Lace Your Dunks and See Some Art

Joe Feddersen

Froelick Gallery

817 S.W. Second Ave.

I hate glass art. I hate everything from Dale Chihuly to your slack-ass boyfriend’s stony rainbow pipes. Glass is a beautiful, graceful and delicate medium that seems forever trapped in the whimsical grasp of its physical shortcomings. I hate it. That said, Joe Feddersen’s geometrically adorned glass sculptures at Froelick this month are an absolute delight. His work is subtle, precise and engaging, using glass as medium rather than a subject and for this I am thankful. His “fish traps” with their fluid nature and faux-functionality are borderline Saturday Market but are self-aware enough to get away with it.

Will Rogan “Getting Through”

Small A Projects

1430 S.E. Third Ave.

Following up Small A’s awesome debut as a gallery with the ambitious “All I Want is Everything” is a show dedicated to the incidental storytelling of Will Rogan. Rogan tells stories, or parts of stories, through the use of found “sculptures, video and photography, choosing the narrative over the purity of medium.” small A projects has the potential of being the next step in Portland’s contemporary evolution and hopefully concentrating the small space on a single artist will hone a sense of coherency missing from its first show.

Jerry Iverson “Nerve Block”

Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery

929 N.W. Flanders St.

Jerry Iverson’s works explore the elements of visual representation themselves. Images are reduced to fields of blacks and whites, simple geometric elements exploring the meaning of formal harmony itself. I’m pretty sure this ground was pretty well covered by Kazimir Malevich in the first quarter of the last century, but it’s always possible I’m missing something. Maybe Iverson could print a manifesto or something. I don’t know.