Fresh young talent, old rotting fruit

As an artist, Carly Bodnar is sparkling. With her third solo show in three months opening this week, Bodnar is receiving the kind of professional attention some mid-career artists can only dream of. One can only hope that the trend will continue after her graduation from Portland State this spring.

For an undergraduate, Bodnar’s work is surprisingly mature.

“It feels like it’s really coming out of me,” Bodnar said of her painting and organic photography in a recent interview, “which is weird because it’s all happened really fast.”

“Not that many art students have been applying [for a gallery show] lately,” said Emilie Gerber, coordinator of the Littman and White Galleries, who said she is just as committed to showing student work as she is to showing the work of professional artists. “I don’t know if they’re afraid or if they’re not ready to have a show.”

“We do do a lot of rejections,” Gerber continued, pointing out that, “if you don’t apply, you’re never going to find out.”

Finding out is exactly what Bodnar has been doing, often getting gallery shows by responding to Craigslist ads. And, as of late, the answers have all been yes.

“I live my life on Craigslist,” said Bodnar, who met her boyfriend through the personals, and is currently making a custom wedding dress for a woman who offered the job in the barter section in exchange for six hours of massage.

“One of my artistic goals is to get some shows that are not from Craigslist.”

Which isn’t to say that Bodnar is fearless. She said it took several months from when her photography instructor, Julia Grieve, suggested that she submit to the White Gallery to when she finally sent in her portfolio. Even then, it was only when she met up with a friend who had been working for the student-run Littman and White Galleries that she was finally convinced.

Bodnar’s work resembles her working style, a tightly controlled reign that stands precisely on the border between emotive physicality and formal abstraction. A generally happy, even bubbly undergraduate, Bodnar spoke directly about her work and life for several hours while sipping coffee in a warm Southeast bar near her home last Saturday night, before departing at 10 p.m. to do some late-night weekend panel-painting in the Portland State studios.

Bodnar traced the roots of her current work to her class schedule last fall, when she began taking Introduction to Sculpture, a class she had been putting off since her freshman year, along with Photo I and Advanced Painting.

While Bodnar has been painting since elementary school–when she attended an after-school program that a friend’s mom ran out of her garage–branching out into photography and especially sculpture was completely new.

Bodnar claims installation art “scares the crap out of me,” though, “I think I would like to [make installation art] if I could get up the nerve.”

Yet, what makes Bodnar’s work so appealing is that it is multidisciplinary, even while maintaining its flat wall-mounted guise.

In Graven Flesh, the series currently up at Vorpal Space in the Everett Station Lofts, Bodnar is working formally toward translucency, color clarity and well-ordered composition. She was successful, and the resulting images are altogether intricately detailed, fantastic and grotesquely alive.

The questionably biological images have singular names such as “Specimen,” for a pair of hairy purple remnants atop pedestals in an uncomfortably bright, yet dirty, landscape, and “Hypertrophia” (meaning the enlargement or overgrowth of an organ or part due to an increase in size of its constituent cells), to describe a vivid bodily wad falling from darkness to light.

“A lot of people see balls,” Bodnar said, describing her images as a kind of inkblot test.

“It says more about you than it says about me,” Bodnar went on. “People see what they want to see.”

As plastic, molded clay or cotton, the images in the paintings formulate a carefully controlled environment, with aesthetic moodiness that is conveyed in the shapes of Bodnar’s brushstrokes as well as in the drips and peaks she allows the paint to form.

For the White Gallery, Bodnar is showing a different but related body of work: the Of Flesh and Fruit series. Starting with some aging fruit leftover from one of her mother’s visits to Eugene, which are usually accompanied by a passenger seat’s worth of food, Bodnar began photographing up close, manipulating the fruit by tearing at it with her hands or painting it with makeup and adding hair.

When Gerber, the coordinator of the galleries, was considering the work, she was impressed because “it was different.”

“It was organic as well as fake-looking,” Gerber said. “I haven’t seen something like that in photographs.”

Of Flesh and Fruit opens in the White Gallery, on the second floor of Smith Memorial Student Union, on Thursday, Nov. 1, with a reception from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. The show will last until Nov. 28.

A closing reception will be held for Graven Flesh Saturday evening, Nov. 3, at Vorpal Space, on the corner of Northwest Flanders Street and Broadway, in the Everett Station Lofts.