Portland Eclectic Art Comic Opening
A presentation, gallery exhibit, and book signing with Jesse Reklaw, Shannon Wheeler, Graham Annable, Joëlle Jones, Jamie Rich and Carolyn Main in conjunction with the Wordstock literary festival.
Thursday, Nov. 6th, 6-10pm, Fuzzy Glamour Art Gallery, 625 NW Everett St #111.
Damali Ayo spoke to “the realities of what it means to be an activist artist, a feminist anti-racism performance artist” on October 30th, opening the Bitch Magazine Feminism and Pop Culture Series at the Smith Memorial Ballroom. Ayo’s willingness to speak to her observations about race relations started at an early age, as she showed us in a insightful and highly engaging slideshow of her work, starting with the multicultural Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls she brought to her preschool as a child.
Her oeuvre includes panels of paint matched from the flesh tones of various parts of her own body and audio tapes of the paintmixers’ conversations with her, presented at the Seattle Center of Contemporary Art in 2003; name tags that read “Hi, My Race Is…” and were to be filled out as white, black or other at gallery openings (I believe she said the Mark Wolley gallery) through 2001-02; and perhaps most famously, her Rent-a-Negro website where you could allegedly hire a person of color for services such as tolerating your racist relative, now a book as well. Throughout her career, she has aimed to “create a cognitive dissonance in our collective unconsciousness.”
She also is retiring however—it’s not easy doing this sort of work. Some of the examples of hate mail she showed us were truly appalling, and she has suffered from chronic fatigue for years in addition to PTSD from a sexual assault she survived as a young woman. Still, I can’t help but think she’ll be missed.
Check out Back Fence’s theme this time around—it’s Just Can’t Get Enough: Getting Stuffed and Being Stuffed, and yours truly contributed a story about being addicted to mentally recording moments, sort of an extreme take on remembering important things in life, aka writer’s disease as one friend said to me. Though I think mostly the moments I notice are a sort of distraction from the depressing real stuff that might going on. I wouldn’t know. I’m too busy noticing the curtains.
Adrianne Young’s account of a acutely constipated kitten is also pretty amusing.
I guess it happens from what people tell me, but I’ve personally never seen Powell’s close down the Pearl room for a reading before. Slavoj Zizek—philosopher and cultural icon—read September 9th to an audience eight deep into the aisles.
I came half an hour early and was lucky to get a spot on which to lean on the front of a bookshelf.
He was here to promote his new book Violence, but as he said he would early on, he talked about far more than the book, bringing in chicken jokes, dinner party conversations, late-Platonic notions of discourse and the inadequacies of hard-core porn to further his cultural critique of our particular historical moment.
What jumped out to me was this persistence of ideology. Zizek proposed that we are engrained with certain attitudes that seem ostensibly moral and high-minded, like all good doctrines should, but actually interfere with practical political solutions to the problem in question. The inability to discuss racism was one example he gave, how PC attitudes make it very difficult to address the latent racism which remains dysconsciously in our society.
I can only say that in my life as a schoolteacher, I have seen that to be true. No teacher would ever say they are prejudiced, right? Yet a lot of the more progressive critique of the education system, such as Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children, point up subtle inequities which I have seen in real life, like a principal saying out loud that he had lower expectations for ESL students going to college, or an English teacher calling a counselor in front of an entire Honors English class to question a student’s placement because she had a strong accent.
And then there’s the larger systematic problems, such as why students of color are disproportionately represented in special education programs and underrepresented in honors programs, which has not only to do with the school system but with larger social problems that many communities struggle with and which affect a student’s level of literacy background and focus they bring with them to school every day.
These are all problems which could be solved, imo. The thing is, it would take a brutally honest societal conversation around the legacies of slavery and colonialism and what to do about them going forward.
The last time we saw a conversation like that was in the late 60’s.
I totally ripped off the title of this post from Allison Dubinsky’s email to me, but didn’t think I could do better. I don’t really know much about this event, other than Allison’s description:
The images have been described as “phantasmagoric,” “otherworldly,” and “eerie.” I guess I’d describe them simply as “extremely cool.”
However, I did check out Jim Kaznjian’s website, and his images are very Dali-esque, imo, and also in black and white by the way, which lends a rather more Escher-like quality to them.
I’m also curious to check out Pushdot Studios, now located right off 11th and SE Division—they focus on digital/computer-based art primarily, which sounds intriguing.
I interviewed Adam Arnold a couple years ago for a fashion column profile for PDX Magazine right before his color blindness collection and was struck by how complex his understanding of color perception was, of visual perception actually, and how informed his clothing was by these insights. Truly, wearable art. So I can’t wait to hear what story he has to tell now, and he’s only one of a great line-up. Must also mention that Jess Hecox, my darling friend and graphic designeress, had quite a bit to do with the poster…ain’t she grand?
