Gallery goodies

A beautifully designed room sits in the lobby of Portland State’s AB Gallery. It’s filled with scrumptious goodies that look good enough to eat.

You might say it’s a sophisticated twist on Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, only it’s not edible and the materials used are not candy. There are two parts to this gallery, the interior and the exterior.

It’s a little wacky, to say the least, but there is a level of refinement to PSU Master of Fine Arts graduate student Will Bryant’s work. Standing outside, his work appears balanced yet complicated, incorporating commercial objects like balloons, a banana, a sponge and two flowering pots mounted to the top of a tin can.

The simplicity of Bryant’s work is intriguing, as is the way he creates an illusion of disorder with his use of color, line, texture and form.

Bryant, a graphic design professor at PSU, is one of five art students in Portland State’s art MFA program whose work is currently showing in galleries on campus.

Each student is set to give a lecture this Wednesday at the Shattuck Hall Annex that will cover their thesis and portfolio. The other presenting students include Leif Anderson and Mami Takahashi.

Anderson’s and Bryant’s shows are happening simultaneously. Anderson’s show, titled “Window Room,” is on display at the Autzen Gallery in Neuberger Hall until this Friday, while Bryant is showing at the AB Lobby Gallery on the first floor of the Art Building.

An East Texas native, Bryant got his start as an artist in graphic design. As a teenager, he became involved with packaging for record albums, and has worked with the likes of Stanley Donwood (a British artist who’s closely associated with Radiohead).

During his lecture tomorrow evening, Bryant will touch on what makes him tick as an artist.

“I want my work to challenge the value of the object,” he said. “I like creating a sense of illusion and loss of depth.”

Perhaps this philosophy leaves the viewer with a kind of wandering eye—always wanting more. Bryant finds curiosity in the everyday: His diverting approach to art is inspired by American pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Alex da Corte, who often embraced the absurd or whimsical.

“My printmaking teacher Glenn Downing once told my friend Rand, ‘You can be serious about art, but you don’t have to make serious art,’” Bryant said.

For his current exhibit, Bryant used actor Paul Reubens’ cult classic Pee-wee’s Playhouse as inspiration.

“I appreciated his ability to impact kids in a very strange but bright and colorful way,”
Bryant said.

Bryant used a combination of pink installation foam and sandpaper to create geometrical shapes for this show.

As a child growing up in Utah, Anderson became fascinated with big-city life, and used skateboarding as a way to establish a relationship with architecture, forming artistic images from real-life events. Anderson described how skateboarding is similar to the work he currently produces.

“While skateboarding, I developed the skill of taking observational photos by appropriating architecture,” he explained. “I was intrigued by the handrails, or an abandoned staircase, and that became the beginning of how I viewed art.”

For his current exhibit, Anderson hand-built a wooden sculpture of architectural beams that stretches to the top of the gallery’s ceilings; it is total minimalism mashed with a rugged and polished appeal. Anderson explained that he views the word “architecture” as a verb rather than a noun.

“I look to see how my work plays into the interior and exterior of a space,” he said. “To me, the Autzen Gallery is such a unique space because of its openness and tall windows.”

His work acts as a celebration of the interiority of the space and gives the viewer a unique sense of perception when entering it.

The gallery is 47 feet long and 14 feet high, with a separate room broken off, in which Anderson has set up a video installation. The video acts as a self-portrait of his experience arranging a number of objects within the
gallery space.

There is an upper shelf where Anderson assembled a number of paint buckets, brushes, and scraps of cardboard and paper to form a complex pattern. Anderson plays with his compositions and works with found images within a space in order to evoke a specific feeling.

During his lecture, Anderson will show a series of homemade videos and gritty photographs of urban society. The first video shows his hand holding a glass bottle, scuffing it against sidewalks and used spaces, breaking and demolishing the glass bit by bit with each step. The bottle bursts into thin air, and all we’re left with is Anderson’s bare hand.

He explained that his hand serves as a portrait of his body. His process seems to mimic trial-and-error, ambiguously placing found objects in their place. In his work, Anderson allows the viewer to travel along for the ride. He rearranges the ugly, or what we think of as the ugly.

“This video is really about forming your own pathways,” Anderson said, “and improvising the world in front of you.”