Death of the party is just the beginning

Antistatic is a moving collection of quietly beautiful and openly moribund works quite literally suspended in the place between utter joy and desperate grief. Multimedia and interdisciplinary, the very different forms each piece takes on meld perfectly with its relationship to the whole.

Opening this week in the Autzen Gallery, Antistatic is the first solo show by Heidi Schwegler, a Portland artist who teaches at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, and whose work has been called too good for Portland in various ways over the past 10 years she has lived and worked here.

It is true that her pieces lack the typical Portland DIY aesthetic. Instead they are lush and completely clean, produced with atypical materials designed to match the sentiments each piece is meant to provoke. Taken together, the work combines a unified sense of fragility, shattered sharp edges and dreamlike joy that extends to the brink of horror.

“Choking Hazard” is the first piece most people will see as they walk into the gallery. Suspended from the ceiling at different heights, the hollow plaster cast balloons are everything a typical balloon is not.

Hard, brittle and extremely breakable, the sculptures are grouped in pairs and trios, which flop flaccidly over each other as if dying alongside loved ones and friends. Some of the balloons stand alone and are similarly flaccid, but without any companion to lean on, they are simply sad, instead of just dependent.

They hang from strings instead of floating, and their downward orientation makes them look frozen in the act of crashing to the floor–a devastating effect for any party that might take place beneath them.

The video installation just to the left of the door will explain much about these joyous and about-to-be dangerous sentiments. It shows an airbag exploding, which acts as a reference to the balloons as well as to the painted steering wheel named “Holy Shit (Cadillac Seville).”

The airbag on the steering wheel really did explode, before Schwegler dug it out of the dump, along with other relics of crashed cars displayed on the wall behind it. The relics, together entitled “Missing Since 2009,” allude to the possibility of a future crash that may bring about all the horror and grief evident in the suspended balloons, the video explosions and the lovingly presented found objects.

The quiet understatement in the objects is further illuminated by the choice of materials. Cupcake tins cast in white bronze reveal the thin papery quality of a real cupcake tin without being anything near light or papery.

The placement of a real teething ring alongside a silicone bunny lends a sinister tone to the toy, entitled “Which Could Result,” the first part of the warning present on all toys that makes clear their inherent danger, and the very fragility of life itself.

Arrayed in neat paragraphs along the white walls, birthday cake lettering spells out a passage on the grief of losing a child from “On Death and Dying,” the seminal text on the subject by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

Accompanied by sound and bringing intricately cast and lovingly rendered sculpture together with found objects and moving images, Schwegler’s installation may in fact be a little too good for Portland. But its presence will be a welcome addition to our city’s Arts community so long as it is on display.

Antistatic Autzen Gallery Opens Nov. 7, showing through Nov. 27The opening reception is Saturday Nov. 8, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., and normal gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

This week in the Arts worldGo to the opening reception for BUNDT, a collection of work from current graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute, including Tom Borden, Dave Bryant, Eric Gibbons, Sonja Meller, Kusum Nairi and Elizabeth Pedinotti with curation by Patrick Rock. The opening is Saturday Nov. 8, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., concurrent with the Antistatic opening. BUNDT will be up Nov. 7 through Nov. 29 in the MK Gallery, on the second floor of the Art Building at Southwest Fifth Avenue and Jackson Street.