Kate Towers’ pop up Soft Serve will be up through this Saturday (7/25)—only a few days left to check out these amazing pieces. Also, she’s replenished the rack with some new gems, and is offering all Soft Serve items at a 10% discount! Thanks to our lovely intern Emma Lou for modeling Kate’s rad terrycloth dress!
Thanks for visiting us again Honey Kennedy! Photos by the lovely Allison Burt-Tilden.
Loving our selection of Fredrik Averin books currently in the shop. Follow him on Tumblr HERE.
Thanks to everyone who showed up last night to celebrate Kate Towers and the new creations she made for our special July pop-up, Soft Serve. We are hoping to replenish the rack by Wednesday, but there’s still a few little gems up for grabs…
Luc Tuymans exhibition catalog published by SF MoMA/Wexner Center for the Arts/D.A.P. ($60, signed by the artist)
“I saw this show 5 times in SF and I wish I could paint like him and as fast.”
WWWW tote bag by MODERNWOMEN LA ($20)
“Raised by a single mother—womyn are the world.”
Emily Counts, Transponders, 2015, stoneware, porcelain, platinum luster, cotton rope, 11 x 25.5 x 9” ($1200)
“Emily is my fav ceramics artist—my second is Marcel Duchamp.”
Thanks, Jonathan!
Check out Jonathan’s paintings in our current show Everything We Ever Wanted.
Portland’s got a new great art crit blog! Take a look at Sam Hopple’s review of our current show on 60 Inch Center.
The buzz continues for our current exhibition, Everything We Ever Wanted… Congrats to Jonathan Casella for his feature on SightUnseen this weekend.
“Unlike a traditional bottle, bowl, and fruit motif, the objects of the still lifes in Everything We Ever Wanted lend a degree of specificity that suggest unique personality—the tableaus are alive with vibrant individuality. Wearing similar palettes and styles, the paintings appear that they might be of the same social circle, happily coexisting in the gallery. There is a casual and good humored tone to their rapport as they rest comfortably among patterned linens, enjoy a snack, and leaf leisurely through the pages of Artforum. But as casual as the mood might be, the show is absolutely worth taking seriously. The trio of artists create richly layered works that build and reveal, grow and shift, creating an ever changing viewing experience that seeks to offer everything you ever wanted, and comes close at least for a time.”
Read the full review HERE
On Monday, Nationale’s new show, Everything We Ever Wanted, was extended through July 6, and it’s easy to see why. Though the show’s promotional materials tout an interest in the divide between what Lana Del Rey would call “the real and the fehhhhhhhk,” it’s also got echoes of post-net art, and brings an explosion of color to the shop/gallery’s tidy, white box.
There are Sarah Mikenis’ paintings of grouped, unidentifiable objects—they’re weird homunculi in gorgeous jewel tones, like an army of .gifs invading our tangible, 3-d plane. Jonathan Cassella’s works in acrylic do something similar: They’re paintings, but so heavily textured they read as collage. I checked with Nationale’s Gabi Lewton-Leopold: They’re not. It’s a delightful trick of the eye writ in broad gestures, and the color scheme you’d expect from a D.A.R.E. t-shirt ca. 1994, not precise cross-hatching behind swathes of paint.
Then there are Katie Batten’s paintings—perfect, picture book-illo assemblages that are like acid-hued I Spys for the digital age. They’re like getting to see inside a stranger’s browser history, if that stranger was more into lifestyle porn than porn-porn. I spy: Goldfish in a bowl cribbed straight from Matisse. I spy: a slice of pizza, a nod to snackwave, the web-based snack-food obsession the Hairpin’s dubbed “the internet’s saltiest meme.” I spy: Artforum. I spy: A Dutch-blue-painted flowerpot. In another one of her paintings, Batten zooms in on what reads as the top of a dresser piled with a sliced geode, a BFF necklace, a crucifix. The Tumblr teen girl aesthetic is one of my favorite trends in contemporary art right now, and it’s very much present in this painting, in objects so strongly associated with a particular age (adolescence) and a particular time (mid-‘90s?).
Batten’s paintings are, for the most part, the show’s only plainly representational pieces. Though Mikenis’ appear to have been painted from tricked-out still lifes, they read as abstractions. They’re fascinating. But they evade categorization. Meanwhile, Battens’ paintings are all about categorization. They’re invested in objects. And with their impossibly bright colors and smooth lines, they manage to be both cartoonish and very clean. I want to hang out in a room with 500 of them.
Everything We Ever Wanted is a shot in the arm. It’s a burst of color without being a mess, an onslaught of references you don’t necessarily need to understand. It’s as bright as you want, and then some.
Congrats to Katie Batten, one of our three painters this month, for her feature on the always impressive Women Artists blog.
Impressions / Aidan Koch
Impressions is Aidan Koch’s third graphic novel. It tells the story of a young figure model and her relationships with her mother, her best friend, and the man drawing her. Set in an ambiguously modern time, the book captures a young woman’s reluctant journey into self-awareness.
Impressions was painted over three months at the Maison Des Auteurs residency in rural France, where Koch spent the spring of 2014.
Aidan Koch is a visual artist and storyteller from Olympia, WA. After a year in Sebastopol, CA, she is now based in New York.
72 pages
Soft cover, section sewn, color offset
8.25 x 6 inches
Edition of 100, $15
First Impressions of Greece / Mary Manning
Mary Manning’s debut book, First Impressions of Greece, documents recent travels through the Grecian landscape.
