At first glance, the new University of Oregon faculty show, recently installed at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, looks a whole lot like the last Oregon Biennial held at the Portland Art Museum. This year's faculty show - called ‘Eye Contact,’ for reasons not entirely clear beyond the catchy title - has the same cool detachment, fine craftsmanship and slight feel of emptiness shared by much contemporary art around the state. But there's more to the resemblance than just tone.
Three of the UO artists - Carla Bengston, Jan Reaves and Amanda Wojick - also had works in that last Biennial, which was held in 2003. (The next Biennial, curiously, won't be held until later this year. Extensive renovation at the museum held things up, a museum spokeswoman says.) With 26 artists, there's a lot to see at the UO show.
Here are some of the highlights:
• Abstract drawings on paper by Laura Vandenburgh were among my favorite works in the whole show. At first glance, you would take these to be computer generated graphics, they're so clean and cool. Vandenburgh combines a light touch with a coherent vision to build lacy, imaginative landscapes of line and color on plain white paper.
• Digital artist Colin Ives has created a complex installation that projects a rotating view of an Oregon landscape on the walls of a small gallery. It has the effect of making you feel you are standing inside a rotating cylinder, looking out of a single vertical window. Stand too near the projector, though, and the lush landscape turns into a clear-cut.
• Terri Warpinski's black-and-white photography is a familiar sight around town. She often combines separate photographic prints inside a single frame, emphasizing the role of the photograph as a hand-crafted object.
• Megan O'Connell has created an interactive piece of art without - gasp! - using electronics. Nine simple words (such as ‘I,’ ‘text’ and ‘am’) are engraved into nine pieces of metal, each the size of a deck of cards. They lie in an open frame in a wooden table. A stack of blank sheets of paper and sticks of graphite invite the viewer to rearrange the nine words and make an individual rubbing.
• Painter Ron Graff is well known for his precise still lifes, and there's a large one in this show. But two of his other paintings here are expansive landscapes of rolling terrain, an interesting new direction.
This is the first faculty show to be presented at the Schnitzer since the museum closed down, underwent extensive remodeling and then re-opened a little over a year ago. If you go to the show, you also might check out seven abstract expressionist paintings that are newly hung in the American and regional art gallery. The seven paintings are by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Adolph Gottlieb and Willem de Kooning. On loan from an anonymous private collector, they will be exhibited through March.