Ellen Lesperance

My comfort zone generally runs toward representational and narrative art but I try to keep my mind as open as my eyes. Down at Upfor gallery here in Portland there's a display of work by local artist Ellen Lesperance that is worth your time if you happen to be in town. Her process is highly conceptual. Working from sweaters worn by feminist activists as well as the designs worn by Amazons on classical Greek pottery (!) she develops her own abstract pieces on hand drawn grids. Now concepts can be interesting or not, without having much impact on the visual end product. When the end product is as eloquent and captivating as these, it tends to deepen the interest, adding a layer of satisfying back story and possibly piquing the viewer's interest in those of the artist. In this case, that's the role of feminist activists who often sacrificed many other aspects of their lives to bring about necessary and still nascent changes in society. But process and intent should never be what draws you to a work of art in the first place, and they can be safely set aside until you have first taken in the finished product. Aesthetics is still the unavoidable root challenge of all visual art, despite numerous attempts to set it aside during the 20th century. These pieces meet that challenge with a startling synthesis of painstaking meticulous detail and elegant informality. The hand drawn uneven grid gives the structural aspect of the work room to breathe. The individual paintings are hung upon a background of hand-printed silks, and on a small table near the center of the room, small  statuettes of activists and Amazons cavort together across the millennia in common cause. It's as much installation as it is painting and sculpture, and it's a quietly powerful room to spend a little time in if you get the chance.
The show will up through March 30 at Upfor Gallery
You can see more of Ellen Lesperance's work at her website:
www.ellenlesperance.com

Leonid Tishkov

Private Moon series - "Moon and Hunter"

Private Moon series - "The Crane for the Moon" Xiaogang container yards - Photo Po-I Chen

Private moon series, Journey to Paris "More than simply dead"…Homage to Marie Laurencin

Private Moon series - "Who Washed Ashore?"  Sizihwan - Photo Po-I Chen

Private Moon series - "Two Moons" arctic 2010

Leonid Tishkov is a a former physician from Moscow, who is now a conceptual artist. In addition to a variety of installation work he has spent years lugging an electric moon around the world and photographing it a stunning variety of evocative settings. Often the artist is himself incorporated into the picture creating a narrative scene in which the moon, cast down from the heavens interacts with the lonely mortal. While it is unclear whether the photographer Po-I Chen is responsible for taking all of the actual photos, he (and any others that might have been involved) certainly deserve some of the credit for these images. There are loads of them to look through on his blog:
leonid-tishkov.blogspot.ca
Click on the tag Private moon if you want to see just these or you can scroll back through all his work if you're curious.
 thanks to www.booooooom.com for posting these before me.

Bijijoo

"Jacqueline and the Dragonfly"  oil on panel  24" x 38"  2012

"Alex and the Pill Bug"  oil on panel  36" x 24"  2012

"Alex and the Pill Bug"  detail

"Preparation for a Demonstration of a Pick-Axe"  oil on panel  13" x 19"  2013

"Ghost no. 1" oil on panel  24" x 36"  2012

Bijijoo is the presumed pseudonym of an artist in Portland, OR who is apparently obsessed with giant insects, decapitated celebrity heads, and people holding hams, just for starters. Not all of these obsessions are represented here - you'll just have to look through the rest of his work yourself. He is also, it turns out, a Ph.D. chemist (trained as a biophysicist), and quite possibly a satanist. Oh and a clown and a collector of broken dolls too. This is all as a way of pointing out that his art goes beyond the paintings and strays into areas of conceptualism and avant-garde humor. Have you ever heard of the giant goose that some claim haunts old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest? No? Well you can read all about it here. Did you know an episodes of the TV show "30 Rock" featured characters holding hams, and that the entire concept behind this was unfairly stolen from the mind of bijijoo? No? Well you can follow the course of his litigation here. The world of Bijijoo is a complex cascade of satyrical humor, where nothing is quite what it seems, or perhaps it is but also something more. But in the end it is the paintings, various series that operate around conceptual premises (Presidents holding hams, still lives with celebrity heads, etc.,) that are at the center of his creative enterprise. And the paintings have steadily matured over time allowing his dark humor to haunt the viewer with disturbing realism
visit his website: bijijoo.com.,
And for plenty more go to www.flickr.com/photos/bijijoo

