Fields of Grey

“Place,” on display this month at the Blue Sky Gallery, is a generically but aptly-titled collection of photographs by the Canadian architect/photographer Geoffrey James. The show serves to document, in deadpan fashion, the changing landscape of a southern Canada town and recalls the industrial limbos and stilted landscapes of Lewis Baltz's work of the 1970s.

Taken with an 8x10 view camera, some prints are truly stunning. Printed entirely neutral, in shades of matted grey, putting greens crop up as oddly symmetrical blemishes, inhibiting expanses of rolling plains. Skies are singular blocks of grey -- they are blank slates, which leave everything else in the photograph, the cookie cutter apartment complexes, the billboards, the abandoned sand rakes, feel completely arbitrary and uneasy. In one photograph a steel bridge casts a web of its skeletal shadow, imprisoning the bluffs behind it.

The work creates an interesting dialogue when paired with the luscious mid-century, nature-beautifying contact prints in the Ansel Adam's exhibit on display next door to Blue Sky at the Charles Hartman gallery. The captivating (and eerie) bit about James's show is that his peculiar photographs are easily mistaken as landscapes in the majority of today’s rural USA, particularly in the midwest, like for instance, Glendive or Bismarck North Dakota, or Fergus Falls, Minnesota. James describes the prints as indicative of the “mess we are making all over North America of our new settlements.” Hung one after another in a long line of succession, one can follow, the blunt horizon line -- like a monitor’s flatline -- all the way out the door.

Psycho with live orchestra

the journey of the plastic bag

film by Ramin Bahrani, narrated by Werner Herzog

classic American Beauty

Victor

Victor Hugo also drew. Who knew??

Vogel's: 50/50

On display until January at The Portland Art Museum is Fifty Works for Fifty States, fifty modest but marvelous pieces from the art collections of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. The show proves the New York couple to be a remarkable exception among art collectors.

The emphasis in the collection is on minimal and post-minimal works. (In fact the couple were among the first to begin collecting this style in the 1960s, when Pop Art was all the rage.) Most of the work is in the vein of experimental drawing, and process oriented, makeshift, with pieces of tape used to expand drawing paper -- although most of the pieces are no bigger than a standard sized sheet of paper. One of the finest aspects about the collection are the pieces’ ability to elucidate an artist’s thought process; the Vogel’s show an unerring commitment to particular artists, for instance Richard Tuttle, Sol le Witt, and Lynda Benglis. The very best at the Portland Art Museum is a suite done by Richard Tuttle, which opens the exhibit – a grid of 33 watercolor sketches done on loose leaf paper. The lined paper’s pale blue and pink lines set the palette for Tuttle’s seemingly effortless sketches – they are simple strokes and puddles of pastels, elegantly dimpled and stretched onto mounted board, suspended and weightless. Although the works are on display in the Print Center basement of the Portland Art Museum, which always feels tawdry with its pink-carpeted walls, lined as if expecting to be plugged with marquis letters, the tightness of the space and short walls lend a pleasant cavernous sense. Given the interiority of the pieces, this feels right.

At the heart of the collection is an intimacy and character beyond the whitewash of the museum environment. The exhibit feels intensely personal and recalls Walter Benjamin’s words on collecting, “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” Acquiring rather than calculating, the Vogel’s collection is not a result of auctions or bartering but is a product of individual studio visits with artists, obtained via treks conducted religiously, every weekend. Even more extraordinary is the fact that they have obtained their collection using their meager joint salary as a librarian and postman, living in close quarters with the artwork for years. In a 2008 documentary entitled “Herbert and Vogel,” one sees that every square inch of wall, and sometimes even floor, of their apartment is covered with either a cat or a piece of art.

The art on display is a gift to the Portland Art Museum, and part of the statewide program put on by the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Since the early 1990s the Vogel’s have exclusively donated thousands of pieces to the National Gallery in Washington D.C. Beyond their partnership with the National Gallery, the Vogels have refused to sell off or trade any of their works. As conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner once said, “Every culture needs someone like the Vogels.” Their devotion, and compassion to the arts, partnered with a shrewd eye, is unbridled.