
John Montague’s posthumous exhibit at Nine Gallery, Willamette Greenway 45.525951° N, 122.67341° W, is a subtly powerful testament to the artist’s powers of patient observation. Given that Montague died last year of a rare but rapidly advancing illness that saw dementia and incapacity set in within a mere six weeks, it’s also a moving reminder to stop, look around, and appreciate the spirit of place. And because this is the first-ever art exhibition by a man who was a career software engineer, it’s a motivating invitation to all of us who chose other ways to make a living yet fancy ourselves creatively capable.
Willamette Greenway, on view through November 2, is a split-screen installation with one screen featuring a succession of still images and the other featuring video images, all taken by Montague from 2017 until 2023. His widow, artist Linda Hutchins, put together the installation in collaboration with Portland filmmaker and archivist Stephen Slappe. (Read Brett Campbell’s companion ArtsWatch story about Montague and the exhibition.) Hutchins knew Montague would often walk to the riverside from their home in Northwest Portland, but it was only months after his death in February that she discovered a cache of 130 videos, each about 20 seconds long, and twice as many still photos.
Montague had continually documented the same place: a spot on the west bank of the Willamette River between the Steel Bridge and the Broadway Bridge, with a localized scrutiny. His camera homed in on the square wood frame of what appears to be an otherwise disappeared marina or dock. In each nearly-identical still and video shots, Montague’s iPhone camera frames the dock, water and riverbank tightly, so nothing else, including the other side of the river, the horizon, or the nearby bridges, can be seen.
Even so, it’s incredible just how many details and changing conditions emerge. Sometimes the light is gray, and other times sunny. Occasionally raindrops fall onto the water, and in one case the bank is dusted with snow. In certain instances the wooden square is submerged under water, thereby revealing how water levels subtly rise and fall at different times of the day or year. The Willamette is an uncommonly north-flowing river, yet occasionally in Montague’s shots the water appears to be moving south.
The water’s patterns and colors vary in each shot too: sometimes it’s blue and other times brown. The water often ripples in the wind with dancing reflective light, and at times it’s quite placid. One of my favorite video clips, which Hutchins referred to as we watched the installation together, captures a wake moving from the top of the frame to the bottom.
Perhaps most unique of all, though, are shots documenting a specific water level, at the same height as the square dock frame, which causes the water within the square to vary from the surrounding water patterns in the rest of the river: as if the frame possesses the power to change the water current.
The riverbank spot Montague chose, in front of the McCormick Pier condominiums, is directly across the river from Veterans Memorial Coliseum; its simple cubic shape and the white band across the top of the arena are clearly discernible, and the building itself is actually the same basic shape as the decaying dock framework. Viewing Montague’s installation, despite its restrictive framing of the riverbank, the reflection of the Coliseum in some shots made me realize I had actually photographed the beloved arena (which a group of us in the Friends of Memorial Coliseum campaigned to save from demolition) from this spot on the Willamette Greenway.

In another video shot, the red hull of a docked freighter across the river can also be seen in reflection. Sometimes white clouds are reflected in the blue water. In one video shot, slivers of many ripples in the water act like mirrors. In a few of the photos and videos, particularly those shot in the afternoons, with the sun in the west of the sky, there is a subtle self-portrait: of Montague’s own shadow as he photographs from a nearby walkway.
In a few cases, animals and objects make their way into the frame. One video clip shows a family of geese floating past the square dock framework, and one goose briefly scoots inside the wood frame itself; but when the other geese continue past, the goose quickly reverses course to rejoin them.
In another succession of video and still images, a long log floats over the dock frame during a high-water moment and then gets caught there as the river subsides, perfectly bisecting the square at a diagonal and creating a sort of temporary Pythagorean theorem, as if in tribute to Montague’s science and engineering background.
Hutchins and Slappe used most but not all of the 130 videos; if multiple shots were taken on the same day, they chose the best one. They were a bit more judicious with the still images, simply because there were many more. But they kept the video clips at their basic length, including certain longer shots that Montague kept going in order to let a particular moment—with the wave pattern created by a passing boat, or the presence of birds—play out.

