Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Jaydra Johnson, Brittney Frantece, Blessing Greer Mathurin, and Quintessa Matranga pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Jay Heikes: Second Wave
Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR
January 24 – February 22, 2025
My friend Martha was shaking copper BBs inside stacked sieves when I entered Adams and Ollman. “Want to be in our band?” she asked. Everyone in there was fucking with the art because it was was meant to be played, I guessed. I picked up a copper rod with a golf ball glued on the end and banged it around inside some metal piping on the floor. Next to me and Martha, others plunked around on strips of metal attached to a hollow box or dragged pyrite across its surface, which was covered in some sort of hard, sandy gloop. Pretty much everything was painted black. In a rear room, windchimes could be jostled into performing a clanking, abbreviated tune.
“Experimental sound devices.” “Immersive installation.” I’m not accustomed to using art words, but whatever you wanted to call this collection of noisy stuff, I had to admit it was fun. Martha picked up a ceramic whistle shaped like a shoe and blew. Paintings on layers of soft screens served as acoustic mufflers, but they didn’t do a very good job. Cacophony is a good way to describe it.
At MoMA last month, a friend and I walked away from a too-perfect tapestry discussing the mastery required to play with a form and how much we delight in watching high-level makers make messes of their work: ruptured language, trick performances, the confidence it takes to tear down the edifice to which you’ve devoted your life and dance.
Take sound and make it ugly. Assemble instruments from crap you found on the street. Let people touch the art. Force them to. Play so well that you get them to play along.
Reflection: When was the last time you played with your art?
Personality Test, Jacob Winans, $5000, Letras: Noise Potluck / Casserole Party
Virtua Gallery (Lloyd Center Mall), Portland, OR
Tuesday, February 11, 6-9PM
The world needs oddballs. What would we do without people who rent space in an abandoned shopping mall to start an art gallery, or who organize events that mash together such strange companions as a noise show and casserole cookoff?
An ingenious group of Portland eccentrics have blessed us with a chance at this exact experience. There is a mystery cost to the event, but “IF YOU WANT TO PARTICIPATE IN THE CASSEROLE COOKOFF, BRING A CASSEROLE OR SIDE DISH /HOT DISH AND GET INTO THE SHOW FOR FREE!” Get your Pyrex out, everybody.
The world is becoming increasingly homogenized through globalization and the reign of, like, three billionaire oligarchs. This idea is cliched by now. But I think it needs to be said, over and over, so that we do not fall asleep to the hum of Chipotle’s lobby music.
As an art critic, I give a lot of grace to work that is strange yet unsuccessful. The casseroles might not be very good—someone’s nostalgic midwestern cream-of-mushroom mush, no doubt some diabolical vegan concoction—but I’d rather eat this shit than fill up on some bland, ad-copy version of dinner. Similarly, noise music can be a mess that’s hard to interact with and enjoy. Disquieting, uncomfortable experience is something we should all strive to incorporate more in our diets. Maybe it can help us fall in love again with the disorder of being human and fight with renewed vigor against the tyranny of a clean, corporate existence.
Reflection: How can discomfort inspire resistance?
Linda Austin: In Preparation for Disappearances to Come
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR
February 6 & 7 at 7:30 PM / February 8 at 2:00 PM & 7:30 PM
After revealing my penchant for difficult art, particularly performance, it was suggested that I get tickets to Linda Austin’s upcoming show at PICA. The faces that told me lit up. “She’s so weird,” they said. “You’ll love it.”
The program description is itself strange, referencing “cultural compost,” whatever that is, and “a machine to practice remembering and forgetting.” This bodes well for the strangeness of the performance, as do its accompaniments: an artist talk with a death doula and a free will-writing workshop, where “participants will draft, discuss, witness, and sign their own legally valid* [asterisk theirs] wills using a poetic template created by the artist.”
The trailer shows dancers sliding their bodies around on a carpet of clothing, then writhing inside piles of shirts and various bottoms. The garments undulate then fall away like petals. They are shed. The soundtrack is a pattery percussion under odd lyrics sung by crystalline voices that overlap in sweet—then challenging—chords.
In dance, the performer speaks through the swivel of wrist and knee. I watch closely, trying to locate a story. It’s like sex, watching a body to track what it’s saying, to speak its language without language, a purely carnal exchange, a tongue of gut and gesture.
Much of my life is dedicated to making meaning from a conflagration of confusing material, translating that to an audience. But then sometimes I break free from my compulsion for coherence—I can just experience, take something in without the need to decipher it, my world abandoned for a while to visit another place. I return empty handed but changed.
Reflection: How much can you enjoy what you don’t understand?
Brief Encounters: Queer Instant Photography
Carnation Contemporary, Portland OR
February 1 – February 28, 2025
Polaroids—whose birth democratized photography as much as 35mm point-and-shoots and later, our phones—are this group show’s primary concern. These relatively inexpensive, instant pictures freed the amateur photographer from the prying eyes of developing services and the labor of the darkroom, affording the maker more easeful control over content and audience. The most interesting art is often made extra-institutionally, and this collection of works, made possible by the wonders of instant film, is no exception.
These pictures feature, well, a lot of gay sex, transgressive imagery that wouldn’t make it into many museum exhibitions or blue chip galleries these days, where buttholes and feet pics are considered declassé. By inserting profane subjects into a formal gallery space via an informal medium, these artists buck this high art sensibility to publicize the private (and much-reviled) reality of queer intimacy.
Some of the show’s themes: the grid and its disruption, the polaroid as a preamble and not a conclusion, shame and its opposite, freedom, love, power, trash. Here you will see polaroids bedazzled with stick-on rhinestones or brushed with paint, manipulated in dozens of ways. On one wall, a series of sultry pictures disappear under their needlepoint copies. Over there, the white box becomes permeable, is destroyed and turned into an abstract collage. The one sculpture—a dildo-and-Polaroid mobile—spins jauntily in the corner. It’s a show of charming surprises, certainly not the same old thing. Some would call it unprofessional. I call it art.
Reflection: Can subversive art survive the institution?