June 5, 2008

 

INFINITUS
by John Motley

 

Cities are often metaphorized as living things: Their streets and thoroughfares are veins and arteries, their pulsing centers, hearts. Of course, their citizens are responsible for their animation, but somehow the most impressive metropolises suggest that as environments, they have nearly outpaced such human dimensions. Instead, they seem to take on a life of their own, growing and mutating like some viral strain. This latter vision of the city dominates INFINITUS, TJ Norris' new immersive video installation of "a seamless, endless city" at New American Art Union, and the final installment in his Tribryd series, which began in 2003. Here, Norris continues to mine the readymade imagery of the city, from the clean lines of urban architecture to the erratic, bubbling forms of graffiti. And as ever, he does not labor to decode or even interpret what he finds, but is simply seduced by their surfaces.

Entering the exhibit, one passes through a heavy black curtain into a dark room, where a black-and-white, two-channel video is projected on the ceiling. The room itself is filled with five divan-sized viewing beds, where visitors can recline as Norris' video unfolds above them. The video itself oscillates between representation (lampposts, a helix spiral of razor wire) and abstraction (fuzzy-edged lights blink like champagne bubbles), and is accompanied by French composer Christian Renou's score, which marries Angelo Badalamenti's maudlin synth-scapes to experimental electronics. At first, the experience—the shuffling imagery, the jarringly unpredictable soundtrack—mimics the sensory overload of street life, but, the longer one stays in the gallery, the cacophony of sight and sound gradually recedes. It soon becomes a relaxing, tranquil experience, in which the stimuli wane to an even and forgettable background noise—not unlike the ubiquitous honking horns and shouts of city streets.

As Norris situates his viewers flat on their backs, he subconsciously prods them to compare the experience of city life to similarly positioned activities. Most obviously, it conjures movie-going or the less literal cinema of dreaming. For Norris, urban living is akin to the stylized magic—and disorienting fragmentation—of images scrolling across a screen, a version of interpretation and narrative construction that is, by now, second nature. So even in Norris' un-navigable city, we still feel at home.

AUGUST 30, 2007

M_US__EUM
by John Motley

A new collaborative work by TJ Norris and Scott Wayne Indiana goes to even greater lengths to subvert the confines of traditional exhibition. Although their Postmortemism [ M_US__EUM ], a neon and video work, will be shown at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, it will also be broadcast online at YouTube. Instead of limiting an encounter with an artwork to a specific time and place, Norris and Indiana have made the viewing conditions of their piece virtually limitless. It's a fascinating move that relinquishes control of a precise presentation, thereby compromising intention, while undermining the supposed exaltation of the art object within the gallery or museum context. And, of course, it also means that you don't have to be in Portland to take part in the city's busiest month for visual arts.

June 7, 2007

The Hook Up
by John Motley

For the year's fourth guest-curated show at the New American Art Union, Bay Area transplant Jesse Hayward has selected work by eight local artists that explores how installation art has impacted traditional wall-based presentation. Throughout The Hook Up, the work occupies a gray area between painting, sculpture, and installation. Jenene Nagy's "Meadow" typifies the investigation: Her unwieldy, map-like wall painting seamlessly spills into three-dimensional sculpture on the gallery floor.

But if Hayward's title refers to the process of hanging work on the walls, The Hook Up can also signify the insider connections shared by the artists, who all figure prominently in the city's arts community. Jenene Nagy co-founded Tilt Gallery last year; curator and critic Jeff Jahn is co-founder of the local arts blog PORT; and both TJ Norris and Jacqueline Ehlis have curated shows for the New American Art Union this year. Surprisingly, The Hook Up remains an underwhelming collection that hardly lives up to its supposed pedigree.

