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.
Dream Juice
Paragon Arts Gallery, Portland, OR
March 7th – April 12th, 2025
Spring break began for me at 3:30 PM on Friday, March 21st (I teach high school English), and the first thing I did was walk over to the Paragon Gallery to see their current dream themed group exhibition. I dream of Spring Break, I thought upon entering the gallery, I dream of sleeping for a week. The show was a fantastic prelude to my slumber.
The artists in Dream Juice dream of materials: silks and scrims, potter’s clay, ribbon, paper, lightbulbs, light, vellum, cotton, sugar and flour. In one darkened room of the gallery, a video projection of a bed, bedside table, and bedroom window shines like dawn through a length of silk the size of a bedroom window. The silk is pinned up as if over a window. This is how the dreamscape builds via layers of infinite self-reference, and one loses herself inside it.
Everything keeps repeating. Two copies of an artbook called Hell Realm. A series of collage paintings that share a textural language. Pillows appear twice. One set is overstuffed pima cotton. The images printed on them are of sleepers sleeping, again repeating. Across the room, a pair of crocheted throw pillows on a bench read “Sex Dream” and “Stress Dream.” I dream of these things, too, don’t you? All this iteration can’t be an accident. I wonder if it’s related to the phenomenon of dreaming something over and over until it comes true, until the obsession is resolved.
At this juncture in the show, some of its special events, each hosted by its artist-participants, have already passed, alas. March included a sound bath, a one-night performance, a dj and dance set, and the live scoring of an episode of Twin Peaks. But a dream drawing group on April 3rd and the closing event on April 11th can still be enjoyed, along with generous open gallery hours Wednesday – Saturday each week.
This is the kind of group show I dream of. It’s interactive, inventive, brisk, and ironically awake.
Reflection: What have you dreamt of lately?
Gather:Make:Shelter & Mullowney Printing Co: Impressions From The Collective
SATOR projects, Portland, OR
Gather:Make:Shelter, Portland, OR
April 6 -May 31, 2025
Gather:Make:Shelter, a local organization that connects people living in poverty or without housing to creative opportunities, teamed up with Mullowney Printing Co. this past year to offer a printmaking intensive for its participants. It’s time for the culminating exhibition.
The work runs the gamut from single-color block prints to abstract painterly pressings. One features an overtly political slogan (You can destroy my home but you can’t sweep poverty), riffing on the medium’s lineage in organizing struggles while experimenting with a mash-up of several popular typefaces. The result is part poor people pride flag, part ransom note. Other prints appropriate geometry, the figure, and street art, among other traditions and iconography. I’m particularly partial to a highly detailed, scratchy etching of a tower falling, a take on the tarot card, I presume. That one is in black.
Printmaking primarily involves the manipulation of positive and negative space. I’ve always found that tension interesting: what gets included and what is left out, how that changes the contours and, therefore, the mood and the meaning of the art object. Often, I’m inclined to enjoy the space around something, that imaginative territory where I can fill in whatever the fuck I want. Perhaps it’s my general conflict with reality that pushes me toward the outside. I don’t want what’s here; I want what I can invent. “I want to be god” is one way of saying it, I guess. Here is a rare show that plays its own god, granting some positive space to a group of makers who are otherwise left out in the cold.
Reflection: Artists are all around us—can you see them?
Hannah Thiess: Qualia
Blackfish Gallery, Portland, OR
April 2 – 27, 2025
Early on in my self-directed art education, I saw Tschabalala Self’s take on portrait paintings—the ones made not from paint but sewn fabric—and thought, wow and duh, the latter about my own dullness. Before encountering Self’s portrait I’d believed implicitly that fabric was for quilts or soft sculptures and paint was for painting on canvas. No more. Later, I made my first body of work by affixing collages onto porcelain tiles in lieu of a more conventional canvas or paper backing. Artist Hannah Thiess’ Qualia at Blackfish gallery creates collage assemblages that, similarly to Self’s work, make me want to try something new.
The world of this work is a complex ecology, a system of cohabitant organisms, hands and feathers, ink spills, light bursts, and nets. One little guy that lives inside this landscape is a painted zig-zag flattened through scanning then recontextualized as a print on clear film. This is overlaid atop a raw-edged, marbled cotton rag paper. A similar smear amends a photo of a sinking swimmer. Every square inch seems to contain a new pattern or material. Things are sewn with thread and stapled with metal, even hung on wooden pegs, not just glued or taped. Gauze evokes a funeral shroud or mummy, either way a wound dressing. I wonder what hurts, who died.
So many rich rewards from looking at these pieces, each a study in layer and texture. Squareness complements organic tears, and what’s clear like glass abuts what stops the eye from getting through. A digitized textile texture glitches against itself; it’s like seeing a swatch of denim magnified 1000x on a computer, then printed atop a pool of liquid. In another work, the shape of a pocket holding photo-mementos is sewn seemingly onto the wall. Blue and yellow splash around amid the blackwhitegray. All this variety creates pleasurable tension. The natural and the manufactured duel. Thiess wins.
Reflection: What kinds of beauty can chaos and rule-breaking create?
Dinh Q. Lê: A Survey 1995 – 2023
Elizabeth Leach, Portland, OR
March 5 – April 26, 2025
Dinh Q. Lê was fascinated by the image. In what would become the defining form of his oeuvre, he put pictures to work via photo-weavings. To make them, Lê printed images of subjects such as Khmer Rouge prisoners, opulent temples, Hollywood war films, angels, American brand logos, and relics of the Vietnam War. Employing a technique that he learned from his aunt, he and a team of assistants (the pieces are not diminutive) then cut the images into strips and wove them into intricate, braided works that juxtapose two versions of reality. It feels reductive to say Lê saw the world in two ways: one Eastern, one Western, because he often occupied the uncomfortable third terrain in between and pushed viewers to consider similar extra-places.
No wonder a 2D photograph rarely sufficed.
The weavings blended images that resisted quick consumption. Khmer Rouge murder victim + religious statue, angel + jail, blockbuster film + rainbow gradient + renown self-immolator Thích Quảng Đức. His “Monuments and Memorials” series mostly combined mugshots of the brutal Khmer regime’s casualties with gorgeous religious relics and architecture. Regarding these photo-weavings, the artist said: “I envision these two extremes, what we are capable of,” invoking the image’s power to connect with people like a ball to a bat.
A few reviews of this show have already appeared on the Oregon art beat, but there’s a connection that hasn’t yet been made that I can’t get out of my mind. It’s Palestine. I’m not yet forty, but I have lived to witness many wars-for-oil or hegemony, ethnic cleansings—some of them blooming into full-blown genocides—and terrific brawls over dozens of contested territories. When I was a child, I watched them on TV and now I watch them on my phone, the images spinning eternally, a relentless plaintive march. Imperialist war and blood-hungry regimes deeply affected Lê, his family, his work, and his home country. They affect me, too, though in a very different way. This seems like an appropriate moment to remark, idiotically, that war persists. And yet, so does art.
Reflection: How can art help us hold reality?