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
Holden Head: A Day Goes By
Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR
April 19 – May 17, 2025
I dislike most art that appropriates pop culture iconography, likewise art that deals in nostalgia too directly. By extension, I am sick to death of art made from plushies, but the ones that appear in this series get a pass from me. Dull pigments and joint compounds encrust the fur of the stacked, stuffed creatures, rendering them nearly unrecognizable, each sculpture a horrifying totem. A carmine red and silver one is called Chthonic Bosom. Chthonic—I had to Google that one. It means “of the underworld.” Indeed. Murk, a sister piece, features more fucked up plushies. These ones are painted black. They look like what’s left when a snake firework is done dancing its lazy dance.
There is something hellish about these sculptures with their disquieting shapes and sinister colors. Some of them even move and make sounds. A stick spins and boings some springy door stops as it makes its crazed loop around a board. There is a disembodied ponytail called Swish that swishes, a hand-painted ceramic belt called Whipped. It’s pretty bawdy to boing and belt at strangers like that, not to mention the fact that all this stuff is haunted. Then again, the work is puckish, not demonic. Rather than torture, it’s meant to tease—light with a little gravity.
Reflection: What is the difference between heaven and hell?
Crescendo: Group Show
Elbow Room, Portland, OR
April 26 – May 24, 2025
The show on view at Elbow Room deals with admiration and idolatry. The work represents musicians or instruments that have ostensibly obsessed the artists. Ron Grimes embroidered a denim cap inspired by Mariah Carey. Jonathan Velazquez crafted a saxophone using lots of blue and black tape. A drawing of Akon is there, along with Aerosmith, the Ramones, Fleetwood Mac, and Cher.
“The thread is that these represent different ways of thinking about music—how we internalize and then reflect it,” the curator told me. Music is universal, he said, but it’s cool to see how each of these artists expresses their personalized experience.
Chanel Conklin (stage name Chanel Grunge) was selling her tape, Haunted Sounds, at the opening. She created it by looping one-second segments of the most guttural, grisly screams she could find in horror films. “It’s…noise,” the Elbow Room staff said. I bought a copy.
Despite its range, much of the work finds its lineage in portraiture, which in the past connoted status. The film camera and then the smartphone made the form vernacular, allowing us an infinite archive of self-portraits that often spotlight our worst rather than our best (Who hasn’t opened the front-facing camera by accident and required immediate psychiatric care?).
Part of me hopes we are still capable of turning away from the self, that we still have heroes worth exalting. Part of me knows that sentiment reeks of lawn-sign liberalism. Regardless, I appreciated the noise tape and the time to consider who it is that I admire.
Reflection: Who are your idols?
Peter Gallo: Gods, Sluts, and Martyrs
Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR
April 11 – May 10, 2025
I’ve been wondering if Peter Gallo’s pieces are more sign than painting. “Emergency Entrance,” reads one. Another says “Mama America” across a pair of pink breasts. The human circulatory system. The digestive tract. “Violets Violets Violets.”
“Through these words,” reads the gallery text, “Gallo explores language’s core—its strangeness, seductiveness, and its complex semiotic relationship to images, revealing its heartbreaking inadequacy and brutality,” which is something I think a lot about, perhaps because everything I do requires words, and so much of it fails to connect.
Most of Gallo’s sign-paintings feature pairs of words. That must be why I left the gallery thinking about couples, about “kissing and fucking,” sure, but also others not pictured—birth and death, for example. Bread and circuses. Not just the pairs themselves, but the way that they’re stuck together. Staples and glue. Paint on paper. Needle and thread to get buttons into holes.
I have love tattooed across the knuckles of my left hand. The word war appears in the webbing. It’s often been hard for me to tell which is which. Gallo might suggest that all this philosophizing can only lead to tears.
Gallery notes:
Punctures
Staples
Adhesion
Linen, wood
Everything red
Badly decorated cake (Andrea told me the paint is applied with a syringe)
It’s giving skin suit
Crass and crude
Couples and throuples—Philosophizing and crying, kissing and fucking, theory and disgust, eat and die, gods sluts and martyrs
Guts
Reflection: What do you do when words fail?
Nut Job: Morgan Ritter, Maggie Chen, and Katya Kirilloff
Helen’s Costume, Portland, OR
April 26 – May 24, 2025
Let’s start with the fact that this gallery is in a garage. I took my mom to a show there last spring. She hit her Elf bar in the unpaved alleyway while cocking her head at an abstract painting and trying to decipher what everyone was on about.
I went to the current show because I’m not feeling very funny lately. I am glad that somebody is, namely Katya Kirilloff. The Instagram press for this show features a few drawings from her series called Cans of Worms. It features, um, different cans of worms. A Spam can, a paint can, a tuna can, a tin: each one full to its brim with writhing, wrinkled invertebrates. The highlights, in particular, shine.
An oddball lyric by Morgan Ritter and Chase Allgood accompanies the show, which also includes colorful work by Ritter herself and Maggie Chen. It speaks of “a nut job PROFESSIONAL / AND the pay’s for shit.” It’s hard not to relate to that.
I take myself and my own work too seriously. Much of the art world does, too. So it’s good for me to see people doing stuff like this that is goofy as fuck, garage-coded, or exuberant.
Reflection: What’s so funny?