To Hayward's credit, his selections are smartly arranged, creating connections that pull the viewer through the gallery. The bright kelly green of Jahn's arching, floor-bound sculpture points toward the green expanse of Nagy's "Meadow." Ellen George's dangling vertebrae-like sculpture shows well next to Ehlis' molecular steel orbs. There's even a niche for art historical nods, as Sean Healy's neon-lit "Neighborly" conjures Dan Flavin, and Stephanie Robison's adjacent "Now Available" contains two stitched fabric clouds that evoke Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures.

Taken individually, though, these pieces suffer when removed from the context of the artists' bodies of work. Moreover, the show is undone by a sense of predictability: It's full of exactly the kind of work one would expect from these artists. And then, sadly, some of the inclusions are just lackluster. Brenden Clenaghen's "Black One," a tiny soot-colored hut that sits on a mirrored perch, disappears in one corner of the gallery. Ehlis' multi-colored steel spheres play like bad garden art. And Hayward's inclusion of Jahn's clumsy Minimalist sculpture, "Where We Go from Here," can only be explained as an act of kindness. It's disappointing, then, that in spite of Hayward's thoughtful curation, the talent here goes wasted: The Hook Up hangs itself on deservedly known quantities and too few surprises.

April 26, 2007

invisible.other
by John Motley

Last July, TJ Norris curated grey|area at the Guestroom Gallery, resulting in one of 2006's best group shows. This month, Norris has curated a sequel of sorts with invisible.other at the New American Art Union. Again, the work is largely muted and understated, but, collectively, far more visually arresting than grey|area. That the work achieves both is particularly apt given that Norris explains, in his curatorial statement, the show investigates the idea of "the blank stare": a term that simultaneously signifies passive reception and direct confrontation.

As such, there are pieces that threaten to disappear into a kind of self-effacing absence. Abi Spring's painting, "Wet," is barely there, as soft fluorescent yellow rows of teeth-like patterns creep across a bright, white panel. Conversely, Daniel Barron's enormous, plexi-mounted photograph seethes with fiery reds and oranges that surround a milky white foreground. Although indiscernibly abstract, the image's forms possess an explosive, biomorphic quality that suggests the magnification of some microscopic drama.

Still, the exhibition's best work inhabits the sprawl between these two extremes. Most entrancing are Laura Vandenburgh's six restrained studies that resemble topographical maps. In the delicate "Coast (huftaroy + reksteren)," two amorphous forms appear like islands, but the meticulous linear markings that cover them suggest something like tiny hairs on a fur pelt.

Perhaps the most emblematic piece in invisible.other is Michael Paulus' sculpture "Tabernacle," which occupies an unassuming space in a far corner of the gallery. Fabricated with wood, brass, and glass, "Tabernacle" appears to be little more than a display cabinet, a piece of furniture swiped from someone's living room. But that sidesteps what Paulus is up to. With a frosted pane of glass and its door seductively ajar, the piece sends viewers mixed messages. If the glass reveals nothing, the open door invites closer scrutiny, but, peeking inside, there's nothing more to discover. In physical terms, it recreates—and undermines—the viewer's expectation that, in some capacity, an artist make his or her innermost thoughts readily available. But opening the door of Paulus' sculpture insists on an ultimate disconnection between the viewer and, per Norris' title, the unseen interior of the artist.

June 22, 2006

grey/area
BY JOHN MOTLEY

When Guestroom opened beneath the Wonder Ballroom last January, the gallery set itself apart with a novel idea. As its name implies, each exhibition would be guest-curated by a local artist. But the payoff of this approach remained to be seen until grey/area, curated by TJ Norris. In his own work, Norris relies on the graceful juxtaposition of multiple photographic images as well as disparate media to create meaningful resonance for a viewer. Such a sensibility makes him a logical fit as a curator, and that grey/area works is a credit to Norris' thoughtful organization.

Of the 26 pieces in the show, none stand out as head and shoulders above the rest; rather, they work together as complements, strengthening the experience of viewing the body of work as a whole. Part of this coherence can be attributed to the highly controlled color palette. With few exceptions, the works are rendered in white, gray, and black. When they deviate, the colors are still cool and muted, such as the washed-out, earthen tones in Scott Wayne Indiana's painting "The Diamond Cutter."

