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Art Briefs |
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Portland Design Festival
Beginning October 7
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Forget Bumbershoot, forget the Time-Based Arts Festival, and forget MusicFestNW. What you need to do is check out the Portland Design Festival.
The fun begins October 7 when the City of Roses hosts a ten-day celebration of quality design from Oregon and Southwest Washington, featuring a design competition at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and an awards ceremony to be held October 8.
One highlight is a presentation from Kit Hinrichs of international design firm Pentagram, and Delphine Hirasuna of Hirasuna Editorial, two graphic designers discussing the gap between business and design.
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Expect a lively keynote address from Marcel Wanders of Dutch design group Droog. With a reputation as “the man who saved design from itself,” Wanders is sure to have a prescription for the design blahs. The festival culminates in a gala affair featuring a spectrum of arts—dance performances, poetry readings, films, and more—to honor Portland’s mayor, Vera Katz, and her contributions to the design community. Katz’s mayoral office set aside $100,000 for the festival’s inauguration in 2003.
Not everyone hopes to see the festival in 2005 or in any other year, however. Some members of the local design community confess ignorance about the event, which either shows that organizers haven’t had the money to launch a strong publicity campaign or they’re maintaining selective outreach efforts that critics of last year’s festival called “exclusive and embarrassingly elitist.”
Some factions complain that the festival is redundant, duplicating events like the annual Rosey Awards, which recognize Portland’s advertising and design industries. Alicia Johnson, member of the festival’s executive committee admits her peers “have a valid concern,” but points out that the Portland Design Festival showcases various design fields under one umbrella. Tafflyn Williams-Thomas, a consultant for the collaborative, says she’s “not aware of other festivals in the US that really take the aspect of problem-solving made visual, if you will, and look at how that can be applied across disciplines.”
Despite the modest controversies, the festival will be worth it to see what the city and region can offer to propel the modest burg to global status in the design world. —Cielo Lutino
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Tashiro-Kaplan Building Opens
(Thank God!)
The Tashiro-Kaplan complex has officially opened its doors, providing a welcome burst of fresh blood to the heart of Seattle’s Pioneer Square. Situated kitty-corner to crackhead park at the corner of Third and Yesler, the TK building houses affordable artist live/work lofts and new gallery spaces. Hopefully now Seattle can do a better job at providing affordable living spaces for artists and bringing edgy galleries to the area without paving the way for the sort of development that eventually prices these same people out.
There are no less than five new gallery spaces in the TK building, three of which are filled with relocated tenants with established reputations: Garde Rail Gallery, SOIL, Forgotten Works, and the newly inaugurated Platform Gallery. The fifth, 4Culture has not yet moved in.
It is, in fact, the newbie that’s assembled the most intriguing show for their debut. While the other three have some interesting work on display, Platform provides the most stimulating exhibition to wrap your brain around.
“Still Lives” features work from Carlee Fernandez (LA) and Keith Yurdana (Portland). These two artists’ work are surprisingly complementary. Fernandez uses altered taxidermic animals and various plant elements to compose tiny, surrealistic tableaux of weird beauty, like baby birds with tree branches growing though them, or a black rabbit with a cluster of cherries embedded in its body. Yurdana uses drawings and organically-designed sculptures to represent a no-less-surreal landscape of knotted roots and internal organs sublimated to a strange sort of medical and mathematical architecture of the mind. The most arresting piece, “Flora-Graft,” greets you when you enter the space. A huge, twisted branch (root?) hangs from the ceiling, covered with stitched skin. Surgical clamps peel back a section of the tree to reveal its bulbous innards and you can see tubes running out of it into a vase underneat. —Kristopher Monroe
Platform Gallery’s “Still Lives” runs through October 14.
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