EIGHT DAYS LEFT, 2022
Amble about Portland’s neighborhoods in the next couple of weeks and you’ll notice the impromptu winter blossoming of a temporary sculpture garden scattered among the front porches and lawns of the city’s bungalows, four-squares, midcentury moderns and other usually more discreetly domesticated homes.
That’s what photographer K.B. Dixon‘s been doing: capturing the fleeting joy of this seasonal people’s art form while it’s in full flower. It’s a traditional art style, really, banking on people’s deep familiarity with seasonal images and stories, but it also has an almost Surrealistic edge — a whimsical, not-real sort of reality. The statues in this jaunty community garden tend to be of the inflatable variety: Sometime shortly after Halloween you take ’em out of storage, blow ’em up, and proudly put ’em on display. Then, around about New Year’s Day, you let the air out again, flatten ’em and fold ’em, and put ’em back in storage for another ten or eleven months until their time comes ’round again.
Dixon is an inveterate recorder of of the happy idiosyncracies of everyday life, and this celebration of the city’s celebration of the Christmas season follows by just six weeks Photo First: an amble through Scare City, his photographic ode to the shuddering pleasures of Halloween. Below you’ll find three hands-full of images of Portland in its holiday glory. Enjoy ’em before the sculpture garden disappears again.
— The Editors
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Scary Snowman, 2023
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Nutcracker, 2023
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Santa et al, 2023
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Snowman & Penguins, 2023
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Santa’s Workshop, 2023
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Monkey, 2023
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Xmas Dragon, 2022
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Santa & Rex, 2023
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St. Bernard, 2022
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Reindeer, 2023
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Marshmallow Roast, 2022
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Snowman, 2023
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Tiger & Tree, 2023
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Santa & Teddy, 2023
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K.B. Dixon’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and journals. His most recent collection of stories, Artifacts: Irregular Stories (Small, Medium, and Large), was published in Summer 2022. The recipient of an OAC Individual Artist Fellowship Award, he is the winner of both the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Eric Hoffer Book Award. He is the author of seven novels: The Sum of His Syndromes, Andrew (A to Z), A Painter’s Life, The Ingram Interview, The Photo Album, Novel Ideas, and Notes as well as the essay collection Too True, Essays on Photography, and the short story collection, My Desk and I. Examples of his photographic work may be found in private collections, juried exhibitions, online galleries, and at K.B. Dixon Images.