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.
I Know This Place By Heart: Ahnika Wood and Karina Rovira
Stelo Arts, Portland, OR
January 11 – February 22, 2025
In one room, cyanotypes printed on sheets of gossamer silk are strung up to the walls. This imaging process, involving an iron salt solution and light, produces photographs in tones of Prussian blue. It’s an old way to make a photo. One that I’ve always imbued with a melancholy romanticism, whether that association is justified or not. These particular photographs are self-portraits. Not of one self but two. The artists, Ahnika Wood and Karina Rovira, are both in frame, each taking part in photo direction. Their softly contorted bodies orbit each other in close proximity. They press into each other, chest to chest, then come apart. I keep looking for Rovira’s eyes. They cradle wells of blue as they turn sidelong and away. This specific blue is negotiated by the blue shadows that deepen in folds of drapery. I try to read what transpired between the blue.
As a facet of their suspension there’s enough space to walk behind and examine how light passes through some of them. The light from behind washes the image out. This reverse view plays a slight ocular trick. The positions of the artists switch sides like a mirror. The change is just enough to trouble whatever dynamic was established between them in the front-view. Every panel finds them in new orientations to each other. A fixed dynamic is never reached. These possible configurations are opened up further to spectators who have an opportunity to direct Wood and Rovira. Set-up in a dark corner of the gallery is an old-school projector with moveable transparencies featuring photos from the artists’ archives. I like the black and white images: portraits of the artists, flowing fabric in motion, netting, handwriting. I spent a long time arranging the transparencies. Another person appeared to take their turn before I could find one arrangement that explains a relationship.
Reflection: Who would you allow to direct you and why?
Echoes of Passage: Jia Jia and Melanie Tsang
Well Well Projects, Portland, OR
January 4 – January 26, 2025
A goodbye mostly consists of trying to leave. The intensity of leaving is, of course, always measured against the impossible strain required to stay. There are several goodbyes in Echoes of Passage, particularly in Melanie Tsang’s contribution. Tsang is interested in the language of departure attuned to the various geopolitical and existential forces that drive one to bow out quietly and flee.
Successive rectangular metal pans form a grid on the floor. There’s space between them for people to walk through, kneel, and inspect. The silver pans hold a shallow bath of clear liquid. Floating in each one, a sheet of transparent film with words and numbers printed on them. A lot of the language is explicitly bureaucratic and technical (“Department of Justice,” “date issued”) except for words like “arrival,” “approval,” and “comply,” which leave room for other associations. These words are harvested from immigration documents, evidencing the form and craft of state literature. It’s an art of transferring distance, objectivity, and stasis to life in a state of intense flux and fragility. The blank space on the page can be read many ways. Light refracts in the water and bubbles assemble under the clear plastic. Possibly the unspoken emotional life left off of immigration forms.
A poem, broken up into a framed series in the far hallway, depicts a conversation. Someone is saying goodbye. For reasons unknown but related to pain, someone must go. This goodbye is shaky. I can sense their shared exhaustion (it’s been a long time coming, I think). It takes place in the moment before departure, the moment of reprieve, release, togetherness before the separation to come. Saying goodbye is an art form. I don’t know what I mean by this but it’s what I think while reading the poem. Saying goodbye is a heroic act or a miracle. It’s the right thing to do with microscopic margins of error. Real goodbyes are rare. Ghosting doesn’t count. Forgetting doesn’t either. Most goodbyes are not successful.
Reflection: Why didn’t you say goodbye when you needed to?
As a parting note, I want to plug my favorite artist in Portland, Nick Norman, who has worked in two shows later this month. I’m told his contribution to Mug, on view at Lowell Shop gallery, a green and yellow tiled snake creature, will be completely nonfunctional. His nonfunctional mug will be in good company with usable mugs by painter Sheila Laufer, and fellow ceramicist, Eunice Luk. And though I’m less familiar with the other artists in Leave the Porchlight at Hide and Seek Gallery, I anticipate it’ll be an amusing trifecta. Of all the art I saw and enjoyed this year, many made me feel things but only Norman’s made me happy.