E X P O Opens April 1















Lisa Radon Reviews Colin Matthes's EXPO on Ultra
review

Reception: Thursday, March 4, 6-10pm
Open by appointment.

For his first solo exhibition in the Northwest, Midwest artist Colin Matthes will participate in a short-term residency at Igloo gallery, culminating in a site-specific installation. Colin will be scavenging scrap wood and found objects, combining them with high tech gizmos and survival gear to create a lighthearted, yet poignant installation referencing stage sets, flea markets, unrealized innovations, and trade work. The installation will focus on creating an environment that invites the viewer to imagine small victories in hostile locations while encouraging reflection of how our own lifestyles contribute to creating these dynamics.

Bio:
Colin Matthes, based in Milwaukee, WI, works across a range of media including drawing, sculpture, installation, public art, print, and self-publishes the zine Ideas in Pictures. His artwork has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Denmark, Spain, and Austria. Since 2004 he has been an Adjunct Instructor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Milwaukee, WI. He has previously shown in Portland with the social art group Justseeds Artist Collborative at PSU, Sea Change Gallery, City Club of Portland, and more. In 2010 Matthes will have solo exhibitions at Igloo Gallery, Portland, OR and Ripon College, Ripon, WI and two-person exhibits at 58 Gallery, Jersey City, NJ (with Nicolas Lampert), The New Art Center, Newton, MA, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, and Walkers Point Center for the Arts (with Anthony Smith Jr).

www.colinmatthes.com
www.justseeds.org

Please direct questions to Christine Taylor ctaylor3333@gmail.com, or 646-763-4905
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IGLOO
625 NW Everett #102
Portland OR 97201
503.724.7300

WRECKING CRÜE | Opens March 4

Reception: Thursday, March 4, 6-10pm
Open First Saturday 1-5, and appointment

In terms of genre, this gathering of artists presents ideas at once related under the umbrella of constructed space, yet provide a variety of challenging perspectives. These artists conspire in a loose category of structural invention, whether found at the foot of a modernist monolith, or in an impossible world flirting with utopian sketchbooks. Wrecking Crüe owes no allegiance to systems or practicality, working in an interstitial state of half-made/half-undone. What these works can do is give our current visual processing a crash course in alternative spatial understanding while questioning how creation takes form in spatial contexts.

The works generate ideas that mash-up relationships: hammers and hypershapes, blueprints and Outer Space, insulation and simulation, rendering philosophical material from impulsive architecture. The works vary from subtle to jarring manipulations of space and the objects contained within, breaking our reliance on architecture as a visual support structure for our environment. They propose the built environment as a playground that keeps building, and rebuilding, itself to explore some unknown, perpetual concourse.


Artists:

Jordan Tull is an established freelance metal fabricator and industrial designer known for his strict geometric installations and physically sophisticated sculpture. His works challenge the understanding of unseen forces that govern visuality, seeking to agitate the structural clarity of objects in space.

Josh Smith is a sculptor and furniture maker in Portland OR. His work explores notions of utopian space in relation to modernist philosophies. His work reinvestigates modernist principles using the language of the architectural model and the illustrated proposal, presenting latent potential of the Idea in flux.

Salvatore Reda lives and works in Portland, OR. His artwork delves into architecture as fantasy, researching the location of the familiar in a synthetic, abstract sense. Detail, beauty and lyrical abstraction are preoccupations of his work. His paintings and video works have been exhibited at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Adamski Gallery of Contemporary Art, Aachen, and Basel Switzerland.

Joshua Pavlacky is a Portland native and a founder and gallery coordinator of Appendix Project Space, an experimental installation site in NE Portland. Inspired by Landscape Urbanism and Infrastructure, his work explores the landscape as a conceptual, perceptual and physical infrastructure capable of seeding the development of urban and ecological systems that are better suited to the ethical and practical concerns of the 21st century.

Jeff Jahn is a Portland based curator, critic, installation artist and photographer particularly interested in the conceptual loading and kinesthetic potential of man made spaces.

FLOATER Opens January 29

"Floater" is a two-person exhibition showing large snap shot portraits by northwest photographer Kelly O and the documentary film ‘Super Noble Brothers’ by Los Angeles/Milwaukee based filmmaker Mark Escribano. Kelly O’s vivid portraits capture scenesters in a variety of compromising, naughty and unapologetic moments. Escribano’s film follows the lives of three brothers, small-time celebrities based in Milwaukee and L.A. who are deeply invested in rare record collecting and art making. Both of these artists document an energetic subculture that live a life of careless freedom.


Kelly O is a photographer and the originator of the infamous ‘Drunk of the Week’, published in Seattle’s weekly newspaper ‘The Stranger,’ where she has worked as assistant art director and most recently with photography and multimedia. Her saturated portraits depict city scenesters in compromising moments that some may regret and others will joke about for a lifetime. Her work has been published in SPIN, VICE, Mojo, Kerrang!, and FADER.

