Small mercies keep art walk interesting

Canvases fly from one tiny gallery; elsewhere the images flow like water

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Dec 5, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

Joan McGuire (a local artist who is also a graphic designer at the Tribune) deploys “Coffee in the Face of Adversity No. 2” at Ugly Mug in Sellwood.

COURTESY OF JOAN McGUIRE

A busload of design students on an art field trip from Missoula, Mont., got a pleasant surprise while exploring Portland during November’s First Thursday art walk.

They checked out the Core Gallery in the Everett Station Lofts and ended up buying 10 of the 35 paintings on display by Chris Haberman (22 were sold altogether).

The works were only about $50 each, so no biggie. Until you realize the Core Gallery is just a crawl space inside Anna Todaro’s live-work studio.

You enter through a 2-by-2-foot hatch and there it is, an L-shaped room with 3 1/2-foot ceilings and enough space for about six warm bodies at a time. It’s like “Being John Malkovich.”

“I used to look in here and think, ‘White walls, wood floor – it’s a gallery!’” says the chirpy Todaro, 25, whose own quite good paintings (“urban pop surreal”) are stacked three deep around the room.

Above the Core is a loft bedroom, newly occupied by not one but two roommates. Todaro moved her bed into the closet, which she enters through a curtain of clothes on hangers.

Haberman took his show down early because half of it was gone (no red dots here – it was cash and carry), but a new one, by Troy John McCray, opens Thursday evening. McCray’s “Doll Relic” sculptures and photographs are pretty spooky – dolls with nails through their heads.

See, Portland still has a few surprises left.

First Thursday reception 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. Dec 7; regular hours by appointment, Core Gallery, 625 N.W. Everett St., No. 230, 815-793-4496, www.ohdivine.com/thecore.html

•••

Back on planet Earth, a few local gallery owners have taken off for Miami for the Aqua Art Fair (Dec. 7 to Dec. 10), a thinly veiled knockoff of Portland’s Affair at the Jupiter Hotel.

Holding the fort at PDX Contemporary Art while the big cheeses are out of town are gallery assistants Adam Sorensen and Caitlin Moore, who will make sure that Megan Murphy’s show goes off without a hitch. It consists of paintings based on rivers of the Columbia Plateau.

Murphy makes video stills and prints them on Duraclear, a clear plastic, then covers them with Plexiglas. She paints layers of colored oil paint and wax and then adds text, although it’s barely readable. Sometimes she adds a mirrored backing, or silver leaf, which makes the surface marks seem to float. The resulting dullish, grayish panels look like the water of the rivers we love.

In earlier works she has drawn on vellum – another barely discernible practice.

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