Blog
Deborah Kass On Meaning, Identification, and the Seduction of Color.
Written by Catie Keck Deborah Kass is a prolific, Brooklyn-based artist whose work reimagines the visual languages of postwar American art through a queer feminist lens, blending appropriation, pop culture, politics, and autobiography to examine who gets seen, celebrated, and remembered. She speaks in systems political, aesthetic, and historical, each braiding into the next to create art that’s visually striking and ideologically subversive. Over the course of an hourlong conversation with Lesbian Culture Club, what begins as an interview about queer representation and artistic practice quickly expands into something much broader: a reading of the art world as market and...
Umico Niwa Plants Seeds
Umico Niwa is about to do something to the installation. It’s already been up for three weeks, but that isn't stopping her. She’s been living above the gallery since then, close enough to hear it breathing, or at least to imagine she can. She may be leaving Portland soon, but that's just enough time. She heads to the hardware store down the street for egg-yellow spray paint without removing her apron. While I await her return at ILY2, I step on a tomato. The seeds spit onto the hardwood floor atop a splotch of Klein blue spray paint. The scattered...
Jules Latimer Holds Steady
Written by Nic Porter Jules Latimer wants me to feel at ease. I can tell right away. They offer a warm smile, a self-deprecating joke, a generous laugh. They’re wearing a plain white T-shirt, and behind them hangs a slightly crooked picture of a woman napping on the steering wheel of a red sports car — Flaming June by Sir Frederic Leighton meets ’80s car catalogue.Off the jump, Latimer is charming in a way that feels authentic and easy. I later learn “Cool Jules” was hard-won. Their story is one of coming out while being raised in a religious household,...
Daelyn Allis Lambi Is Building a World Where Nothing Has to Stay Fixed
Written by Carrie Hinton, Photo above by PDX Insectarium A Youth Arts Program in a Dying Mall: Daelyn Allis Lambi usually introduces themself as the director of a youth arts program in a dying mall. For now, that’s Lloyd Center, although its official closure date is August 8. After that, the program will move somewhere else, but the setting feels almost too fitting to ignore: a half-abandoned Portland landmark, a commercial structure the city has already decided is obsolete, still holding a living, strange, deeply intentional creative world inside it. daelyn has history there, too. Their PNCA thesis project once lived...
