Symbiont/Synthetic

part fairytale, part nightmare...all real

(Foreground L to R) work by Matthew Picton and Jesse Hayward (Background) Bruce Conkle

October 11-29th, 2003 1039 NW Glisan Street - Portland's Pearl District

Curator's Statement: Jeff Jahn

There isn’t a place on earth where humans have not made their presence felt. It is unavoidable and it resembles a marriage with kids, everything has Gordian Knot level complexities with no easy solutions. Thus, for better and for worse the natural and synthetic will interact and shape modern civilization. Think of this show as looking like a marriage counselor’s session between man and nature, part fairytale, part nightmare and all-real.

Todd Johnson (top) Michael Oman-Reagan (bottom)

There were flying trees, cavemen, videogames, cartoons, diseases, miracle cures, as well as a testament to the simplified applications of man and the complex sublime of nature.

Part of what draws people to Portland is its strong combination of a cosmopolitan human presence and feral Nature. It makes Portland unique amongst large US cities. These natural/unnatural combinations are invariably deemed as positive or negative, certainly all of it will be disruptive in some way, life affirming in others.

It reminds me of both Dave Hickey's cosmopolitan sense of beauty and Robert Storr’s irreconcilable grotesque. Thus,Symbiont/Synthetic was emblematic of the disruptive conjunctions between the man-made and the impossible to find pristine.

In a case of art imitating life and life imitating art, this show is no different from GMO’s or Yosemite, nothing is pure or impure. Simply put the double-edged sword of our existence cuts both ways simultaneously making life for humans easier but environmentally unstable. I like to think of it as humanism that is not all human.

Symbiont/Synthetic was a component of Core Sample.

 

Artists:

Ellen George: Craftsmanship meets disease head on. (Courtesy PDX Gallery)

Bruce Conkle: Arguably Portland’s chief multimedia artist, he muses on why we prefer to anthropomorphise famous cartoon mice instead of acknowledging real ones. He does the same with videogame wildernesses and its preferential replacement of the forest primeval.

 

Matthew Picton: Parking lot cracks and synthetic materials produce a natural fractal sublime within his gigantic dadaesque civilization doodles. (Courtesy Mark Woolley Gallery)

Bryan Suereth: Makes better, sexier, bionic trees for tree lovers. In this installation office plants are both abberations and dressed to kill for the window shoppers in the Pearl District.

Tom Cramer: Portland's artist Laureate, his exquisite totemic woodcarvings meet Zen and rave culture in a collision of old and new, natural and man-made.

Jesse Hayward: Paint slithers and grows like fungus as sculpture in his hands.

 

Brian Borrello: Nature expressed through motor oil (Courtesy Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery)

 

Carolina Medina: Surrealism and the juxstaposition of the natural/abnatural have long held a special kind of potency

 

Dianne Kornberg: The unnatural look and seemingly irreconcilable image of death and fetal development is expressed in her exquisite photography (Courtesy Elizabeth Leach Gallery)

 

Todd Johnson: Clinical photographic examination of stylized nature in antique lace. (see above 2nd image from top)

 

Nathan Marcel: History on steroids, Marcel reminds us there is nothing new to the slippery man and nature question, yet its importance is pervasive in every pore of civilization's tenuous experiment.

Jacqueline Ehlis: The finish fetish marriage of wood and automotive paint, her focus on materials puts her at the heart of the symbiont/synthetic question. Her hemispheres lure us like advertising and tantalize like fishing bait. (Courtesy Savage Art Resources)

 

Michael Oman-Reagan: His installations of drooping plastic stems grow and adapt to the gallery environs swaying with the artificial air currents of gallery visitors (see in second photo from top).

 

Adam Sorensen: His naturalized forms confound scale and space with interior designer colors. (represented by Motel Gallery)

 

Bob Wilcox: Nature projected onto flesh then documented as video

 

Soctt Patt: Graphic art, storefront displays and advertising comingle with high art that references the natural totemically.

 

Tim Diggles: Borg Botanicals, Tim's work initially inspired the idea for this show. (Courtesy Mark Woolley Gallery)

Laura Fritz: Art straight out of the lab, she plays with our expectations of the manufactured and natural... Is it being studied in this lab or has it escaped quarrantine?

 

 

Jeff Jahn: curator .... my work focuses on primordial forms that resonate with the viewer's instinctual mental processes... its all informed by texture, action, color and philosophy. Think of shark fins, eye spots or thorns removed from utilitarian formal contexts...yet still operational. The man-made aspect makes the ambiguity even more acute rather than being too specific or identifiable (the nature of abstraction).

 

Another installation shot:

Ellen George (left), Bruce Conkle (top) and Jesse Hayward (floor)

 

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