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Visual Arts: Food: Outdoors:
Vintage
Point
Modern dance balances atop a rock-solid historical foundation, but a large part of what keeps the art form "modern" is the choreographers' ability to flow with time and continually reinvent concepts within the genre. Eugene audiences will have an opportunity to see this kind of innovation in action when dancer-choreographers Pamela Geber and Eric Handman perform at the UO Friday and Saturday. The two taught in Eugene in the past and are now assistant professors at the University of Utah. Handman and Geber offer up dance compositions stripped down to their essential parts and rebuilt by highlighting the movements' most important aspects. "Palpate: An Evening of Dance and Film" will incorporate solo performances, dance video and a duet, including works by internationally recognized choreographers Sara Rudner and David Dorfman. Handman utilizes film, or "dance for the camera" in two of the program's six pieces, but he says incorporating film into live dance performances is not a necessity in keeping up with the times. "I can't talk about dance in general," he says. "I don't believe it needs to be faddish. It's up to each artist how much they want to be interfacing with technology." However, Handman adds that for him, dance for the camera lends a whole new dimension to choreography. "As a performer, I have a hard time being an audience member," he says, referring to a seated onlooker's limited vantage point. "The camera and editing allows me to have a much more mobile point of view." Handman acknowledges that video might lack the intimacy of a live performance, but says the benefits of multiple angles are often well worth the trade-off. Geber says all parts of "Palpate" stand out, whether they focus on video or live performers. "The pieces are pretty distinct," she says. "Both Eric and I are really steeped in the post-modern philosophy aesthetic." She adds that the secret to keeping this type of choreography fresh is not to create cumbersome characters, but instead invent situations for the dancers themselves to move within. "I like it to be about them in this context," she says. "It's about what's essential to create this mood … It's not about ornamentation." "Palpate: An Evening of Dance and Film" will take place Friday and Saturday at 8 pm at the UO's Dougherty Dance Theatre. Tickets are $5 to $10, available at the door.
Colorful
Nature,Minimalist
Figures Satoko:
Transience Eugene painter Satoko tells the story of an 11th century Zen monk who warned against colors because of their seductive power. Herself under the spell of color, Satoko admits she cannot stop exploring its complexity in her paintings. Her most recent watercolors and oils are inspired by Tuscany, where she spends her summers, drawn by the qualities of the northern Mediterranean light.
Satoko gives us interpretations of Tuscany — internalized cityscapes and landscapes whose elements, such as buildings, are abstracted to their bare essentials. Correspondence between those buildings and their reflections or between trees and their shadows is only partial, an apt metaphor for the strongly evocative but ultimately independent way in which those paintings reflect the original landscapes. "The beauty of nature is too great to be recreated," Satoko said. "The painting has to be something completely different from what you see. You can't copy." To represent or evoke forms, Satoko does not use line, nor does she strive to suggest volume. She creates the impression of depth through multiple layers of sheer pigmentation. Satoko's physical and conceptual tool, the key to her compositions, is color. Color, and light, from which it is inseparable, are the true subjects of her paintings. Fundamentally a fearless but subtle colorist, Satoko uses a bold palette of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple that might turn garish or kitsch in less capable hands. She works with water, pigment and light to achieve luminous vibrancy and harmony. In Reflection on Water colors and light appear to dance, precisely as if reflected on water. In Moons and Suns, the abstracted elements of the painting — disks and cloud forms — are involved in a slow, ethereal dance, as if to their own music of the spheres. Abstracted buildings constitute the only hard edges in her work. With the circles for moons and suns, they provide the only geometric forms as counterpoint to the dominant organic forms of hills and clouds. Water reflects both heaven and earth. In those dreamy landscapes the vertical order is subverted or made irrelevant, even when, as in Reflection #2, we can tell where the divide occurs between the landscape elements and their reflections. All appear suspended in a fugitive moment of time — time captured in its very passing, rather than as a frozen image. In the two oil paintings, Passage and Nocturne, light is also a crucial component, but it is now light reflected off objects to which the medium has conferred solidity. Although both the oils and watercolors represent light, the watercolors produce the illusion of light caught between the layers of pigment, while the oils offer a higher sense of grounding. The passion the painter herself feels for her medium and subject coexist paradoxically with a peaceful, contemplative element, the painter's mood. In the summer, Satoko spends the early hours of the morning and evening painting in the countryside. "It is very important for me to be alone and sit on a hill painting," she said, "but also experiencing the wind, smells, sounds. It's a physical experience that's at the source of my paintings, which are done in my studio." "Sunrise and sunset are the times when I experience transience the most," she explained, "because I can see the sun moving. All the shadows of the clouds are visible, changing constantly, dancing on the hills, like the breathing skin of a living animal. That moment, that hill, those shadows, will never be repeated. This is what is called 'one encounter, one experience' in Japanese tea ceremony." Watercolor is an appropriate medium for a study of the fugitive. Being aqueous, it slips and flows on the paper. Satoko's watercolors have an atmospheric quality. The eye is drawn into a layered mist of color, which it can never quite seize and hold. We encounter no solidity. As viewers we are required to go with the flow, just as the painter does when dealing with the medium. "With watercolor, I just feel that I have to go with the flow of the water. It is like maneuvering a little boat on a river or ocean. I have to accept where the flow is going." Satoko, born in Japan, living in Eugene and with a third home in Tuscany, may have found her roots in the study of transience.
