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.
Everything is Days
Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR
May 17 – June 14, 2025
I lived in Springfield, OR during the 90s and early aughts, a.k.a. my childhood, while the place was fucking imploding. Everyone and their literal mother was on meth. Hardly anybody had a job, and you could practically watch the teeth fall out of people’s heads. I feel sick to my stomach thinking about it. Sometimes I wonder: if Ditch Projects existed then, would it have made any difference?
Could it have been a shock of vitality, some creative force to counteract all that decay? Could it have been a periscope to look through to find somewhere I could land? For some, an art gallery is just more bad shit: capitalist greed, speculative investment, the commodification of the human spirit, herald of gentrification. Ok, yeah, but a gallery—especially an artists’ collective like Ditch—can also be a place of, forgive me, hope.
Right now the gallery is showing a bonkers-looking group show curated by Dan Devening (he has a great solo show up as well, so it’s a two-fer). Among the works, Melissa Pokorny’s assemblages stand out to me. Pokorny’s come together through “knotty attachments,” so many ropes and strings. From the artist’s website, I learned that assemblage is also “a term used by the theorist Jane Bennett to describe the power and agency of non-human things to assemble.” The show, then, is itself an assemblage. Artwork gathers. Water molecules bind and rinse the windows. Skin cells reach across a chasm to form a scar.
Reflection: What is holding it all together? If it breaks, to what will we remain attached?
Martha Daghlian: Papillon
FalseFront, Portland, OR
May 10 – June 22, 2025
There is something about butterflies and their symbolism. The caterpillar enters the darkest black where it melts into a viscous liquid, then reconstitutes into something new, a former worm suddenly winged, somehow capable of flight. Ego death. Revolution. A glow up. Whatever. We want to believe that rebirth is possible, that things can change.
To enter Papillon (the French word for butterfly) is to walk in this transmutational shadow world. Through cut-out rugs inspired by Gothic window panes, hung garments, sand-cast medallions, and soft shelving, Daghlian has created a room to live inside of, a light-dark cocoon to hold the dying as things goo and then form. The touches of death are here and there, namely in painted silk skulls derived from early American and English gravestones. Plus everything is black. Elsewhere the work springs to life.
Daghlian practices chaos tailoring, not neat needlework. She regularly cannibalizes her pieces—or perhaps, more aptly for this show, she facilitates their metamorphosis. Everything folds in on itself, wings flapping. She reuses everything (such as the video that plays on a two-inch screen inside the shelf; the star of the show, IMO) until, as she says, it turns to mulch.
Papillon teaches us that confronting death makes us grow. Maybe this is what drove Daghlian to fight her shyness and create a performance for the show’s closing. Off the wall this stuff will come. Daghlian will slip into the cape, pull on the antennaed hood, don the mask, and snap on the wings. She will goo and form, goo and form, animated by the art she animates, changed.
Reflection: Do you believe in transformation?
Lydia Rosenberg: Lamp Store
SOCIETY, Portland, OR
June 7- July 19, 2025
A couple of weeks ago, I talked to my eleventh graders about light, the way it worked in whatever we were reading aloud in class. Light manipulation, I said, descriptions of light—they play your words like a movie projector inside the reader’s mind. You can conjure a scene simply by describing how the light looks, what it touches. I don’t think anyone heard me but me.
This artist Lydia Rosenberg was also struck by literary lights. Her work is a novel in sculptures that takes inspiration from, among other sources, lamps in classical literature. But more than allusion, her lights perform ornamentation tinged with satire. I think of critiques of the feminine or domestic in art, the rejection of the decorative by minimalists, and the way Rosenberg responds to that through the clever purposelessness or perversion of these light-devices, the tension of their gift and refusal.
Her show of lamps at the new art space SOCIETY is, for the most part, wrong-lit. Rosenberg has made a reading desk with the lamp on backward; it is page-darkening, usurper of its own purported purpose. See also a light in a blue plastic bag, a lit bulb burning under a bonnet of the browning leaves of a cabbage. A lamp-in-a-box.
Think about candlelight, I said, versus these fluorescents. This lighting is part of the technology of the institution, designed to remind you where you are, that this isn’t a place to be soft or free. I probably uttered the word vibe or aura. Consider how you can use light today in your writing. What the light lights up—that’s how you make your point.
Reflection: Where is the light in your life, and what is it showing you?
John Brodie: Friends of Doom
Old Fashioned Garage Gallery, Portland, OR
May 4 – June 29, 2025
DM on instagram for address
The guardian at the garage’s gate is a crazed looking blue guy painted on top of a Versace ad. Next we have some charming ceramics: a flat vessel, a shoe (?) that’s kinda melted, a busted butterfly shelf, a hole-eyed plate face. Inside the garage are more than two dozen works that all incorporate found images, most of which suggest idolatry. The works with brand names, like our sentry outside, among others, incorporate textiles in an active state of unraveling. A thought occurs. I Google “Bible verse about riches rotting”—I was raised around a lot of Baptists, sorry—and get back James Chapter 5:
Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes.
Your gold and silver are corroded…You have hoarded wealth in the last days…
You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.
This work puts the art in a playful indictment of artifice. Putting lipstick on a pig isn’t bad because of the pig but because of the act of pretending. Aren’t we all ragged and mud-smeared underneath? We can feign polish, but we ain’t fixed. We break our ceramics, rend our garments, and melt our boots by the fire.
Gallery notes:
Corrugated
Brokenness, bentness
Counterfeiting and its relationship to sabotage
Warehouse memories
Use of textiles
Raggedness
Smear and tear
Uncontrolled climate, cold
Decay
Nothing gold can stay
Reflection: If we let go of artifice, what would remain?