Art Snack Portland: Holocene's Many Wonders, Mike Vos Photography, Kinoko Evans Comics, Podcast But Outside, Theater Without Theater
Please stay safe during this explosion of coronavirus, culture, and style.
Welcome to the second Art Snack Portland: a newsletter celebrating the endurance of art in the new world of responsible social distancing. Art Snack is curated, researched, and written by Suzette Smith, the furloughed Arts Editor of the Portland Mercury—a groundbreaking alt-weekly newspaper that had to lay off almost all of its staff due to COVID-19 eating up all the paper’s advertisers. Anyway, that’s the bad news. The GOOD NEWS is that this was incredible week for remote art!
And I Would Have Gotten Away With It Too, If It Weren’t for You Do-Gooder Club Kids
Portland’s mainstay dance club Holocene—where sweaty dance nights are calendar neighbors with experimental audio/visual shows—stepped into the remote party sandbox in a major way. This weekend and last saw live streamed DJ sets on both Friday and Saturday nights from Holocene HQ, and they’re doing it again this weekend with Nacho Libre’s DJs La Tati and Cuan on Fri Apr 3 at 8 pm and DJs Maxx Bass, Bnick, and Illordess on Sat Apr 4 at 8 pm. Stream at either their Youtube or Twitch channels, and donate to pay the artists and staff who keep this all going.
Filling out weekend nights with vibes isn’t the only need Holocene seeks to meet. They’ve stepped up to connect Portland musicians with Meals on Wheels recipients, since the MoW’s delivery volunteers were recently forced to switch to “no contact” drop-offs with their homebound clients.
Holocene also spearheaded a banging compilation of atmospheric dance tracks called Constellate where they challenged local electronic music producers to stay within unifying constraints, like playing with the same sample pack. The end result is a joyous through-vibe for the entire collection. You can hear the tracks and purchase the digital album on Holocene’s Bandcamp. Thus far, my favorite tracks are Small Skies’ dreamy “Night Lights” and Strategy’s how-did-you-even “Cascadia Friday.”
Well, This Art Show Certainly Is Prescient
What’s that? A decaying house with a fire with superimposed over it? That certainly says everything to me about my life right now.
Mike Vos’ Pushdot Studio photo show Someday This Will All Be Gone was cut short last month by the necessary wave of Staying Home that overtook our city. So he put his series up on his personal site for everyone to see, and says he’s selling the prints at a significant discount.
Multiple exposure photography smokes of novice and heavy-handed metaphor, but Vos breaks through that stereotype with this striking, skillfully-arranged series. When I first saw the title image—an enormous tree overlaid with a nuclear smoke stack—I thought it was a photo of a monumental fumigation project. On a second look, I figured out that it was actually two images but couldn’t discount the eerie mystery to Vos’ print, which calls in the urgency of our environment’s peril and overlays it with the consolation of nature’s resilience. If I weren’t so unemployed I would snap one of these up in a heartbeat.
Shipwrecker’s Coronavirus Diary Comics
Cartoonist and Pacific College of Northwest Art educator (and, full disclosure, my friend) Kinoko Evans has been making diary comics about video chats, tabletop games, cats, and the other toils/joys of her Stay Home sequestering. Evans is a savvy, precise artist who always manages to do things like inject cake and winged lions into what could have been a depressing story about the governor ordering Oregonians to “Shelter in place.” She’s been sharing the series on her Instagram.
Outside Podcast Stays Inside
I’ve always wanted to write something about Podcast But Outside, the cringe comedy show from LA comedians Andrew Michaan and Cole Hersch. The premise is pretty simple: Michaan and Hersch sit at a table in a heavily trafficked location and pay people a dollar to talk to them. If you have the slightest amount of social anxiety this show will make you leave your body. But their last episode made me scream in my apartment like a stadium fan. Unable to go outside, Podcast But Outside turned to the next best, next-level-creepy thing: Omegle, a random video chat site, which—like Chatroulette—is mostly full of guys masturbating. NSFW but hella LOL!
The Kind of Online Drama We Deserve
The New York Times turned me on to theatrewithoutheater, an Instagram account—founded by actress Ali Stoner and playwrights Lily Houghton and Matt Minicino—which posts short, nightly performances. So far the excerpts from Katie Cappiello‘s Now That We’re Men (a production that cancelled their run at WNYC’s The Greene Space due to the virus) and Ebony Marshall Oliver’s eulogy as Beverly from Chicken and Biscuits by Douglas Lyons have been my favorites. I’m enthralled by these daily performances, some of which manage to transcend the scratchy “weird hum” of amateur mic work to touch our hearts. Actors are magic.
Tibs
Don’t forget that Earthquake Hurricane, who I wrote about in last week’s newsletter, will hit Twitch Thurs Apr 2, 8 pm EDT. This week’s show looks amaaaazing.
This will be niche! On Fri Apr 3, 5 pm contemporary art space Yale Union will stream a marathon of work by George Kuchar on their Twitch channel. This is but one more brick in the institution’s long running obsession with the underground filmmaker.
Thank you for reading! Don’t forget that I’m on the lookout for local art. Tell me about your thing! Tell me about your friend’s thing! This could be as simple as sending a screen grab of an Instagram post (Okay, so she paints with banana, the brushes are banana fiber, the frames are banana, and the GALLERY IS A BANANA?) or as complex as writing up a simple press release:
Where: Gallery inside an enormous banana
When: Show remotely available 24/7 at this address
Who: An artist in a big hat who enigmatically goes by “La Costanza”Please let me know! suzettesmithsmith@gmail.com