Mary Manning is a photographer based in New York City. She runs the website Unchanging Window.
48 pages
Hard cover, section sewn, color offset
7.5 x 5 inches
Edition of 100, $ 22
Painter’s Journal / Joshua Abelow
Painter’s Journal, by Joshua Abelow, is made up of six journals that chronicle Abelow’s first year living in New York in the late 90s.
Published in 2012
6 x 9 inches
112 pages
offset
Edition of 1000, $15
Katie Batten, You Also Have a Pizza, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 34 x 34”, sold
Katie Batten, Boy’s Club, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 26 x 26”, sold
Katie Batten, Galentine’s Day, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24”, sold
BIO
Katie Batten received her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2012. Working out of Philadelphia, PA, she has exhibited at such institutions as Gallery 1301, Baltimore, MD; Nomadic Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; and Tacocat Cooperative, Columbus, OH.
A beaming “congratulations” to Elizabeth Malaska for her recent Money for Women Grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund!
About the Fund from their site: Barbara Deming (1917-1984) was a feminist, lesbian, poet, writer and nonviolent activist in the civil rights, anti-war and women’s movements. She founded the Money for Women Fund in 1975 to give financial and moral support to creative women. Money for Women is the oldest ongoing feminist granting agency. After Barbara’s Deming’s death in 1984, we became a memorial fund. While other grant sources have come and gone, our fund is in its third decade. We are still feminist and still willing to take risks. The fund gives encouragement and grants to individual feminists in the arts (writers, and visual artists). The Fund relies on a volunteer Board and judges to collaborate in making awards.
Jonathan Casella, The Fizz, 2015, acrylic on panel, 30.5 x 24”
Jonathan Casella, What’s After the Great Escape? Loneliness and Something Else…, 2015, acrylic on panel, 30.5 x 24”
Jonathan Casella, Once Hidden in Time, Twice Forgotten Until Found Near the Pressed Flowers, 2015, acrylic on panel, 13 x 10”
Jonathan Casella, A Benevolent One, but Anyone Who Understands This Vault Wasn’t Made Pinching Pennies, 2015, acrylic on panel, 13 x 10"
Jonathan Casella, Jewish Girl from Florida. Her Nose., 2015, acrylic on panel, 14 x 10 1/2”
Jonathan Casella, The Drive Saw Palm Trees (right), 2015, acrylic on panel, 17 x 15”
BIO
Jonathan Casella is a Texas born painter now living in Portland, OR. He’s studied art in San Francisco and has shown at CAMH in Houston, the Luggage Store in San Francisco, Galerie C.O.A. in Montréal, QC, and in various pop-ups set up in New York hotel rooms.
Sarah Mikenis, Everything We Always Wanted, 2014, oil on canvas, 48 x 42", sold
Sarah Mikenis, Shifting Back, 2014, oil on canvas, 48 x 36”
Sarah Mikenis, Untitled (Confetti Party), 2015, latex, acrylic, spray-paint on canvas, 32 x 24”, sold
BIO
Sarah Mikenis currently lives and works in Eugene, OR while pursuing her MFA at the University of Oregon. Born and raised in Portland, she has shown locally at the White Box and the Gallery at the Jupiter Hotel, and is a member of the artist run Ditch Projects in Springfield, OR. Congrats to Sarah who is spending the summer at the renowned Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine.
Head over to Votre Grande Soeur to hear more about our current artist, Emily Counts’ process. Thank you to Allison for the wonderful photos and interview.
We were pleased to meet Megan Harned, the newly appointed Visual Arts writer for the Willamette Week, last weekend. Here’s her short review of Emily Counts’ The Ins and Outs:
“To answer my own question, Emily Counts new work is Freudian and feminist, weird and queer. As the name of the show suggests, The Ins and Outs has a great deal of sexual subtext, but these works aren’t simple iterations of mortars and pestles. Some are freestanding sculptures in the round and others are strung together and hung up like unwieldy ritual ornamentation. Segmented ceramic rope is a unifying motif that causes the viewer to recall intestinal tissue alongside gilded phalluses and perforated cervices. Counts handles her medium well and creates a variety of contrasting textures through manipulation and glazes. They heighten the physicality of the work and bring out our own desire to touch, fondle, and caress the sculpture on display.”
These are just a few of our favorite moments from Emily Counts’ sculptures now on view until June 1 in her show, The Ins and Outs.
Nationale proudly presents a special reading by Portland writer and teacher, Tom Spanbauer this Wednesday, May 20 (7:30 p.m.) at the gallery.
Spanbauer is an American writer whose work often explores issues of sexuality, race, and the ties that bind disparate people together. Raised in Idaho, Spanbauer has lived in Kenya and across the United States. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches a course titled dangerous writing. He graduated in 1988 from Columbia with an MFA in Fiction and has written five novels, including I Loved You More (Hawthorne Books), from which he will read. Spanbauer is the recent recipient of the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award for outstanding contributions to Oregon’s literary life.
“It is a terrifying thing to bring your inner life out of the closet and read it aloud to a group… Because I encourage excellence, and each of us has our own excellent, and excellence only comes with not being afraid of who you are. To learn to speak your truth honestly with a clear voice takes lots of practice, and every trick in the book to keep you going down the arduous, cruel, lonely, glorious path of a writer.” –Tom Spanbauer, on the dangerous writing technique.