While Norris' selections do represent a satisfying body of work, there are natural standouts. Three slight drawings by Ty Ennis show growth since his impressive solo show at the New American Art Union last year. In "Portrait of the Artist as the Ghost of Sarah Jane Palmer," Ennis mixes graphite, ink, and watercolors with his signature delicacy. Grayish watercolor blotches form the subject's face while wispy yet precise lines create a ghostly frame in varying degrees of detail.

Laura Fritz's sculpture "Illuminant" includes two flat, translucent forms that could either be as repulsive as sun-melted plastic or as mesmerizing as fragile sheets of ice. Presented on a mirrored surface, though, her sculpture takes on a deceptive hall-of-mirrors majesty, as the two forms and glints of light multiply in the reflection.

Norris could have strengthened the show, though, by excluding Daniel Duford's sketches and sculpted figurine from his "The Naked Boy" series. Unlike the light touch of Ennis' figuration, Duford's bold comic book-inspired illustrations seem out of step with the other artists' meditations on surface and detachment. Still, this is a minor flaw for a show that so successfully cultivates an even and atmospheric aesthetic.

November 10, 2005

Nucleo, part two in TJ Norris' trilogy of collaborative exhibitions, finds the artist creating abstract, circular photographs in response to experimental sound artists from Germany, the UK, and Ireland. The composers were given samples of Norris' previous work, and then created a sound piece in response. From their compositions, Norris has interpreted their work through drawings, sculptures, and now-photography. The images in Nucleo focus on the surface of decaying signage and weathered buildings. Moving in close to isolate the evidence of aging and weathering, Norris' photographs are highly abstract, and coming just after the artist's 40th birthday, likely a lot more personal than he'd lead you to believe. Chambers, 207 SW Pine #102, Through Nov 26

November 2005

If photography was originally intended as a replication of human vision, and our eyes operate on circular optical principles (as do nearly every sort of lens through history), why do we take for granted that photographs result in rectangular or square images? TJ Norris asks this question-and many more-in Nucleo, an installation of abstract circular photographs and aural goodness. Chambers, 207 SW Pine #102, Through Nov 26

October 13, 2005

TJ Norris, he of the late Soundvision Gallery, presents a new installation at Chambers combining new color photographs and a sound installation. Chambers, 207 SW Pine, #102, Through Nov. 26

November 20, 2003

* Battle of the Artist Curators The inaugural show at Haze Gallery showcases the personal work of artists who are better known locally as curators, or who have curated at least a few local exhibitions. This includes multi-taskers such as Jeff Jahn, TJ Norris, Eva Lake, Bryan Suereth, and others, but unfortunately leaves out Nan Curtis, Bruce Conkle, Stuart Horodner, and Terry Toedtemeier. We're not sure why, but halfway through the show's run, the artists are swapping out all their work, so now you have reason to go see it twice. Haze Gallery, 6635 N. Baltimore Ste. 211, 503-283-6863, Through Dec. 31

October 2, 2003

GENOMETRICS (TRIBRYD PT. 1)

After one year of consistently presenting the most challenging, thoughtful, and professional exhibitions at the Everett Station Lofts, Soundvision closes up shop on the 18th of the month. Via one cerebral show after another, Soundvision and owner TJ Norris presented serious conceptual artworks with a special emphasis on sound art, a marginalized but growing form of sonic installation. For Soundvision's last hurrah, Norris presents Genometrics, the first of three collaborative exhibitions that he has been working on with accomplished sound artists from across the world.

