#litterkit

MP's Tom Litterkit reports on the art show "Mapquest," which opened at Graeter Art Gallery in Portland, OR, on 2 February. Reviews constrained by aleatoricism.

Portland's Graeter Art Gallery promised artists "watching you like a speakeasy mirror at midnight." They did not disappoint. Jeff Betz breathes a rich amalgam of media into his figures, and the viewer is well rewarded by traversing the 360 degrees required to fully appreciate the skewed (and sometimes papal) dignity these characters emanate. His “Brotherhood” piece is a totem of leering faces, each distinct expression molded with a creator’s attention to detail. “The Prosecutor” is all maw- it’s face a grotesque toothy yawn- while the “Baron,” this reviewer’s favorite, stands with the sleepy dignity of a Hussar’s ghost. With the poise of bantams standing in cockfighting wait, these pieces gave the impression of being on the verge of action.

Candid and humbly evoked characters stare from Roscoe Hall II’s gallery of drawings and paintings. Hardly easing viewers through the backstairs passage, Hall instead brings them eye-to-eye with a young Ali, a hoodied youth (who reminds Hall of a monk), and several men straight from an urban landscape. In an especially fraught “Greed,” two giant figures’ visages are a tangle of thick, black lines, while the scuffle of persons and blackbirds in “Kuntry Tuff” are rendered from a more vivid (but no less compelling) palette. An interesting bit of personal trivia: fans of Alabama’s famous “Dreamland Bar-B-Que” may be interested to know that Hall is the grandson of founder “Big Daddy” John Bishop!

Skull headed and dressed down in briefs, Joseph McVetty’s cultish crew is at times both striking ridiculous poses (“Initiation Into Nothingness”) and buoying figures on light beams shot from eye sockets (“Approach to the Sun”). His agility with gouache adds a lushness to the simplicity of the pieces, and each is as peculiar as it is fun to contemplate. Something about these characters’ duality- half-naked vulnerability and finely-etched musculature- would make their presence comforting if a crisis were imminent.