the grapefruits sometimes art mail is back!

the grapefruits sometimes art mail is back!

i have been super busy in the past year and kind of neglected this project, but thanks to covid i now suddenly have a bit of time to restart things! always searching for a positive spin on things lol.

if you've never gotten one of these emails and don't really know what you signed up for, it's basically just a biweekly-ish assortment of art writing, shows, and other stuff that i thought was interesting. a lot of events and such are portland-centric because that's where i live, but i am interested in art from anywhere.

i would definitely consider submissions for future emails! send me stuff, please! i think it would also be cool if some conversations came about as a result of these emails. i'm not sure if people can comment on emails on the buttondown site or what but maybe i'll look into it...

one of my favorite portland painters has a new solo show at one of my favorite portland galleries! anya roberts-toney's water witch moon mother opens this saturday november 4, 1-3pm. anya's paintings are radiant and emotional, full of gossamer symbols that allow multiple meanings to drift through them. i was lucky enough to see them in progress at anya's studio over the summer, so i can tell you there is an incredible amount of care and dedication contained within these canvases. this is a great follow up to ty ennis's recent (outstanding!) painting show at nationale, and really a whole year of amazing painting shows at this special spot. (full disclosure: i used to work there!)

my partner nim recently sent me a link to this review of an art show by a social media-famous portrait artist. i'm not super interested in the work, but the artist's response and the critic's follow up piece about it is interesting. what interests me about this is thinking about why this critic chose to review the show in the first place. the artist's response was pretty uncool, but i think they were mad because they felt talked-down-to. i teach art classes to bfa students, lots of whom are interested in culture that falls outside the contemporary art world, and i'm always trying to make sure i am reserving judgement on those inspirations so i don't discourage them from expressing themselves. i'm interested to know what others think...

just putting this here for anyone who missed it. so gross but sadly not surprising.

in other art world disappointments: whyyyyy did the new yorker stop publishing "goings on about town" with its really excellent short art reviews written by cool people such as johanna fateman??? this actually really upset me. and they just rubbed salt in the wound with their choice of jackson arn as the new art critic, replacing peter schjeldahl. boooo! sorry to anyone who likes him, i'm sure he has many great qualities. but the new yorker has already had a white guy art critic who only writes about midcentury or older artists showing in museums or blue chip galleries. this is so boring, and depressing, considering all the talent they had to choose from and all the art in new york that could and should be written about in a magazine like theirs. was anyone else bummed out by this too? what's the state of art criticism from your perspective? seems like it is suffering from many of the larger problems affecting journalism in general. not linking to the new yorker out of vengeance and also it's paywalled (am i part of the problem?).

i think it's cool that there are so many more art projects that can be fully accessed online now. one of the coolest i've seen recently is ORAL.pub, a website that publishes experimental web-based poetry projects by artists from around the world. if you click through, get ready for weird websites that are not super-obvious in their navigation. shameless self promotion moment: they are publishing my art website early next year! yay : )

i am from montpelier, vermont, which felt like such an un-hip place to be to an "artsy" teen in the late 90s early 2000s. if only i had known there would be a genuinely cool art gallery right in the middle of my hometown a mere 20 or so years later! i haven't gotten a chance to visit hexum gallery yet, but i follow them on instagram (where they have much more information about their programming than on their actual website) and i have sent my sister on a mission to check them out. the current show looks so good! i got to see erin murray's work at holding contemporary here in portland a few years back and really loved it. if you are in vermont go to hexum! they are open fridays 4-8, saturdays 12-5, or by appointment, and they are on the second floor of their building and were not affected by the july flood, thankfully.

i had the honor recently of working with portland-based band/art duo s.e.c.r.e.t.s. on the artwork for their newest musical releases. their music is dreamy and surreal, i highly recommend! and the videos that aaron made using my artwork are hypnotizing. it's funny that none of us are religious but we ended up liking this faux-churchy imagery for a variety of reasons. we also collaborated on some text about the project that i'm happy to share if anyone is interested! i guess this is a bit self-promoting too but hopefully nobody minds too much... if you listen to this beeeautiful music you won't mind at all : )

in brief: i thought it was cool and kind of sweet that this ai-corruption tool for artists is called nightshade. a cute little flower poisoning data sets so tech companies can't profit off art they scraped without permission? i love it.

extremely unrelated content warning!!!

the following content is not really about art, proceed at your own risk of boredom

ok this might sound silly but i got into the show loki when it came out a year or two ago, and it just came back for another season so i'm watching it again. it is a goofy marvel thing, which i usually really don't like very much. go ahead and laugh, i don't care! but there are a couple things that hooked me on this show: 1. i kind of think loki is kinda cute? 2. time travel! i love theoretical physics (the kind where they take all the math out for philistines like me), and i feel like the stuff that deals with spacetime and quantum vs. relativistic gravity all quickly approaches ideas that are so abstract and distant from reality that they might as well be fantasy. some of it basically is, thanks to the "infinity of bad ideas" spawned by capitalism (btw i have a great idea that research teams should have an on staff science fiction writer, like a sin eater, to indulge funders' need for hype). i am not afraid to say i don't understand any of this science very well and that's what i think is fun about it! it's my own little mind riddle that i'll never solve. why not be like my smart partner nim and go to the wikipedia page about closed timelike curves and click all the links and just try to understand! in the show loki, i like that not only do they spend tons of time explaining all this pseudo-science, but then they also just have plain old magic. they could just stick to magic! but that kernel of truth is so much more exciting. they recently introduced a thing called the time loom that isn't worth explaining, but i bring it up because it reminded me of the air loom. as a fiber artist, i think if i ever descend into some romantic stereotype of madness i will project my fantasies onto some sort of sick time loom.

wow if you have read this far i'm honored! please let me know if you liked it, or if you didn't like it be specific so i can adjust things to your liking next time (your majesty!!!). jk but do let me know if you have suggestions/tips for me about art stuff. thank you for reading : )