Lindsay
Kennedy: Person Etcetera
Lindsay Kennedy's figurative oils offer a sharp contrast in approach to Satoka's work. At 22, Kennedy is fast learning mastery of the craft and finding her voice. Person Etcetera focuses mostly on the human figure, portraits and nudes, but also includes three unusual, tiny still lives. Closet Scene no 1, a drastically cropped view of hangers and clothes, provides deadpan humor, while the red shoes fetchingly portrayed in Flats supply the single incidence of bright color. "I was never drawn to bright colors," Kennedy said. "I love all the various tones of gray. They remind me of water and rocks, which I like a lot." Kennedy's palette is distinctive for its cool, subdued tones and its minimalism, although it has expanded since her first series of strictly white-on-black paintings. Her palette now includes blues, grays, dark pinks, umber, and light flesh tones warmed by discrete pink undertones. Kennedy usually limits herself to three of these colors in a single painting and builds them up with numerous thin layers of paint applied with invisible brushstrokes. Eschewing line, Kennedy allows contrast in tone or value to delineate shapes. Similarly, facial features, anatomy and folds in garments are suggested through gradual shifts in value. Backgrounds are simple and kept to a single color. Kennedy's paintings maintain an interesting tension between realistic modeling of the human figure and a sustained emphasis on the two-dimensionality of the canvas through her treatment of backgrounds as flat areas of color and her smooth application of paint.
In Kennedy's nudes, cropping serves to underline her formalist treatment of the human figure as an aesthetic object. Sometimes the entire lower body is cropped, and sometimes only the buttocks and legs are represented. Faces are cropped or hidden away, de-emphasizing the personal element. Even when a personal story exists behind a painting, she resolves the personal through formal means rather than expressionistically. In Someone Else's Lover, a female nude lying on her side on the floor, her back to the viewer, is depicted through a grid of squares painted blue, umber and gray, a composition that can be interpreted in purely formal terms. Yet this painting chronicles the end of a relationship: Each square was painted in a darker or lighter color to express the painter's shifting feelings. Another of Kennedy's compositional devices — a counterpoint to her general predilection to partial views — is to provide a double perspective of the depicted subject matter. Cups presents two partial perspectives of a cup and books. Ryan is a double portrait of a young man whose back and profile appear on the left, a frontal view on the right. In Me/Myself, Kennedy plays with the notion of duality by representing her face pressed against its mirror image. Whereas a more impersonal aesthetic approach serves Kennedy's nudes well, it is not as felicitous for her portraits. Effective portraits convey some essential trait of the individual. Too often in Kennedy's portraits, the impression we get is of an individual as sitter and the resulting stiffness he or she feels, rather than a sense of the person. But Kennedy is just starting and so far has proved hard-working and quick-learning. She has talent, and I look forward to see where she will take it.
