Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Fox Whitney, Alitzah Oros, Melika Sebihi, and Kaya Noteboom pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Necroarchivos de las Américas: An Unrelenting Search for Justice
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
June 15th, 2024 – December 8th, 2024
In this soul-quietting exhibition, curator Dr. Adriana Miramontes Olivas brings together a multi-medium archive of artists who denounced necropolitical forces in the Americas in their work, charting the development of state-sanctioned death from the 1960s into the present.
A silvery disc about the size of a hand-held mirror is positioned at face-height on a wall. Breath (1995), by Oscar Muñoz, is a welcomed moment of trespass between museum object and viewer. Its title is an instruction. The viewer is meant to breathe on the plate to activate its image. Heat and moisture collect on the surface to reveal a photo-print made with grease. The images are from obituaries and their relation to the artist is unknown. Breath, here, is transfigured from the figurative to the literal as an act of remembrance for the dead. But participation also reads as an implication. In the mirrored surface, one asks who is more culpable—the viewer who exhales the ghost image or the one who only sees themselves looking back?
Elsewhere, sixteen pairs of tables are upturned and stacked on one another, creating a path for viewers to walk through. Between the tables is a box of substrate where grass attempts to grow from underneath the slats toward air and light. Doris Salcedo’s Plegaria Muda (2008-2010) stuns with its quiet contemplation on the cruelty of hope. “Silent prayer” is a meditation on the disposability one encounters after leaving the Global South for the Global North. It is a moment to honor life courses constructed by mitigating forces of premature death.
Together, Muñoz and Salcedo’s minimal and participatory forms withhold graphic representations of the violence at the heart of their protest to distill the preciousness and fragility of life that is at stake.
Reflection: What does your breath remember?
Sara Rahmanian: Maybe Tomorrow
ILY2, Portland, OR
November 23rd, 2024 – February 8th, 2025
Sara Rahmanian’s paintings tinker on the edge of representation and abstraction. Naan (2024) depicts a piece of charred bread on a plate, blue tiles, and crossed legs under a table; these are barely perceptible amidst a sundowned tree line on the periphery. The most concrete representations are in the Roommate series, a study of a hair-clip at different times throughout the day. As light passes over from 6:30 am to 5:30 pm, it becomes clear that some times of day are more abstract than others. Take for example, Roommate at 11:30 AM (2024), in which the corner of canvas disappears under the clip’s spiny teeth and several teeth also appear to be missing.
Not just objects but parts of people occupy many of the canvases; the outline of a portrait obscured in the shadow of another person, a direct gaze looking out through a wash of blue, and many sets of black bushy eyelashes—all detached from the context of a solid body. The effect of this dissolution is humorous though not trite, tinged with the absurd thoughts arrived at in a state of boredom or isolation imposed by forces outside an individual’s control. Through repetition and decisive subtractions, Rahmanian seems less interested in processes of self-actualization and more interested in negation, how the self dissipates in a blur and can be cut away.
Reflection: At what times of day do you feel most abstract?