The first phase of Genometrics manifests itself as a series of post-minimalist sculptures, drawings, and accompanying soundtracks that don't pander to audiences in search of instant gratification. Composed almost entirely of abstract white, plastic-y materials such as glycerin, Mylar, and Dacron, Norris' work is impersonal, preferring to deal with DNA theory and mathematical systems than with soul-baring autobiography. On top of that, the audio components offered up through headphones are abstract compositions that could easily frustrate listeners unaccustomed to the asymmetric clicks and whirrs and static-y pops of experimental glitch music. Untitled (bestesends) is composed of 12 truncated egg shapes displayed in an elongated vitrine. Sporting seams from the mold they were cast in, the imperfect shapes are striped in creamy, sensuous layers. They are made of beeswax and glycerin, repellent materials whose opposing dynamics are forced to coexist under Norris's Plexiglas box. Humectant Interruption's soundtrack clicks back and forth, from one headphone to the other, creating a divisive effect in the listener's mind.

Norris's fetish of austerity borders on clinical self-containment, but there is an irrational element that underlies even his most heady, restrained work. Collaborating with artists whom he has never met and welcoming their input to his vision requires a great leap of faith. Using materials that are usually never mixed without any preconceived notion of the result suggests another nonlinear approach to impossibly complex structures like DNA and mathematical architecture. It's almost as if Norris is taking the "science" out of scientific inquiry and approaching theoretical problems from intuitive and nonsensical angles in search of new versions of Truth. How unexpectedly pleasant it is to find Dadaist roots under the mask of what appears to be an emotionally blank, intellectual execution. - CHAS BOWIE

September 4, 2003

Genometrics (Tribryd Pt.1)
After one year of presenting the most sophisticated and handsome exhibitions of all the Everett Station galleries, Soundvision is bowing out due to--big surprise--economic factors. Following impressive showings at The Best Coast and The Modern Zoo, owner TJ Norris is rededicating himself to art making, as witnessed by his farewell show, Genometrics, the first of a three-part collaboration with experimental sound artists. Soundvision, 625 NW Everett #108, 238-7007, Through Oct 18

May 15, 2003

Visual Review: Laura Fritz & J. Frede

Soundvision, 625 NW Everett #108, 238-7007, through May 24 Local artist Laura Fritz delivers a disturbing and fascinating installation, Indication 2, in Soundvision's darkened front gallery. A series of thin black tables fill the space, their contents suggesting a dark, futuristic fetish laboratory. One table holds a cluster of translucent, jelly-like pods that one can easily imagine growing and multiplying out of control. Another table sports yards and yards of medical tubing and a plastic bag containing a urine-like substance.

One original creation from this exhibit will undoubtedly turn up in future nightmares--a clump of hair, dotted with mysterious white droplets that lurches, crawls, and rolls around, as if trying to gather the momentum to hop off the table and realize its latent, evil intentions. How Fritz made this stomach-churning kinetic hairball I don't know, nor do I want to know. The moment that I first saw Indication 2 in Soundvision's darkened gallery is an experience that I will remember for a very long time.

Should one feel the need to sit down after Fritz's clinical mindfuck, check out J. Frede's Selected Phonographies in the back room. 24 tiny speakers, stripped to their barest states, dangle from the ceiling, looking like a suite of limp stethoscopes. Frede's hour-long opus takes the listener through a whispery tour of Bees on a Sunday Afternoon in Griffith Park, Church Bells in the Morning, and A Search Helicopter Flying Over My House. Separated into three channels, the audio track assumes sculptural properties as one moves throughout the space.

Soundvision's commitment to audio-based artists from outside of the region is already laudable, and when such efforts are coupled with knock-out solo shows like Fritz's current installation, the results are nothing short of magnificent. - CHAS BOWIE

May 2003

Selected Phonographies _Phonographies is a fancy word for field recordings, which J. Frede has been making across the U.S. and Europe. He presents a selection of collected ambient noises like circling helicopters and rustling leaves hissing and whirring from tiny speakers dangling from the gallery ceiling. Frede will perform a live set May 2. Soundvision, 625 NW Everett #108, 238-7007, Through May 24