Mark Escribano is a Los Angeles based filmmaker. He is a professional photographer and cinematographer for independent films such as ‘Modus Operandi’ and William Shatner's ‘Gonzo Ballet.’ Mark is a recipient of the Peck School of the Arts Mary Nohl Fellowship. His work has been shown at the Dislocation Film Festival in the UK, The Pompidou Museum and both the Milwaukee and Cleveland International Film Festivals. He is also a member of part of 'The White Box Painters' performance troupe. ‘Super Noble Brothers’ will screen this month in Los Angeles as a part of LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions).


Links:
www.thestranger.com/seattle/drunk-of-the-year

www.thesupernoblebrothersmovie.com



Opening: Thursday, February 4, 6-10 pm.

Artist’s Reception: Friday, January 29, 6-10 pm.
Artist Kelly O will be in attendance along with music by DJ Porq.

Open First Saturday 1-5.
Exhibit is open for viewing by appointment through 02/20.

ART ATTACK from Project Grow | Opens Dec. 3

The exhibition will present a selection of works from the Project Grow studio and a screening of “Project Grow Goes to France,” accompanied by short videos.

The artists at Project Grow create a wide range of artwork including works on paper, painting, puppets, collage, zines, text work, and video. In addition, the artists are collaborating on international projects with musician Jim Fairchild during the tour of his band All Smiles (founding member of Grandaddy) and the people of Paris through a distance residency at Betonsalon, Paris, in collaboration with Laurel Kurtz, Natasha Wheat, and Sandy Sampson.


Reception:
Thursday, December 3, 6-10pm

Screening:
Friday, December 18, 6-8pm
North American premier of “Come As You Are Viens Tel Que Tu Es”, a bilingual document of the distance residency at Betonsalon. Paris.


Project Grow is a social program within the Port City Developmental Center dedicated to the development and promotion of artists with developmental disabilities. Established in 2008, Project Grow consists of an open studio practice, an urban garden supplying CSAS (community supported agriculture subscriptions), and a social outreach agenda.

As an innovative and progressive program, Project Grow continues to lead a dynamic existence including the creation of the North Portland Farm. Project Grow is developing satellite locations in order to accommodate demand and offer fair wage employment to more farmers. The artists who participate and coordinate the programs offered by Project Grow continue to develop unique ways to further successful collaborations between Project Grow and the community at large.


http://www.growinginalldirections.org/

MAY JULIETTE BARRUEL | Opens Nov. 4

May Juliette Barruel's textile-based work and photography address themes of nostalgia, obsession, and loss in an intimate and often voyeuristic fashion. For this exhibition, Barruel investigates a variety of materials in order to reify her experience, and here her voice finds resonance in printed words and embroidered textiles.

Conceptual tapestries and text works accompany Barruel's photographs to create "And Now We Do What We Do", a reflection on a half-life of dating, falling, hoping, pining, loving, and obsessing with its fair share of drunken haircuts, romantic inspirations, ridiculously embarrassing behaviors, and hundreds of hours spent wallowing while listening to songs by Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Bill Callahan. The work is both catharsis and hypothesis, a searching for the existence of truth and love in an endlessly fragmented and often lost contemporary youth culture.

A native of Grenoble, France, May Juliette Barruel lives and works in Portland, OR. She holds a Master of Arts degree in American Literature from l'Université de Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle and a professional certificate from New England School of Photography in Boston, Massachusetts. She has shown work in many cities including Portland, Los Angeles, and Lawrence, KS, and frequently posts images on her blog, à la claire fontaine. Barruel is the curator for Stumptown's downtown gallery and is owner and curator of Nationale, a shop and gallery on Portland's east side.

http://5408miles.blogspot.com
http://nationaleportland.blogspot.com

Public reception: Thursday, November 5th, 6pm-10pm
On view Saturday, November 7th, 12pm-5pm, and by appointment.

SIGNAL FIRE Residents 2009 | Opens October 1

Signal Fire announces "The Soft Shovel," an exhibition at Igloo Gallery featuring the inaugural residents of the Signal Fire Outpost residency featuring new photography, drawing, and mixed-media sculpture, alongside collaborative video and sound works.

The show will feature works by Portland-based artists Katy Asher (and collaborators), Tom Colligan, Bruce Conkle, Ryan Jeffery, Marne Lucas, Jenn Rawling, Vanessa Renwick and Ethan Rose, and will be accompanied by a self-published essay by husband/wife team Ryan Pierce and Amy Harwood about establishing Mt. Hood's first artist residency.


Reception: Thursday, October 1, 6-10pm
Open First Saturdays 1-5, and by appointment.

Closes Saturday October 24.

Contact: Amy Harwood 503.484.4850 or Ryan Pierce 415.690.0949

CHRIS LAEL LARSON | opens September 3

Chris Lael Larson is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician and graphic designer who lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

In “Photos and Photo Animations", a series of 48 photographs are disclosed from the artist’s online photographic diary, called, www.natural-lightning.com. The exhibition also includes the artist’s more well-known photo animations, which presently coalesce hand-sequenced digital stills, stop-motion, hand-drawn animation, motion graphics and sound collage with flowing layers of color, shape and texture, together, into surreal meditations on physical and emotional landscapes.

Larson is the founder of music/visual performance group Deelay Ceelay, has performed in over 30 cities nationwide, and has shown his work extensively in galleries, museums, and film festivals.