sm{art}: Time Based Art Festival

Art and Design post by Katie Presley on September 16, 2010 - 10:02am; tagged art, female artists, performance art, political art.

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It's festival season here in Portland, and MFNW was just the beginning. Running now thru September 19th, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art is putting on its 8th annual Time-Based Art (TBA) festival. Here's your Bitch guide to women-centric performances and exhibitions over the next few days.

 

A picture of a hole in a grey wall. The edges of the hole are pink and you can see a high-heeled shoe and black nylons through the hole, they are kicking through the wall.
Photo Still from "Walk this Way," Kate Gilmore 2008. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Hard Edge, Hard Work. Curated by Stephanie Snyder.

This exhibit will focus on female artists whose film and video work explores the concept of abstraction. The language on the PICA website over-generalizes gender in the art world ("...seeking to consider the obsessions and impulses of female abstractionists..."), but the artists lined up for the exhibition (late filmmaker Maya Deren and contemporary performance/video artist Kate Gilmore, among others) guarantee a mind-bending, multi-dimensional series of perspectives on what it means to make abstract art as a woman.

 

 

thankyoubar_mask

Still from "The Thank you Bar," Emily Johnson 2010. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Emily Johnson/Catalyst: The Thank You Bar.

Director and choreographer Johnson's latest project explores ideas of home, displacement, history, yearning, and igloo myth through the media of dance, visual images, music and storytelling. Personally, I'm going because I want find out what an "igloo myth" is, and because I'm intrigued by those fish on her arms. Plus I'm obsessed with dance. Basically, there is nothing about this show I DON'T want to see. 

 

 

a woman sits behind a sheer curtain on a stool. It looks like there is some sort of pillow wrapped around her head. She is active, her arm is outstreched and grabbing the pillow-wrap.
"Blanket," Noelle Stiles and Danielle Kelly, 2010. Photo courtesy Noelle Stiles

Danielle Kelly and Noelle Stiles: Blanket.

Blanket begins as an installation piece (hugging the pieces is apparently encouraged!), morphs into an interactive performance piece, and ends as a combination of the two. Artists Danielle Kelly and Noelle Stiles are engaging with a synthetically-obsessed culture, and are implicating their bodies in the installation as keepers of information separate from and involved with constructed materials. And did I mention you can hug the art? Because you can.  

 

For dates, times, and to buy tickets to these and other shows, see the PICA:TBA website.

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