When people say Portland has a great art scene, it's things like the TBA festival, or the Portland Biennial that Disjecta puts on that they are talking about, I think, more so than the gallery/museum scene.
Any who, I have a headache here, as I write this, so I'm going to zone out and watch football (yes I know, an artist who likes football too?) but here's some picks from some of the installations, and sorry I don't have a heck of a lot of info on the individual artists (titles, names, etc) but it was a really interesting show - today is the last day for the festival this year, but it's in its 9th year, so if you are into the arts I highly suggest checking it out next year!
Jesse Sugarman's video of inflating air mattresses lifting mini-vans, rather comically. Jesse also shows
at Season Gallery in Seattle
.
This piece is called Collateral Damage by Joshua Berger. It's an ongoing performance - he apparently did one or part of a page at the beginning of the festival and had done 46 pages so far. It's made up of tiny tiny "x"s, each on represents a dead civilian from the Iraq war and the total dead are over 300,000, tallied by him so far, of the 655,000 reported in the NY Times in 2006. So he has a lot more marks to make. Needless-to-say, it wasn't all light fun and games at TBA this year.
installation in the bathroom
file it under optical illusion
photo cred to LH
