Portlanders, at least in my part of town in the deep southeast, tend to go all-in on Halloween. There is an abundance of decorated homes, each with their own fantastical spin on the holiday. Helen’s Costume, run by partners Steve Brown and Sarah Chase, is in the Montavilla neighborhood in a little carriage house. Though the gallery programs a roster of shows year round, its Halloween group show is a mainstay and speaks to the gallery’s eclectic and quirky bent. It’s fitting for a gallery named for a 127 year-old costume shop, also in Montavilla and just around the corner from the gallery, that closed in 2017. This year, Helen’s celebrates its fourth anniversary with the exhibition Toadstools, featuring the work of fifteen artists.
On the invite and press release for the show’s October 26th opening is an asterisk note typed in pink font: “Costumes optional but encouraged.” It was a nudge to get into the spirit of the season. The press release for the show is simply a poem by Chase Allgood, with welcoming lines like the prologue to a fairytale:
we all love a fruiting body
we’re all connected
by the toadstool dance
we’re all invited to the mycelium party
I arrive late due to a prior commitment, but Brown has assured me that the opening would run long. As I walk toward the gallery from my car, I smile to myself upon noticing some toadstools that spread through a patch of grass—a good omen. Even before arriving, Helen’s welcomes me to apply my imagination to the world, to suss out connections through signs and symbols. If the toadstools in this show are the artwork, then the mycelial network that runs below and between them promises to be full of paradoxes, illusions, secrets and surprises.
As promised, the yard is still brimming with costumed attendees, many of whom are wearing costumes. I stop briefly on my way to the gallery entrance to hug my friend Ralph Pugay, a featured artist in this show, who is dressed as a traffic cone. I then greet Brown who is wearing purple face paint, elf ears from the original Helen’s Costume shop and a sweatshirt decorated with mushrooms hand-sewn by Chase. Brown explains that he is dressed as “Lavender,” and goes on to admonish me to try the tasty “witches finger” hors d’oeuvres (made from pretzels, he notes). First, however, I needed to venture into the gallery proper.
Inside I find an array of artwork of many different mediums. The pieces talk to each other throughout the space and fill unsuspecting nooks and crannies. A track of ambient and experimental sounds contributed by Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Midori Hirose, and Stephanie Simek plays gently in the gallery, the latter two also contributed sculptural works.
Simek’s a spider weaving a web in space sits on a stand in the northeast corner of the gallery. It takes the form of a small black disk of paraffin wax, which has been etched with an audio recording (sound that is also playing on the gallery’s speakers). A candle adheres to the center of the disk, protruding and threatening to disintegrate the etching if someone dared to light it—quite the paradox.
Sponsor
Meanwhile, Hirose’s works, three different white fabric gloves, hang from three different empty metal ducts in the gallery ceiling. Each glove holds a game piece in its fingers: a vinyl checkerboard, a chess piece, and two dice. The disembodied gloves tease me, spinning flirtatiously. This simple trickery tells me nothing is as it seems here, that I should look for more of the story.
Near the front door hangs Pugay’s painting—an array of colorful witches in a palette of pastels and rich and royal colors. Some of the witches ride brooms in the foreground while the rest frolic among forest and cabins. I look closer and notice the frolickers are actually lifting up their shirts to show their hairy genitals, a cheeky reveal. Pugay’s witches seem like distant kin of Marilyn Chase’s (the 95-year-old grandmother of Sarah Chase) work bat, a nearby wall hanging of a character with a cartoonish face, black wings and ears, and an otherwise humanoid body. Both Pugay’s and Chase’s works offer unmistakable references to Halloween—its campiness and strangeness—in this context.
Elmeater Morton’s works of colorful ink and pencil line work on found papers are titled Meat and Steak. Both works feature what I will fondly describe as “chunks,” shapes with angled facets of color overlapping pre-existing geometry printed on the found paper. Pen marks create a sense of marbling over a delicious candy colored palette, dominated by pinks that suggest a fleshy rawness. The closer I look, the more I see meat and steak. Chris Johanson’s untitled work responds to Morton’s through colorful swirls in circus hues, another abstract offering. Softening my focus, I notice the vibrant shapes in Johanson’s work hint at the soupy essence of faces and bodies that never quite come into form.
Shards of glass glimmer on the ground and catch my eye. The irregular pieces reflect my own face and the surrounding architecture back to me in fragments and splinters. Created by Leif Anderson, the work is fitted carefully into a deep pre-existing crevice in the concrete gallery floor. Above it looms a pedestal, displaying a work by Lena Lutz composed of a knight’s helmet from the original Helen’s Costume shop covered gingerly by a sheer scarf with small jewels adorning one corner. Lutz sourced this scarf from another neighborhood retailer, still in business, Continental Textiles. The sheen of its dainty jewels, the shine of the mental helmet underneath, and the nearby glass shards come into conversation with one another from their respective positions, conjuring a sense of affinity between realms, like the saying “as above, so below.”
Erica Eyres Brunette hangs to the left of all this, a realistic oil painting of a white woman with brown hair in profile, looking at something out of frame. This work, perhaps more than the rest, calls into question what might be just out of view, beyond this realm, even beyond the proverbial veil.
DL Alvarez’s work on paper, Paths To and From This Place Are Also Here, contains extraordinarily detailed drawings of haunting vistas and gesticulating characters, hemmed in by an array of chains drawn in graphite that spoke out on all sides. The chains bind together cartoonish absurdity with realistic scenes, conjuring a tone of psychological horror and delight. Two handcuffed arms reach up from the bottom of the fray and appear to pull down on the chains at their center link. All this meticulous imagery was rendered by hand—save for a tiny head with elf ears, collaged obscurely to the left-hand side.
To round out the macabre, Shelley Turley, the only artist that Helen’s represents formally, contributed a small impressionistic oil painting. A figure peers at a skull that sits on a mirrored dresser. The reflection of the figure’s eyelids in the mirrored dresser with their averted gaze adds to the unsettling tone of this work—a little prick of heightened obfuscation in the dreamy world Turley has created.
Sponsor
Toadstools contains the work of many people who are friends, even family, of Brown and Chase, all connected by a shared sensibility that manifests through this fanciful undertaking—a show full of serious art with plenty of levity and intrigue. Nothing is as it seems at Helen’s, making the trickery the very substance to seek out. Toadstools gets at the essence of affinity and begs the question: What happens when we choose to play pretend, to try on the illusory masks that call forward the most obscure parts of who we are, and, in doing so, what connections might we find in the world and in ourselves?
Helen’s Costume is located at 7706 SE Yamhill Street in Portland. It is open Saturdays from 1-4 pm and by appointment. Toadstools is on view through November 30th.
