This year as part of its Time-based Art Festival (TBA), the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art picked up its tradition of collaborating with the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College and its Director and Curator, Stephanie Snyder. The collaboration resulted in two offerings: Reductions of Mountains, an installation consisting of cement sculptures created by Portland-based sculptor Jess Perlitz, which is housed in two vitrines in the college library; and Tender, an immersive exhibition of wood-based works by visiting artists Sarah Gilbert and Pato Hebert and set in the Cooley Gallery. Despite their disparate material constitutions, Reductions of Mountains and Tender coalesced a web of related themes, suspending me in realms of knowing and unknowing from their adjacent campus locations.
TBA’s presenting framework has historically posed a hefty amount of information for its prospective audiences to process. Over plenty of years of participating in and writing about this festival, I have often found its events hard to imagine on the basis of their written descriptions alone, which pair abstract conceptual information with nuanced logistics for attendees. The installations in question are no exception. Take, for instance, the fact that Gilbert and Herbert’s Tender actually exists across two locations, boasting a concurrent exhibition at Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon that I, unfortunately, was not able to attend or cover for this story.
However, in spite of my occasional confusion, I have found that TBA events do make intrinsic sense when experienced in person in their durational, spatial and sensorial contexts, which foster thematic relationship with one another. Reductions of Mountains and Tender at Cooley cohere in this way: together, they herald a prescient discussion about the way notions of “past” are actively constructed by tectonic shifts in contemporary sentiment.
Upon arriving at Reed, I visited Gilbert and Herbert’s gallery show first.
In the TBA pamphlet, I had read that producing Tender was a healing undertaking for both the artists, who are longtime colleagues with, as they describe it, “dyadic attunement to and compassion for one another” amidst life’s challenges, including injury and illness as well as loss of loved ones. Their exhibition description cites Hannah Arendt’s philosophical perspective: “a palpating tenderness toward the things of the world” as a frame of reference for the emotional cadence of this undertaking.
Upon entering Cooley, I was overcome with the presence of many wooden words, adhered to and running up the gallery walls in scattered formations and drawing my eyes upward with them. They appeared in pairs, two-by-two, side-by-side, with the left-most word struck through: “hotel hospital”, “message massage”, “silk sick”, “lock lack” and many more. When my gaze found the ground, I noted two more words spelled out in large wooden lettering: “concentration” and “consecration.”
I learned from the exhibition description that one of the artists, Herbert, is a COVID-19 long hauler, which reminded me how the pandemic scrambled my own sense of time and transformed my ideas about the past through unexpected challenges and loss. Each pair of wooden words in the gallery, Pato’s Malapropisms, indicated a poetics of transition, a slippage in language that might have come as a result of shifts in circumstance—”asymmetrical asymptomatic”, “affection infection”, “eggs ego”—and some pairings, like “war was”, even posited potentialities.
[In considering Tender’s words in retrospect, I must also credit my dear friend Leland Hull, who builds treehouses, for recently calling my attention to the ways that wood has been used by humans to hold memory—through paper, carvings, containers, etc.—and how trees themselves archive cycles of time on earth.]
Wood threads throughout this exhibition. I interacted with many of their sculptures made from branches and tree trunks, laced with copper wire and copper nodules that I (with permission from a sign at the gallery desk) indulged in tracing with my fingertips. Some of these sculptures were adorned with sepia glass bulbs of a vintage patina. But the aesthetics of nostalgia permeated the space most prevalently through the sounds of a player piano that pulled focus at the far wall—the centerpiece of Gilbert’s contribution, Hollow. It cycled a tune best described by my unschooled ear as “old-timey,” calling to mind a cheerful bar or saloon.
The piano looked alive, like a jolly creature with an open lid, smiling keys and a large perforated paper tongue—a musical transcript—protruding from its exposed case. This tongue was thread in a loop between an electronic roller system built into the piano’s frame and another roller suspended from the ceiling above. All these trappings made for a grand site to behold, and, when the gallery quieted, I could enjoy the entire scene as I would an intimate performance.
After my time with Tender, I made my way out of Cooley and into the nearby library in search of Perlitz’s installation Reductions of Mountains. I found it encased in the reading room in two large vitrines, another dyad, surrounded by a few students working quietly. I tried not to be too distracting as I circled the vitrines, craning my neck to look inside and ascertain what I could—one large, hollow cement lump with holes on either end in the far vitrine and a few cement forms stacked atop one another in the other.
I read a description of Perlitz’s work in the TBA pamphlet and found a cheeky and clarifying insight into possible contexts for these “boulders,” learning they might be earthen matter, a figure in ruins, or some other kind of remains. As pointed out in the exhibition description, humans have a tendency both to categorize objects and to interpret life “in fragments, shifting their scale to our needs and desires.”
Looking back into the two vitrines, I began to see bits of a body—femur, scull, torso, vertebral cavity (admittedly, with my limited capacity to conceptualize vast time scales, objects like this have a way of tricking me into believing in their fixity of form is something to be named rather than experienced). My imagination fashioned a figurative character, like Tender’s player piano, that could reflect parts of myself back to me.
I applaud Perlitz for this simple but incisive use of abstraction. The vitrine displays, situated as they were in the library, hint at a tradition of extraction and containment perpetrated by unchecked western researchers that seek to affirm superiority of thought, condition and ego. As an alternative, she has incubated rogue artifacts that invite and then refract projections of self and circumstance through its mirage of gray cement.
When taken together, Pertliz’s works and Gilbert and Herbert’s exhibition spark a conversation with one another along these lines: They engage materials and forms that pull antiquity forward, conjuring slippery referents to be experienced rather than named. And, most potently, they tease out the continuity between pastness and nowness through the syntax of transition, a patina that falls in many directions.
Reductions of Mountains will be on view through December 8 during open hours in the Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library at Reed College (Portland, OR). Access notes: As students are studying in the library, installation visitors are asked to be silent or whisper.
Tender will be on view during gallery hours at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College (Portland, OR) as well as at Ditch Projects 12 PM – 4 PM, Friday through Sunday (Springfield, OR), both sites through December 8.
*Transparency note: Hannah Krafcik has been an artist-in-residence with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, their work has been presented by the organization on multiple occasions, and they retain supportive professional relationships with its leadership as an artists. Hannah offers this story about two Time-Based Art Festival offerings from this perspective.*