“Do you see the big Costco sign?” asked Gabriel Weiss over the phone, trying to explain the location of his gallery that had eluded me twice.
Part martial arts and meditation center, language school, art gallery and acrobatic training studio, the Bamboo Grove Salon is a learning and exhibition space of Weiss’s own design-one that provides a physical representation of Weiss’s frenetic interests.
And there’s more: Plans for the future include an apothecary and a clinic for acupuncture and naturopathic medicine, with a reception room for patients and offices for Weiss and the doctors he hopes will practice with him at the Salon.
Started a little over a year ago, the space, located in a Southeast post-industrial building, was originally rented for Heidi Weiss’ pilates studio, which is now the spacious Portland Pilates Collective next door.
Victim of water main and street construction in the past year, and with a relatively obscure location, the Salon has survived through Weiss’ sense of adventure and the monetary support it receives from his stonemasonry business.
Weiss’ life has been as varied as his gallery’s scope.
“In ’93, I was 18 years old,” he began over tea in the Salon’s open kitchen. After studying Chinese languages as a freshman at Reed, he began to travel. “I started in Beijing and got full up on Beijing,” he said. Weiss then traveled to Yunnan and to Sichuan, where he enrolled at Sichuan University to study anthropology and spent his free time traveling into Tibet and walking alone through its grasslands.
“If you run into someone out in the grasslands, you sit down and you both smoke tobacco,” explained Weiss, whose goal at the Salon is to “give precedence to art that shows an East-West fusion.”
As in Weiss’ own life, the experience of being in the gallery is one of learning, not just from other people, but from realizing what you can contribute as well.
The current exhibit, Hanami, or “flower viewing,” involves the Japanese tradition of outdoor viewing parties during the brief period when plum and cherry blossoms are in full bloom. Billed as “An Indoor Blossom Viewing Experience,” the exhibit opened with a performance by the acrobat Kyoko Uchida.
The group show of paintings and work with wood, metal and paper is surrounded by natural light from various skylights in the open, industrial space. Slabs of raw marble and granite in the kitchen, small rock arrangements and sandstone tiles in the entranceway make the indoor gallery look more like a quiet, sheltered garden than anything else. It’s a theme accentuated by Weiss’s arrangements of branches and green plants throughout the space.
In Marshall Stokes’ “Death Becomes Us,” a motif of blossoms falling from branches gather in a growing pile of skulls burnt into a series of three wooden skateboard decks, a design related to Japanese tattoo art.
Jennifer Cox’s thrilling watercolor “Blossoms on Mt. Hood” invokes popular images of Mt. Fuji, but on a more brilliantly distant and insurmountable scale. Kim Hamblin’s stiff painted paper strips nailed on wood create a texture that, according to Weiss, people are drawn to.
Less dressed-up works like Zoe Roller’s “Anna N.,” a simple drawing in ink and pencil on paper of a girl in a blossoming tree, make a straightforward the connection between the show’s theme and the artist’s personality.
Viewed separately, the works might seem too simplistic or out of place, but together, in their cool gardenlike setting, the exhibit speaks for a new kind of gallery that is personal and scholarly.
Visit Bamboo Grove Salon
Hanami is up until April 30 at the Bamboo Grove Salon, 134 SE Taylor. Regular hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., or by appointment (e-mail bamboogrovesalon@gmail.com). First Friday receptions are every month from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. The gallery is in a brick building painted green at the corner of S.E. Taylor St. and S.E. Second Ave. Look for the large metal sign for Gabriel Weiss, Stonemason, above the door.