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
mars ibarecche: the ephemeral and the enduring
ILY2, Portland, OR
June 28 – August 9, 2025
Collage lacks prestige in the fine art world because of its relationship to zines, scrapbooking, inpatient-program art therapy exercises, and found art—all of which tend toward the provincial, not to mention the feminine and aberrant. These uses are legitimate unto themselves, but collage can also be elevated, if that’s what you’re into. Artists can employ finer cuts, layer pieces in more intricate patterns, utilize unusual or precious materials, and imbue the work with a conceptual charge. There is a strange elegance about the collages at ILY2 because Mars Ibarecche is doing it all.
Ibarecche makes these collages from the covers of affordable vintage paperbacks, which they cut up and then reassemble with a chaotic precision. Some of the cover-sized works are spare with sharp, square cuts—simple compositions that retain surface tension through textured layers and carefully placed blocks of color and text. The leanest of these reads “RAGE” in black letters that are affixed atop stacked rectangles of sullied ivory paper. A Mondrianesque work repeats the ivory and adds blue. “Passion,” it reads in pretty script. Others use shapelier, more colorful piecing. Some echo Calder mobiles and their serpentine energy, but a little more slutty. Time-worn papers create color fields that are rumpled like the bedsheets of new lovers.
In the artist’s own words: “Everything is always falling apart so it can be put back together. We are all parts of each other put together in different ways.” In these collages, everything touches.
Reflection: What is falling apart for you, and how might you collage it back together?
Coming Around Again: Columbia Basin Basketry Guild Weaving with Recycled Materials
Lincoln City Cultural Center, Lincoln City, OR
July 11 – August 31, 2025
I own a purse woven from garbage. To make it, the artisan folded Mexican candy wrappers into strips then joined them together, creating interlocking chains of metallic film. I get at least one compliment every time I wear it, which I mention not for vanity’s sake (I am vain, though!), but to express how beautiful and engaging a bag made of trash can be.
I was stunned to see what members made from local refuse for the Columbia Basin Basketry Guild’s summer show. The exhibition honors a founding member of CBBG, the late Janet Ronacher, who favored constructing baskets from recycled materials. Works in the show utilize holiday lights, denim, telecom wire, seagrass, zip ties, plastic tubing, fishing line, mylar balloons, barbed wire, and the cord from a weed whacker, among other recovered stuff.
For “Homage to Sinéad O’Connor,” the artist wove Dr Martens shoelaces, salvaged fiber, and plastic to create a wall-hanging with 21” tails—just one example of how the shapes of the baskets are as nuts as their materials. Some are squat, taut bird’s nests. Others are floppy and curvaceous. The technique is meticulous even where motley dimensions or ornery textures threaten to rupture warp from weft.
As I close out this column (after this month, a new writer takes over), a plea: get thee to the beach and admire these ingenious woven sculptures. Pick up some crap on the beach while you’re at it. Build a vessel. See if it floats.
Reflection: Does all waste constitute materials abuse?
Tess Bilhartz and Margaux Ogden: Blonde On Blonde
SE Cooper Contemporary, Portland, OR
July 12 – August 30, 2025
If I were to sum up this exhibition in a single word, I would use the categorically reprehensible millennial term “besties.” During their durational friendship, Tess Bilhartz and Margaux Ogden, the besties in question, have shared pretty much everything, including a studio wall. All the while, they pursued their own art careers and developed radically different styles. Year on year, the pair coiled together then sprang apart, together then apart, creating a helix of lore.
Their pieces are barely even (I’m so sorry; I’m going to do it again) frenemies. The works are hung in twos but have little affinity. Most share just a single color, sometimes only a speck. Ogden’s works, carefully lineated and neatly colored, are tight abstracts of interlocking organic shapes nestled inside rectangular black boxes like blades of stained glass. Bilhartz loosely layers photos, paint, and illustrations in her work. Onto desaturated images of landscapes—the ruffled surfaces of the beach recur—and residential streets, the artist grafts dreamed-up colors and scenes.
My life is rich with friends, many of whom have little in common with me, especially those I’ve known the longest. Over the years, our work has diverged, along with our preoccupations, our spiritual leanings, and our choices around geography, marriage, and children. We’ve coiled together then sprung apart, together then apart. If I met them now, idk if we would click. But what they’ve proven to me is that people who are different can enrich each other immensely. Two things can’t complement each other if they are the same. Without contrast, the art falls flat.
Reflection: Who provides your contrast?
Grizzly Grizzly: VOIR- | VER-
after / time collective gallery, Portland, OR
August 7 – 30, 2025
In my mid-twenties, I briefly dated a man who asked if he could watch me while I showered. I was to pretend he wasn’t in the room. I said no. A week later, I caught him lingering outside the curtain while I lathered my armpits. “Hey,” I said. Rivulets of water slapped the floor of the fiberglass tub. He invented a question. “I know what you’re doing,” I said. “Get out.” I never saw him again.
Think of all the times you’ve been seen without wanting it. Data breaches, bad candid shots, an interlocutor staring at your heinous, oozing zit, accidentally liking an ex’s post—these are near-certainties of our existence. But we also see without explicit consent. One might peer into her neighbors’ yellow-lit windows during a late stroll down the street, or watch on Instagram as a celebrity bottoms out on alcohol beside their pool in a desert outpost of Los Angeles.
This is a show about looking. Its theme is VOIR- | VER-, meaning “to observe,” as in voyeurism. Its goal is to examine our cultural obsession with watching in a detached, consumptive manner. Fittingly, the work skews toward video, though the content occupies opposing poles of uber-saturated color and blood-let gray. The pieces surface then decay. Discarded plastic water bottles become sculptural window charms that form and fade with the light. Tulle solidifies through sublimation, then vanishes under shadows and neon paint. Buried materials and archived memories become pixels. These become dust.
Part of why I love writing as an art form is that no one is looking at me while I do it.
Reflection: How does it feel to be watched?