, the name Mary or Maria becomes a point of access to another kind of worship, one that imagines grocery lists as sacred texts and returns us to the Mary’s we know.
Reflection: What spaces are sacred to you?