Sounds also play a role. In some video clips, freight trains can be heard on the nearby railroad tracks, either the clang of a locomotive’s warning bell or the low rumble of its engine. In other shots, a boat can be heard going by on the river. There are cawing crows and other birds as well, yet one of the most pleasurable sounds, when other external noises quiet down, is simply that of the gently lapping water. Montague himself can occasionally be heard too: his sniffling.
Montague grew up in the Puget Sound area, mostly on two islands: Mercer and Vashon. That means his formative years were by the waterside. No wonder he was drawn to continually walk from his house in Northwest Portland to the river’s edge.
I also thought about Montague and Hutchins’ home, a converted warehouse that I visited and wrote about for Dwell magazine in 2015. Known as the Bowstring Truss House, it’s named for the former industrial building’s exposed wood ceiling trusses, which allow for wide-open, column-free spaces. Like the dock frame, the house itself is an industrial remnant, embedded with untold stories. At the home’s center is an atrium, clad in stained wood and glass, filling the interior with natural light; the atrium is square-shaped, with the same basic proportions as the subject of Montague’s videos.
Watching the square dock frame for just over 45 minutes made me think of the cinematic technique known as “frame within a frame”: the use of visual elements in a scene to border a subject, further drawing the focus to them. Two of the best-known examples are in director Mike Nichols’s 1967 film The Graduate, when the camera peers through the bent leg of Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) to frame Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) amidst a romantic tryst, and John Ford’s 1956 opus The Searchers, which begins and ends with actor John Wayne framed by a doorway, emphasizing that his character Ethan Edwards is a troubled antihero who will never settle in. Here, the dock frame has no one in it (except briefly a goose), and you can’t see through the murky water. Yet it does act as, or at least imply, a kind of portal.
Both the still photos and the videos are presented chronologically, but they do not correspond to each other, so their light levels and other conditions tend to vary. A sunny still image may sit beside an overcast video clip, or vice-versa. Together, they illustrate the duality of this spot that Montague chose to document repeatedly over about five years: that it remains largely unchanged (there is always bank, water and dock), and that the subtleties of its conditions are constantly in flux. There is also the duality of this tranquil riverside spot existing among so many transit paths: for trains, ships, pedestrians and automobiles.
The title of the installation, which names the latitude and longitude coordinates, and an accompanying flier provided by Hutchins listing the exact date and time of day for each photo and video, are incredibly exact. Yet except for the variable of evolving iPhone photo and video technology, they could have been shot yesterday or 10 years ago. I suspect there was comfort for Hutchins in tying her late husband’s work to a very specific place and succession of times. This wasn’t just any time along the river: It was when John was here.
Montague spent his career as a software engineer, much of it locally working for Intel, which is also where he met Hutchins (before she became a working artist). Trained as an electrical engineer, earlier in his career he worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. Hutchins recalled to me that around the house, Montague preferred repetitive chores like vacuuming, where he could lock into familiar behavioral patterns.
Knowing this while taking in the Willamette Greenway exhibition, one can see his mind working: a curious, intelligent man inclined to focus on details of how things work, and comfortable returning to the same task over and over again, still engaged when others might tire of the monotony. There was clearly something comforting and maybe even freeing about shooting this same little swath of land and water every day, one where nature met the built environment. Montague never sought exhibition for his photos and videos; for him, maybe the artistry came from the process rather than the product.

While we wish that Montague were still here, if I may respectfully say so, his absence adds weight to this installation. Like Charles Foster Kane’s utterance of the word “Rosebud” and the mystery of what it meant driving Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane, we are left to wonder why Montague chose to continually document this spot, what his plans were for the footage, if any, and what the work says about him. And given that he made these photos and videos repeatedly over years, ultimately the final years before his passing, what might his subconscious have seen in that dock-frame, or through it?
Viewing this installation, I was reminded of the 1995 Wayne Wang-directed movie Smoke, in which Harvey Keitel’s character, Auggie, has undergone a similar project: photographing the corner outside his bodega every day, more than four thousand times. This week I found on YouTube a clip from the movie where Auggie describes to a customer named Paul (played by William Hurt) his motivation:
“It just came to me. It’s my corner, after all. I mean it’s just one little part of the world, but things take place there too, just like everywhere else. It’s a record of my little spot.”
As Paul briskly flips through the albums of pictures, Auggie tells him, “You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend. You’re going too fast. You’re hardly looking at the pictures,” going on to explain that while the subject remains the same, the conditions are infinite.
“They’re all the same, but each one is different from the other one,” Auggie says. “You’ve got your bright mornings, your dark mornings. You’ve got your summer light and your autumn light. You’ve got your weekdays and your weekends. The earth revolves around the sun and every day, the light from the sun hits the earth at a different angle.” Quoting Shakespeare’s Macbeth (inexactly), Auggie adds, “You know how it is: ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, time creeps on its petty pace.”
At that moment Paul, a widower, notices his late wife in several of the photos. He breaks down in tears.
I happened to visit Montague’s photo-video installation with Hutchins, his widow. Unlike William Hurt’s character in the movie, she was not encountering these images for the first time, nor outpouring emotion. Yet she was the driving force behind Willamette Greenway 45.525951° N, 122.67341° W, sharing her husband’s artistry with the world.
It’s perhaps weird to say you could feel the love, given that we’re talking about shots of an abandoned dock frame. Yet the love was unmistakable: not so much for the video and photography shots themselves, though they are certainly artfully observant and worth experiencing even if one knows neither of them, but in her affection for his humble, patient powers of observation. She recognized the beauty in how John knew how to slow down, and knew that way of being had larger meaning for us all.
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