April 10, 2003

While the Portland art community continues to proudly wave it's yardsticks of local artistic successes--the birth of The Organ, the inclusion of Miranda July in last year's Whitney Biennial, and the eagerly awaited inception of the Portland Center for the Advancement of Culture--a small but encouraging measure of growth has come to our attention. The press releases sent out by the galleries in the Everett Station Lofts are getting much headier, as witnessed by those for Fluorescence: brighter than white at Field Gallery ("When light shines on fluorescent paint the molecules convert high energy ultraviolet light into electromagnetic waves within the visible spectrum,") and Stratum at Soundvision ("Their work alters viewer's perceptions by taking advantage of photography's semiotic status as both indexical and iconic"). This thoughtful, somewhat academic approach toward crafting exhibitions isn't what we have been conditioned to expect from the well-intentioned but generally lackluster Everett Station crowd, but these two exhibits would certainly indicate that there may be a change in the air.

...at Soundvision, Stratum presents a much quieter group of artists who don't threaten to burn your retinas out. The five photographers involved are surface junkies who explore systems of nature and patterns of memory. Julie Orser, who is leaving Portland to pursue a graduate degree at CalArts, has created a breathtaking and haunting body of photographs, printed on the back of antique dominoes. The images, many of which come from her family albums, are like palm sized pearls of distant memories--galloping horses, empty beds, scraggly trees, hitchhikers, and graveyards. Collectively, the installation is touching, cinematic, and more than a little Victorian.

Donald Jones has created a multi-paneled, quasi-pixelated wall installation of photos from the surface of New York's ultra-polluted Gowanus Canal. Formally, it's an interesting piece, although the presentation feels arbitrary.

Belgian artist Martina Verhoeven's photographs resemble crystalline galaxies--they are the glacial microscopic cracks and formations of ice ferns. I am not steadfastly in the camp that cries "bigger is better," but these arresting images deserve to be at least 4x6' so that viewers can get lost in their icy beauty.

These two shows couldn't be more different, but together they signal a raising of the bar for Everett Station, a call for the galleries there to create thoughtful exhibitions that showcase meaningful work being created both in and outside of Portland. - CHAS BOWIE

October 2, 2002

Up to now, TJ Norris' new gallery, Soundvision, isn't very Portland. It's New York or San Francisco, or even Berlin. The gallery's, ahem, vision of coupling visual mediums with audio installation and performance is one that hasn't had much of a home in Portland. Nonetheless, it sits alongside the other galleries that line Everett just south of Broadway.

The opening show is Seth Nehil's "Basket"--walnut ink drawings consisting of organically dense lines coalescing into hubs like a handmade diagram of the networked society. Though not a high-tech piece involving video capture or the like, it's an excellent introduction for the gallery. The work speaks to technocratic themes of networking and isolation without having to rely on the technology itself. Nehil and Bethany Wright will also be the first artists featured in Soundvision's monthly performance series, Soundbytes. They'll break out microphones to capture the sound of breaking things, thereby chiding the audience into "making a certain type of listening sound."

The upcoming shows by photographer Chris Komater and the paintings of Cary Leibowitz, who wrings meaning out of simple phrases and typography, should be interesting. However, the promise of Soundvision's mission will be most realized after the New Year. Internationally lauded sound artists such as Taylor Duepree and Terre Thaemlitz test the boundaries of neo-intellectualized electronic music, but what's more noteworthy is that their art transcends the strictly audio, going deep into the visual mediums. They are scheduled to present everything from interactive sound spaces to "A/V theatre." "The initial attraction may be from people interested in the music, but the sound and visual work feed each other and are indicative of each other, and that's what I want to present," explains Norris.

So Soundvision becomes a de facto challenge to Portland (especially with the city's low-tech musical heritage). Will Portland appreciate and support having such a direct line to some of the most innovative artists working in these digital modes? As Norris said, and undoubtedly hopes, "I think that they'll get it."

- ELLIOTT ADAMS