Michael Beitz

"Dining Table"  wood

"Dining Table"  wood

"It's no Picnic Table"  wood

from "Body/Brick"  cement

from "Body/Brick"  cement

Michael Beitz enjoys a visual joke. But the humor is not just silliness. He's playing with the ideas of organic and man-made form, juxtaposing the two in a variety of ways in order to reconsider their meaning. When a table is no longer a flat surface is it still a table? What if the walls really did have ears? Or noses? The artist seems less driven by consistent intellectual inquiry than by whim and whimsy, turning what-if doodles into realities. This is not a criticism. Artist's sometimes get a little too full of themselves, believing that the rigor of their intellectual thought can sustain the aesthetic of their creations. It usually does not. Better to explore with open wonder and see what profound ideas emerge from the chaos. That is the real wellspring of art. Craft, discipline, intelligence, and critical thinking are all important tools for any artform, and if undeveloped the art will fail. But they should never control the art. They should become like muscle memory, acting to realize the artist's playful imaginings. In this sense Michael Beitz's work occasionally succeeds brilliantly. There's not a whole lot of work on his website but there is a tree with hinged branches, a house frame that gently folds up,  a pair of giant hands operated by bike pedals that will slap the operator and more, so it's worthwhile taking a look. I look forward to seeing what he does next.
www.michaelbeitz.com

Dan Tague

"Reality Sucks"

"Hope in the Whitehouse"

"Resistance is Futile"

"The Almighty Dollar"

"American Muscle" 1969 Firebird Hood

Well to day is Black Friday - that commercial flip-side to Thanksgiving. For those outside the US, I'll just say... it's a long story. But it's a perfect day to post these. Actually, there's a lot more to Dan Tague's work than cleverly folded US currency. There's all kinds of conceptual work, installations, graphics, and so on. But the folded money is what first caught my attention and it neatly captures the overall tone of his work. Which is to say, both highly cynical and slyly humorous at the same time. The money pieces are presented asquite large glossy prints, simply matted and framed and make an arresting presence in person. The bills are generally photographed on a black background, the one exception I found being "Hope in the Whitehouse" photographed on white,  presumably because it was the only one expressing anything optimistic. In general his work reflects a highly skeptical view of American politics and history, and this themes overlap his personal experience as a resident of the famously flooded ninth ward in New Orleans. Much of the work since then has dealt directly and indirectly with the government's response to the disaster. To look through all of this for yourself just go to his website: dantaguestudio.com
or his gallery's website: Civilian Art Projects.

Myeongbeom Kim

Untitled  Deer taxidermy, branches, leaves

"Edison"  15" x 15" x 30"  Branch, goldfish, glass, steel

"Leave"  installation

"Chair"

Untitled  balloons, oak tree

Most of my posts fall in the category of representational painting. That's what I know. It's what I do and feel best qualified to comment on. But it's not the only thing I'm interested in looking at, and it's good to mix things up now and then. Myeongbeom Kim is a sculptor, installation and performance artist whose work is quite varied, and reflects an ongoing obsession with trees, balloons and goldfish bowls. There's a lot of clever juxtapositions going on and some interesting commentary on both the fragility and tenacity of nature. But mostly he displays the wit and ingenuity that all art requires to take the viewer by surprise and force us to look at the familiar as if it were new and strange. There's a lot of work to look through on the website so take your time.

www.myeongbeomkim.com

I saw this work first on www.artistaday.com

Kevin Cyr

Kevin Cyr's primary angle of approach to art is to document small commercial vehicles that have seen better days. He takes those vehicles out of their, obviously urban, context and paints them as affectionate portraits. Not unlike a number of famous painters from the 19th century on, who decided that the poor average worker made as suitable a subject as the rich and famous, Kevin Cyr seems to say, and what about these working class automobiles? Their dents, rust and graffiti are only the accumulation of character. He's clearly having fun with the subject and not taking himself too seriously, but he has another very promising alternative expression: designing, painting and actually building satirical alternative mobile dwellings. In addition to the mobile bike home below he has also designed a shopping cart camper!
Check out all his vehicle portraits and more on his website: www.kevincyr.net
Thanks to the folks at Vivianite.net for introducing me to his work.
(and don't forget to click on the images for larger views)
















"Bushwick"

















"Glorious Work. Happy Life."



CAMPER BIKE PROJECT


















"Scaling the summit"















actual camper bike
















blueprint for camper bike