Food
in the City I have seen the signs that — perhaps — Eugene might be growing up, becoming a city where people not only will want to visit the downtown but might even hope to live there. Which is what we really want in a CITY, not some hokey imitation of a mass-market mall. In a real city — think New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland and especially Vancouver, B.C. — a certain symbiosis grows up between residents and businesses to create an environment that flourishes with activity and variety. A lively mix seems best: houses, apartments and even (gag) condos allows for a blend of ages and needs — young families with school-age children, singles and couples of all ages, mature and retired folk in the prime of their lives. Then a mix of workplaces that employ or service the residents and visitors — office complexes, nice hotels for visitors, small-scale production facilities, institutions such as schools and hospitals and libraries, good food stores, retail shops and boutiques, art galleries, restaurants (lots) and, and, and. Save plenty of parks and open spaces, preserving and even enhancing features of natural beauty where kids and adults can gather, play, walk or run, bike or roller-blade. Concentrated living works well for many (not all) human beings; the result of careful planning and cooperation can be a livable city. Imagine such a fate for Eugene. Imagine people in the streets in the evening (not just lost kids, panhandlers and lurkers). Imagine gaping holes in city blocks filled with vigorous businesses and living spaces. Could happen. Some of the signs to watch for will include such places as City View Café (corner of 8th and Park) and Perugino (between 7th and 8th on Willamette). City View is tiny, maybe a half-dozen tables including two outside for rainless times. Most of their business is in specialty sandwiches and take-out lunches. But they also serve at least one item that is a distinctive mark of high civilization. I speak of New Orleans-style beignets; faintly related to donuts, these are fluffy rectangles of fried dough liberally sprinkled with powdered sugar. City View's version are cooked to order (3 for $2.50), served hot, best with some of their good coffee or modified café-au-lait. Oh lor', dey some good. Perugino styles itself a coffee house, wine bar and gallery. They offer a wide range of desserts to go with an array of coffee drinks, plus a few sandwiches and "light plates," beers, teas, etc. But the exciting aspect of their repertoire, to my mind, lies in the infancy of the wine bar. Right now Perugino is pouring two sparklers, four whites, one rosé, five reds, two ports, and one sherry, but all are very carefully selected for top quality and value, all reasonably priced ($4.25-$6/glass, $17-$24/bottle). This is a fine beginning and maybe about as much as can be expected for this market at this time, but in a glowing future of Eugene's increasing civilization (don't laugh, it could happen), wine lovers might look for a much wider range of tasting options, both for local wines (Perugino currently pours only one Oregon wine, Evesham Wood 2001 Pinot Noir, superb, but… ) and examples of the rare and surprising (say, Argentine malbec or Hungarian tokay or Okanagan Valley ice wine). If Perugino can survive long enough for Eugene to grow up, maybe we can all look for a brighter future. We have seen other such hopeful signs that the Emerald City might actually leave its Kansas-like doldrums, but our most civilized citizens will have to help. Get on your feet, folks, and get into town.
Clay
Creek Trail
One suggested translation for the word "Siuslaw" is "far away river," which couldn't be further from the truth for Eugeneans. There's so much great hiking to be had by following the Willamette River east, that a lot of people forget about the spectacular scenery along the banks of the Siuslaw River, which begins in the hills just west of Eugene and pours slowly through a gap in the Coast Range to the Pacific. With the short days of winter upon us, not only does the Siuslaw have the advantage of being close to Eugene, but it's also almost always free of snow. The Clay Creek trail is one of several short walks through a classic example of coastal old-growth. Directions: Drive Highway 126 west from Eugene for approximately 30 miles. Take a left onto Siuslaw River Road at a sign for "Whiteaker Creek Recreation Area." Stay to the left at the intersection in just 20 yards, following signs for Whiteaker Creek and Clay Creek. The scenery along the river road is worth the trip. You'll be following the slow black waters of the Siuslaw as it meanders through a forest of fir, maple, and red alder. 9.9 miles from the highway stay to the left at a fork in the road, following the sign for Clay Creek. This part of the Coast Range is a "working forest," and the clearcuts get larger and uglier the farther from the main road you get. There's a particularly nasty recent cut 2.8 miles from the fork in the road that's caved in a good portion of the riverbank. This sort of forestry is the main reason that the Siuslaw supports less than 5 percent of its historic run of coho salmon. After 6.2 miles from the fork in the road, take a right at the sign for the Clay Creek Campground. Cross a bridge over the Siuslaw and park on the left, just on the other side of the bridge. The trailhead is just another 10 yards farther up the road on your right. The first half of the Clay Creek trail is a moderately steep climb, passing dozens of gigantic old-growth Douglas fir trees. This time of year, the path is covered in a thick mat of colorful fallen leaves. There's plenty of color still on the branch, too, mostly from the vine maple thickets whose leaves are the same color as ripe lemons. After a little more than a half mile of switchbacks, the trail splits and levels out in a loop that follows the ridgeline and offers an occasional glimpse through the forest to the river below. If you leave Eugene by noon, you can be on the top of the ridge by 2 pm. Lane County's "other river" is a great alternative when the Cascades seem far away this winter.
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