Oregon author Jules Ohman speaks with Carolyn Hazel Drake and Rachael Zur about their work, providing insight into the themes and process behind their upcoming show at Hanson Howard Gallery, At Home with the Dead.  Creative Process Ohman:  Tell me about your creative process concerning the work in the show.  Zur: For my expanded paintings, I start with drawing out the form, then work out the different iterations for the silhouette on which the piece is painted. Then I draw it onto plywood and cut it with a Dremel. Next, I build up a surface to paint on, out of either plaster ga ..read more

By LINDSAY COSTELLO   Kinke Kooi, The Grotesk of Raising (2021). Acrylic, gouache, colored pencil, collage, and yarn on paper. Each panel: 40.2” x 30”; overall: 40.2” x 89.75”.   On view at Adams and Ollman until September 4, Kinke Kooi’s The Grotesk of Raising marks the Dutch artist’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast. For the exhibition, Kooi shares a series of ten recent mixed-media paintings and drawings on paper, representing years of exploration on themes of feminism and bodily autonomy, binaries and structure. The result is a non-hierarchical Eden, where curving pearl ..read more

By LAUREL V. MCLAUGHLIN I walked into the space of after/time expecting to see the works that I had seen lying horizontal in acid baths in Simone Fischer’s. In their verticality on the wall, they confronted me with their sheer scale, no longer allowing me to look down on them. Striations in rust, etched car-dealer for-sale flags, and even dessicated flies trapped in acid tracks, unabashedly received my gaze and spoke back. The shopping cart seemed to have a visual language all its own, and the flashing sign menacingly told me its opinions. As a recent transplant to Portland in 2018 from Philad ..read more

By LINDSAY COSTELLO Souvenir—to remember. It was one of the first French verbs I learned, and I was charmed by its connection to the English definition of souvenir. A keepsake, a relic, a token. Something small that retrieves a memory from deep below. What is this place in our minds that souvenirs reach? Objects conjure up our pasts. They can hold a mysterious power. In Souvenir at Nationale, ceramic artist Emily Counts explores memory and intimacy through mystic objects centering nature and the body. Counts emphasizes the varying relationships between her objects and experiments with object u ..read more

By LINDSAY COSTELLO Installation view of umm no, photo by Mario Gallucci courtesy of the gallery. Yuyang Zhang, a Portland-based artist from Wuhan, China, recently explained that taking oneself seriously is a central tenet of Chinese culture and politics. He opted to challenge this stereotype through a solo exhibition, umm no, on view at Fuller Rosen Gallery. Zhang draws on Chinese Communist Party propaganda, emojis, and American political memes to create tongue-in-cheek paintings and digital collages; the results, Zhang hopes, demonstrate that Chinese people can be witty, casual, and poke fu ..read more

By LINDSAY COSTELLO Shamanism is in our DNA. This practice, involving varied methods of altering consciousness in order to commune with spirit realms, dates back to the early Paleolithic era. There’s something innately human about it. Shamanism contends with our core questions. How might we be healed? Could we be guided by energy grander than our own? In Yulia Pinkusevich’s Calm Under the Waves in the Blue of My Oblivion, the artist explores their maternal ancestral roots in Siberian shamanism of Russia’s Sakha region. Indigenous practices, including shamanism, were largely eliminated by colo ..read more

Installation image of Fool’s Gold at Holding Contemporary. BY SARAH DIVER The tinted windows of Holding Contemporary cast a sepia glow into the gallery, evoking the amber tones reminiscent of an old photograph or Hollywood Western. Familiar objects like pliers, wrench and other hand tools, small brooms, a portable cooler, and a worktable are positioned alongside hand-hewn ceramic and wood sculptures, dice, charms, and other mementos. A mint green Exacto knife, smudged with the oil of someone’s repeated touch, sits level with Saw, 2022, an impractical ceramic serrated blade, its ..read more

Installation view featuring Tanner Lind, Untitled 4, 2021 and Erin O'Keefe,Circle Circle Elipse Elipse with Purple Block, 2020; photos courtesy of the gallery. BY JASON N. LE In downtown Portland, on the third floor of the Bullier Building is Melanie Flood Projects. Currently, on view is Painters Painting a group show featuring Martha Daghlian, Rose Dickson, Matthew Fischer, Derek Franklin, John Houck, Lila Jarzombek, Erin O’Keefe, Tanner Lind, John Opera, Ofer Wolberger, and Sarah Wertzberger that surveys the action and object-ness of painting. The exhibition’s title references the 1973 Emil ..read more

Installation view of Possessions, Possessions, photo by Mario Gallucci, courtesy of Fuller Rosen Gallery. BY HANNAH KRAFCIK Olivia Faith Harwood’s inaugural solo show, Possessions, Possessions, features twelve paintings layered with curious details that greet visitors in swaths of swirling avocado, soft blush, lavender, and powder blue neons. Yet, this stimulating palette belies an air of unease and mystery, as the exhibition sets out to reflect on “the burdens of adolescent dilemmas, shame and the deconstruction of identity.” A recent Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate at Pacific Northwest Colle ..read more

  By SHAWNA LIPTON Chris Chandler, artist and founder of Portland-based letterpress studio Neu Haus Press, received a Stumptown Artist Fellowship with a companion exhibition currently on display at the Downtown Flagship location.  Reimagined for Chandler’s Art-Mecanica, the cafe has some of its tables removed and the high walls painted ivory to showcase the large chromatic prints hung on the walls. Inspired by typography, Bauhaus design, and 20th-century avant-garde aesthetics, Chandler’s current body of work calls particular attention to the printmaking process. The functionally col ..read more