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.
Agnès Varda Film Festival
Clinton Street Theater, Portland, OR
March 6–March 9, 2025
On a recent snowy weekend, I watched Agnès Varda’s documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) as research for a piece I’m working on about Glean, Portland’s artist residency at the dump. The film is about, well, gleaners—these ones scour France’s rural backroads and cosmopolitan thoroughfares for usable remnants, mostly food, but also household appliances, art supplies, and other materials of daily living.
What struck me most about the film was its effortless juxtaposition of trash-rummaging and fine art. Besides women in rubber boots stooped to gather heart-shaped potatoes after the harvest, Varda visits a few living artist-gleaners and several famous paintings—The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet and The Gleaner by Jules Breton are given significant art-critical treatment.
It is a film of unabashed imperfection. Its crown jewel is “The Dance of the Lens Cap,” a minute or three of throwaway footage caught by accident, overdubbed with upbeat jazz and Varda’s intelligent, charming narration. The film is mostly interviews with gleaners themselves, but Varda makes appearances in such reflective interludes, where she discusses film as self-portrait along with other philosophical concerns.
As part of their Women in Film series this month, the beloved Clinton Street Theater will show The Gleaners and I in addition to five other films by the great French auteur. (The whole festival is advertised with an old-fashioned telephone-pole poster campaign, which Varda would undoubtedly love). If garbage isn’t your thing, check out the other titles. You might like La Pointe Courte, a “graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks,” or Jacquot of Nantes,
“Varda’s tender evocation of the childhood of her husband, Jacques Demy—a dream project that she realized for him when he became too ill to direct it himself.”
Reflection: Which remnants are worth holding onto?
Club Alive! Organized by Kye Alive
Kelly’s Olympian, Portland, OR
March 11
This month, I hope to finally catch Club Alive!, a recurring variety show akin to Dynasty Handbag’s Weirdo Night, if you’ve ever attended one of those, but more DIY. The closest local approximation is something like Sinferno, but I hesitate to make the comparison at all. Club Alive! is less vaudeville revue and more communal performance art-meets-talent show, decidedly non-traditional and more Gen Z gay. All of this is non-derogatory.
The show’s subtitle bills it as “a multidisciplinary performance to make you feel alive.” Browsing Club Alive! posts on the artist-organizer Kye Alive’s Instagram page, I see experimental sound works, complete with projections of moving waves to match the noise. There are dancers, singers, live interviews, small group movement performances, elaborate costumes, a lone rapper, microphones, flashing lights, and a chick playing an electric guitar after she injects herself with what I presume to be estrogen.
Through it all, the house band Special Permission (Kye Alive and local musician Wolfgang Black) composes electronic arrangements. During one past performance, the duo have pantyhose over their heads. The ends are tied together. The knot dangles and bounces between their faces as they press buttons and tap things with plastic-tipped drumsticks. There is also always a DJ, with “micro raves” before and after the lineup. Based on past show flyers, I think the theme of this one is Surprise! I have no doubt the show will live up to its name.
Reflection: When was the last time you were truly surprised?
Christina Martin: hearts and sharp points
Never Coffee Lab, Portland, OR
February 24, 2025 to April 30, 2025
I didn’t expect to meditate so long on fences, but here I am. The symbol—so obvious, so passive and elementary—lost its luster for me sometime between my first visit to a prison in 2007 and the migrant caravan hysteria of 2018. But after spending some time with Christina Martin’s modest series of monotype prints, I have to conclude that sometimes familiar symbols are best.
Gates, fences, walls: these features stall entry and bind space, they necessitate permission for incursion. They say halt, who goes there? Their logical companion is either a program of violent exclusion or its opposite—the detention of captors who’d rather be anywhere but inside. Fences can be cruel.
But if the viewer imagines herself at home behind the swinging gate, the experience is entirely different. Opulent metal or concrete buffers like the ones in these prints beautify the border between self and not-self, and perhaps signify something of lineage or likes.
It’s this paradox of the fence that Martin explores through these print-paintings. Drawn from memory, the artist’s riffs on this motif symbolize “the borders, boundaries, and binaries” evoked by the wrought-iron gates and breeze blocks of Mexican architecture. They are as much about nostalgia and identification as the sharper points of separation.
For me, Martin’s works evoke the softer side of fencing. In the saturated teals and orange-pinks of the Southwest desert, with design elements reminiscent of papel picado, these works seethe with cultural memory. Their fences define home. They keep safe. Good fences make good neighbors, so the saying goes.
When You Look Up presents a fire escape seen from below, its base buttressed by triangles. This is the architecture of disaster but also of life-saving escape. It’s there, in the decorative twists of the horizontal bars that I finally see the titular hearts.
Reflection: What are your fences? What are they doing for you?