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.
Art About Agriculture
Pendleton Center for the Arts, Pendleton, Oregon
July 3 – Aug 16, 2025
We rode the horse bareback through the muddy yard, and then we played hero games in the fall-down outbuilding. In school, we painted pine tree landscapes and hatched chickens in styrofoam coolers. At grandma’s, Jesus paintings watched us eat our weekend pizza without praying. Geometric superstructures sprang up in the hayfields during baling season, baby’s first sculpture gardens.
These are the memories that surface while perusing press photos of this year’s Art About Agriculture—a show organized by OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences since the early 1980s. The exhibition contains some startling acts of brilliance amid the more expected paintings and photographs of rural landscapes. Trouble Light, a charcoal drawing by Clint Brown, lends a shop essential—that hanging, caged bulb—a rare moment of exalted subjectivity. Epiphany Couch’s textural collage Huckleberry Sister, based on a Yakama story, features a bead-rimmed silhouette carefully cut from a photographic print of the landscape.
If you’re in Portland like me, you may not have occasion to make the three hour drive to Pendleton for the sole purpose of looking at this art, but if you have the means, perhaps consider it, especially if the juxtaposition of art and agriculture feels fresh and pressing, or if you are struggling to comprehend the state of our polity. Shows like this, particularly viewed in a rural context, challenge city liberals to reframe notions of the other who lives out there, who owns a shotgun, who says grace, whose children bale hay in the summer.
Reflection: How far are you willing to go to be moved?
Dance The Dream: Intro the Visual Realm of Kate Bush
Tomorrow Theater, Portland, OR
July 25, 2025
I famously don’t watch movies made after the year 2000. That’s when CGI took over and, idk, things started to feel overly sanitary and homogenized. But in July, PAM CUT will present a lineup of movies from the 90s along with a few documentaries about musical artists—Broken Social Scene and Blur among those featured. I’m most interested in Kate Bush’s The Line, The Cross, & The Curve. Somewhere between a short film and an extended music video—a recent formal reference might be Beyonce’s Lemonade—the movie features songs from Bush’s 1993 album The Red Shoes.
The film follows Bush, a frustrated singer and dancer, who is enticed by a mysterious, spritely woman in whiteface with one hell of a unibrow who comes through a mirror during a power outage, proffering a pair of cherry red ballet slippers as a solution to the artist’s creative block. Once on Bush’s feet, the shoes dance interminably on their own, and she must battle to free herself from the crimson-shod spell. The film culminates—no spoilers!—in some hypnotic, orgiastic, fruit-squish dancing and Bush being strangled in a field of fire by the unibrow woman.
To be honest, I found the clips I watched totally perplexing, but at least it’s not military propaganda or one more overly literal movie that somebody made on the computer. Plus I’ve always had a fondness for the vulgarity of red shoes.
Reflection: What will we encounter when we let artists pull us through the looking glass?
Dylan Jones: Love vs. The World
Partly, Portland, OR
May 12 – July 5, 2025
Welcome to the weird world of Dylan Jones. Here a corpulent, nude man rendered in petunia pink colored pencil rests inside the cleft he’s eaten into a big ol’ burger. “In striped attire, he schemes and plots. A world where burgers are hard fought. Within his mind I find my place, alone, exposed, in empty space,” the man muses. Elsewhere six earths wrap their tongues around a slobbering, mottled dog. Across the room, ruptures in the skins of some clown-devil guys reveal a spacescape of stars, bones, eggs, and flowers bursting on the vine.
Jones’ characters are elaborate, layered, often horny, almost aggressively energetic, but also tender and full of holes. His work plays the edge of puerile and poetic, and despite the preponderance of wieners and vaginas, his pieces always land this side of the plainly perverse; one has to admit there is more here than a sex joke. It’s something like Ren and Stimpy meets the surreal barnyard animals of Nellie Mae Rowe meets the time I had too much mushroom tea and tripped the fuck out on my friend’s couch while everyone else had a nice time at the birthday party.
On July 5th, at the show’s closing, Partly will screen Jones’ animated VHS, described as a “full hour of grisly, garbled cartoon fun-time.” Chatting to the shop owner, I discovered that the store also hosts a first Thursday poetry reading, and they will shortly launch a second- or third-Thursday series called Civic TV, which will screen old media, “lots of laser disks.” I’ll be watching.
Reflection: Is the fool ever the wisest of us all?
Ray Anthony Barrett: Who by Fire
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR
July 12 – August 9, 2025
The axe. Fire. Stones sharpened to ragged points. Bone and soil. Oxygen. The rudiments of our eons-long, pre-industrial survival. Chisels. Pelts. Slings and arrows. These are the thought-matter of the artist Ray Anothony Barrett, whose show Who by Fire “takes as its starting point the near total estrangement between people and fire in the 21st century, which is closely tied to a broad-scale contemporary disconnection from the natural world.”
Barrett conducts field studies in the landscapes of the American West as a cornerstone of his practice. He also collects references as disparate as tools in his dad’s shed and open-flame cooking methods. Exploring a sort of inverse futurity, Barrett uses these elements to work with the twin conundrums of late capitalism—sustainability and liberation—seeking a coherent path forward by looking back.
I don’t know what this show will actually consist of. Barrett has worked at a high level in pretty much every medium: writing, film, photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, dance. My reading indicates that Who By Fire is informed by Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, family lineage, African and Indigenous traditions, and a series of food-related collaborations. Whatever the form, Barrett promises to take us back to basics then forward through them in a way that is both affecting and utilitarian. He’s helping us imagine survival.
The best answers to our problems are usually simple: honesty, letting go, chopping wood and carrying water. Similarly, this show might offer as its final thesis one of the best bits of advice I have ever received: Go where it’s warm.
Reflection: Can art making be a survival skill?