RESPONSE > PORTLAND, OREGON

KELSEY GRAY
NOVEMBER 5, 2018

Portland’s much anticipated Time Based Arts Festival is an annual event that features dozens of both new and established artists creating work that subverts expectations of traditional genre and white cube dogma of who gets to make art that’s taken seriously, in what spaces, and for whom. TBA proves time and again to showcase contemporary artwork that is as conceptually rigorous as it can be ethically challenging. The Utopian Visions Art Fair was no exception.

Curator Srijon Chowdhury, the brain behind Chicken Coop Contemporary, amassed for UVAF an impressive catalog of thinkers and makers through word of mouth. No call for submissions was put out, and somehow the resulting collection of work is strikingly variant. An ambitious centering of distinct voices in their own orbits, each different piece at UVAF still managed to work in tandem with one another in a way that felt part of a larger narrative, one made all the more pressing because of the individuality of its component parts. Throughout the fair, I was struck by the multi-sensory experience I was having. Upon entering the initial room at Pegasus Project PDX, the gallery where the fair was held, I found myself being invited to shake the boxes of one installation while performance artist M. Page Green contorted their body around and through a mass of thick rope in a corner. Around me a sound installation cooed and clicked rhythmically, while the smell of roasted corn wafted in from the backyard and dark, ambient chords played by experimental musician Daniel Menche lolled through the air.

One of the more salient and emotionally striking works in the show, and the most subtle, the most probable to be passed over as simply blending into the wall, was a piece of printer paper sitting on top of a basic, white sculpture pedestal. Manuel Arturo Abreu’s contribution was presented with a pen, and simply said, “Please list your info below if you are willing to marry an undocumented person to help them get their papers in order.”

Manuel Arturo Abreu, 2018

Emma Swearengin and Lexie Smith

Lexie Smith

Demian DinéYazhi’, 2018

Marth Rosler curated by INCA, Layet Johnson With Good Weather, Demian DinéYazhi’

M Page Greene, Private Places, 2018

Out back, a wheat paste mural by the transdisciplinary writer, maker, and curator, Demian DinéYazhi’ (@heterogeneoushomosexual on social media if you want to give them a follow for some A+ content), had the effect of lacerating the air with unbridled truths about what it means to live and create from a place of Indigenous identity under the grueling weight of colonialism’s legacy. The 20-foot by 9-foot paragraph of text was presented in a style and font reminiscent of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms series, and carried a similar sentiment of abruptly pulling back the curtain on a systemically veiled inequality for the viewer.

A favorite piece of mine included the eerie black and white paintings by Emma Swearengin, evocative of Rodin’s gates of hell figures and also intestines. Installed outside with the roughly four foot long canvases positioned at a ninety-degree angle to one another, the effect was that of an art fair booth where the paintings themselves were the dividing walls. At the center of the space created by Cook’s paintings were sculptures by Lexie Smith, whose doughy, tubular forms echoed those in Cook’s work. I found myself thinking of genderless subjects, the alien and insect rendered as human, and sculpture utilized as a form of mark making. Grotesque and also kind of cute, those squigglies were one of the more visually memorable components of the fair.

The prompt given by Chowdhury asked the artists simply to present works that “are speculative and work towards possible futures.” The result was a heart-rending reminder that despite the thronging insecurities and modes of oppression that often render this world a hopeless one, it is a tantamount and fundamental task to ask ourselves what we must strive for in the building of a better, kinder, world. The pieces ask their viewers to be honest with themselves and their intentions. They demand we consider how it is we move through the world, and what that might mean for the other bodies and spaces we collide with. A Utopia is a lofty goal. In the meantime, we can turn inwards and question what our role must be in the collective struggle towards a more just and gentle way of being.

Originally from Colorado, and now living in Portland, Oregon, Kelsey Gray graduated in 2015 from Lewis and Clark College with a BA in studio art. With a lifelong background in the visual arts, Kelsey’s practice has recently taken a turn from the concretely tangible, to the more liminal, with writing becoming a more central focus. Her visual work broadly concerns messes, the precarity of domestic debris, and ultimately, corporeal and cerebral fragilities as mooring constants of the embodied experience. In writing, Kelsey brings her history as a painter to the forefront with a fondness for language that dips and bleeds and melds as only fluid pigment can. 

kelsey-gray.com

Utopian Visions Art Fair is an alternative art fair that provides a platform for artists, gallerists, and curators to present projects that work towards possible, alternative futures.

September 14-16, 2018
518 SE 76th Ave, Portland OR
utopianvisionsartfair.com

PARTICIPANTS
Institute for New Connotative Action (INCA) with:
     Martha Rosler, Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas, Joshua Hughes
John Riepenhoff Experience
Carmen Winant
Alice Konitz
Conversations curated and hosted by Asha Bukojemsky
Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations with:
     Aidan Koch, Shawn Creeden, Lisa Schonberg, Mixed Needs
The Institute for Queer Ecology with:
     POSADAS (Pablo Herza + Ignacio Hernández Murillo)
Private Places with:
     M. Page Greene
manuel arturo abreu
u: Curated by Ana Iwataki and 
Marion Vasseur Raluy with:
     Kim Farkas, Alix Ferrand, Anna-Lisa Hölger, Hanna Hur and Michael Kennedy Costa, Lila de Magalhaes and Harley Hollenstein, Benjamin Reiss, Brittany Shepherd, Naoki Sutter-Shudo
Et Al with:
     Laurie Reid and Cybele Lyle
Chicken Coop Contemporary with:
     Arnar Asgeirsson
Conduit
Williamson | Knight with:
     maximiliano
2727 California Street
Victor Maldonado with:
     Laura Medina, Marie Conner, Vanessa Briones Englund, Julian Adoff
Nicolo Gentile & Sam Williams
Lundgren Gallery with:
     Christopher Richmond
OV Project Space with:
     Cat Ross
Pegasus Project
Garden with:
     Genevieve Belleveau & Themba Alleyne, Sarah Rosalena Brady, Sarah McMenimen, Lindsey A. Schulz, and Kyle Welker
Keith J Varadi with:
     Joshua Bienko, Naomi Fry, Jeremy Jansen, and Joe Sola
Derek Franklin
E. Swearengin and Lexie Smith
Midori Hirose & Mia Ferm with:
     Sam Hamilton, Ben Glas, Daniel Menche, Shannon Kerrigan, Nick Bindeman & Danny Sasaki
Lucy Chinen curated by Jesse Stecklow
Tropical Contemporary
Good Weather with:
     Layet Johnson
Demian DinéYazhi’
UPFOR with:
     Moreshin Allahyari

All images courtesy Utopian Visions Art Fair

RESPONSE
A feature of project reviews experienced in person. Response will provide artists with much needed critical response to their work. Response is opinion-based but is not an op-ed.