The Front : NEWS ARTISTS ABOUT ARCHIVE CONTACT LINKS
June 1-July 7, 2013
Opening reception: Saturday June 8th, 6-10 pm 
Presenting Subduction Zone: 15 Videos from Portland, Oregon screening on opening night, curated by Stephen Slappe
Room 1:
Jerry Therio
NEON GRAFFITI: TCHOUPAZINE
New Orleans native neon artist Jerry Therio uses the magic of neon to bring to life graffiti painted by another local artist Jonathan Shaw. Therio will transform Room 1 of The Front gallery with neon tags inspired by a little bit of local bar lore…..Bar owner Fred Laredo of Tyler’s Beer Gardens, a jazz night club, bar owner Jed Palmer of F & M patio, and Nasty Ned owner of Le Bon Temps Bar late one night while holding court proclaimed the area between the bars............THE TCHOUPAZINE TRIANGLE.............. AND THAT'S A FACT JACK..............how about that...........?
Room 2:
Christopher Deris
Peripheral Harvest
A memory stays with me of an influential professor during graduate school that came from a family of farmers. During one of our class discussions he told an allegory of the way a farmer tends his main crops. A good farmer is always allowing a little natural experimentation to take place on the edges. Never cutting this back, but instead, watching what happens. You never know, what you learn from that experimental growth around the edges can someday be vital to your main crop.
Drawing is immediate by nature; it is a process that allows your hand to stay one step ahead of your head. It is an important tool for experimentation in the studio, quickly capturing fleeting thoughts that are passing through; never seeming that important at the moment.
The drawings presented here are collections of work that span a decade and have all served their purpose as experiments that fostered larger crops. Although they have existed on the periphery of more cohesive bodies of work, each has a value and beauty of their own.
Rooms 3 & 4:
Claire Rau
Bonfire
After the series of devastating wildfires throughout the Unites States last summer, woodworking changed into something darker in spirit for me; the material itself is tinder for conflagration. This particular work is constructed of different types of plywood, an incredibly strong and economic media that has an innate feeling of the incomplete as it is rarely used in isolation. The veneer that provides the surface appearance of a more luxurious wood, the visible process of manufacturing raw pine plywood, and the delicate striping on the edge of each form combine to give a deep aesthetic pleasure. These aspects of beauty and irony mesh with the underlying idea of the work, the character of worth.
Conceptually Bonfire is linked to questions of value. The objects within the pile are a mixture of the precious and the mundane. Function and ornament serve diverse purposes depending on the need and motivation of the user. Rare items have both an inherent status and a connection to history while everyday things are measured by what and how well a purpose they serve. With the dawning failure of austerity plans and stimulus packages, problems remain in defining imperative requirements for people, businesses, and governments. I believe this heap of objects connects to these questions on a basic level, such as deciding a household budget, managing the sale of superfluous items, and what to save when an emergency arises in a fiery tornado.
Backyard:
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Anthony Hudson, Monsoonronome, 2013
Subduction Zone: 15 Videos from Portland, Oregon
Curated by Stephen Slappe
Artists: Anthony Hudson, Arnold Kemp, Ashby Lee Collinson, Brenna Murphy, Carl Diehl, Chase Biado, Chris Freeman, Julie Perini, Kiel Fletcher, Laura Heit, Nadia Buyse, Rebecca Carlisle-Healy, Rebecca Peel, Stephen Slappe, Zachary Davis
The artists included in Subduction Zone have helped foster Portland's status as an outpost for wayward, engaged artists. It is difficult to wrangle them all under a single heading but it’s safe to say that their works, like their city, suggest utopian ideals riddled with uncertainty. As a group, they create moving images that mine the rich history of experimental film and video making while mixing in adequate doses of net art, conceptual art, rock videos, animation, and performance art. From Anthony Hudson’s hilarious structural cut-up of a lip sync performance by Jinkx Monsoon to Brenna Murphy’s trippy, meditative patterns constructed from documentary footage, the videos in Subduction Zone slide between and around genres with strangeness, humor, and smarts.
Stephen Slappe (b. Charleston, WV) is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. Slappe's work has exhibited and screened internationally in venues such as Centre Pompidou (Paris and Metz), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's TBA Festival, The Horse Hospital (London), The Sarai Media Lab (Delhi), Consolidated Works (Seattle), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), and Artists' Television Access (San Francisco). His projects have been funded by multiple grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council of Portland and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission.
Slappe is an Assistant Professor and Chair of Video & Sound at Pacific Northwest College of Art. He is an active curator and organizer of video and film exhibitions including New Mutants at Worksound Gallery (Portland) and Out of the Great Northwest at The Horse Hospital (London). Slappe is an amateur film archivist and has presented programs of archival 16mm films such as Rolling Deep: Skateboarding Films 1965-1980, Static Age: The Culture of Early Television, and Drugs, Disease, Disaster.
Anthony Hudson - Monsoonronome
Laura Heit - The Deep Dark
Nadia Buyse (DUBAIS) - Step Back
Chase Biado - Mom and Dad
Julie Perini - 306 Steps in Guanajuato (channel #2)
Zachary Davis - Wendigo
Ashby Lee Collinson - Princess Dies IV: Part 2
Arnold Kemp - WHEN I FALL IN LOVE I FALL DOWN
Rebecca Carlisle-Healy - Arrive Maris In Ronde
Brenna Murphy - exosensr
Stephen Slappe - Bad Religion
Kiel Fletcher - 1984
Carl Diehl - Never Let Me Go (Reprise)
Chris Freeman - A scene from TNG episode 3x09 "The Vengeance Factor"
Rebecca Peel - NEW VERSIONS