A few weeks ago, I performed in Tiffany Lee Brown’s piece, Play Me, as part of JAW, the playwright festival down at Portland Center Stage (seen in pic to left). Part of what I believe she was playing with was this concept of public versus private space, the new ways we negotiate that in the advent of various technologies such as the cell phone and recording devices. Who hasn’t overhead somebody’s colostectomy account or bad date post mortem while on line for a coffee? And while I totally get that that’s bad manners, I’ve been guilty of that myself, which is why it was easy to play cell phone woman. I just loitered around in the lobby re-running recent phone calls I could remember having while folks streamed around me, completely ignoring my end of the conversation, as if I wasn’t having one, as if I was in a phone booth made of space.
Meanwhile, people trickled up to the balcony area, where Tiff was manning a “volunteer” station, wearing a volunteer badge, which was another take on anonymity actually—apparently Tiff was at an event one time, hanging out with some friends who were volunteering, and an event patron assumed she was a volunteer because she was wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. If you look the part…interactions with service people do tend to have an impersonal flavor, even though the person in question may be an artist themselves. So anyway, Tiff was giving people instruction sheets for viewing the installation, and some people got the instruction to call my cell number, and I’d have a personal conversation with someone who had no idea who or where I was. The first thing everyone did was peer over the balcony at me. So I’d chat with them about how their Sunday was going, and why they were here at JAW or in Portland. Some folks were really open and willing, and some definitely had their guard up until they got used to the idea. An interesting cross-section of humanity, how open to the unfamiliar they were, to having a little intimate chat with a stranger.
There also was Eric Hausmann playing ambient music from within a bathroom, which was a hit. People kept peering around the doorframe to see where this out of place noise was coming from. His space had a sacred flavor to it, with all the brass Tibetan bowls and ringers, right there in the john next to the urinal and the tp.
There also were all these installations of cd or cassette recordings secreted around the place, which the audience would find via their maps on the instruction sheets. I contributed a couple stories, one about “hold me” based on my memories of Newport when my ex-husband proposed to me, and one about finding a noose in an abandoned factory while looking for wierd stuff to photograph in college. That was a creepy little locale, let me tell you. Some other contributors were Pecos B. and Frayn Masters—everyone did something intimate, but they were all different of course. Frayn’s was naturally hilarious. A cool thing was some were installed very publicly on lit podiums, and some were in hidey places like under a stairway or just in incongruous places like a drinking fountain. What’s public, what’s private, who’s intimate with us, who’s not—where do we draw these lines?
Something fun this weekend is the JAW Festival, which is a playwright showcase but also has experimental performance stuff too—which is what my friend and editor Tiffany Lee Brown was invited to participate in, and which I’ll be collaborating in as a live performer and also as a contributor of taped material. I think it’ll be way worth coming out for. See press release below.
PLAY ME
Plazm Magazine co-editor Tiffany Lee Brown performs at the JAW
Festival on Saturday, July 19th, at Portland Center Stage.
“Play Me,” a performance-installation by Tiffany Lee Brown and 2GQ,
explores intimacy and communication through sound, words, and
technological mediation. And Tarot cards, too. Collaborators include
Eric Hausmann, Richard Kadrey, Barb Klansnic, Pecos B., Nora
Robertson, and Stephanie Snyder.
“Play Me” is part of the You Are Here series at the JAW Festival.
You Are Here:
Portland Center Stage
128 NW Eleventh
Saturday, July 19
11:30am-2:30pm
Free; sign up at Portland Center Stage or at the Theatre Fair on NW
Davis Street
Ok, Back Fence PDX is really about the stories, but unfortunately, my camera was full early in the evening. I will say the storytellers rocked, though I only got to see the second half since I was part of the crew modeling swimwear at intermission. Will definitely come to the next one as a paying customer, which I believe will be next August, theme to be true colors, including a former gang member and one of those ladies who does your colors.
Check out the gaggle of beauties I got to strut around with last night at the premier of Back Fence, theme being summer love, pool time, sweaty stickiness, that kind of thing. For a more complete account of the evening, check out Matt Davis’ blog entry—I wonder if he was there because Allison Hallett was a storyteller and they both write for the Mercury? I don’t know, but was sorry I had to miss her story because we were all getting ready together the first half of the show. Which experience reminded me of getting ready for the prom or a wedding or any other girl-centric nail salon sort of environment, all trading make-up tips and bits of experience about life and love in no particular order. You might say we had our own storytelling series while putting in hot rollers.
On the porch of our “green room” house, the bevy surrounds Pamela Levenson of Popina Swimwear. At Tour de Crepes, Jessica Hecox and I make ze small talk. Bottom, primp time. Jess is applying gloss very gracefully I must say, while Kathryn, aka The Recovering Straight Girl blogger, gets some hair time with Sadie Byington of Eclipse the Salon.
