Five Standouts at Converge 45

New York artist Trisha Baga is known for video installations that bring together the high-tech and the low-tech, and her Converge presentation combines her meditations on the rise of consumer AI and her own becoming a parent. Her show, at a 10,000-square-foot warehouse space at Portland Institute College of Art, is the standout presentation at Converge. “More” is named for one of the first words many children learn, and the show puts the endless extraction of tech in contrast to the human urge to nurture creatures with bottomless desires;the artist’s diaper-clad offspring is one character in the video footage. 

Wall texts near the entrance set the stage, discussing the legendary 1912 wreck of the supposedly unsinkable Titanic. Nearby, a 3D video plays showing Steve Jobs showing off new models, in front of tables that mimic the ones in Apple stores; lumpy ceramic sculptures sit atop them, like clay versions of bricked phones and tablets hauled up from the depths. Many of the videos boast black backgrounds and swimming ocean life. In the darkened warehouse, it felt as though we were all many leagues under the sea.

A large video installation on the rear wall is projected behind white picket fences and shelves of children’s books. The collaged video footage, some of it in 3D, includes clips from feature films, some involving space exploration, with a voiceover asking questions like, “Did you have a happy childhood?” The artist’s kid, sometimes wearing a headlamp like some tiny explorer, waddles around a homey setting, until, as an exhibition text puts it, “toys and furniture resemble an asteroid field… What feels immense becomes intimate.”

Baga’s show made me reflect on how the titanic burst of the AI bubble may be coming, with disastrous consequences for us all. If it’s bad enough, we may all be sunk. In a century, will historians look back on all our tech as artifacts of a crash of what once seemed inevitable?

In “Reliquary at the Veil,” at Portland State University’s art school, artist and musician Marcus Fischer is showing an installation in which a single tape runs through two vintage recorders, so that the sound of a Swiss folk song played on a hand-pumped air organ repeats continuously. His Swiss-born father, he explained to visitors, died 15 years ago, and the piece manifests grief in the form of a giant strip of black paper running through the space, forming a veil in front of a video projection of the Pacific Ocean. His father had longed to live on the Pacific, said the artist, and, late in his life, he got his wish. 

A performance at Portland Community College Sylvania, We Are the Confluence of Two Rivers, similarly dealt with the inheritance of his father and his Filipino-born mother. In a lush planted area in the courtyard of a Brutalist building, the artist created equally lush, beautiful atmospheric sounds with a guitar and a cymbal, which were then sampled and sent through dual tape players, variously layered and repeated, as if genetic traits were playing out variously across generations. The artist’s voice, meanwhile, played on speakers, discussing his cultural inheritance and his parent’s varied life experiences, including hiding to save their lives amid war. The final question resonated deeply: “What things will pass into legend? What things will die a quiet death?”

Portland artist Ido Radon’s show at Pacific Northwest College of Art, “Men make their own history…,” features a sculptural installation that resembles a giant chessboard on the floor, atop which stand 14 sculptures created with metal Erector sets, the popular construction toy introduced in 1913, as well as a few large curved shapes in red plastic, hugging the floor.

A handout accompanying the exhibition lays out a number of interwoven inspirations for the show, too many to rehearse here in full. They include the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue’s history-making defeat of chess champion Garry Kasparov; the sculptures take the positions of the pieces left standing on the board. The piece also looks farther back, to the Mechanical Turk, an 18th-century chess-playing “automaton” that turned out to be a fraud: It was really just a chess master hiding inside a cabinet. The red swooping shapes on the floor, meanwhile, refer to the slides in Chutes and Ladders.

The show’s title draws on Karl Marx: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” Combining the game of kings with games of chance, children’s toys, and elaborate deceits, Radon had me thinking about how in the sweep of time, history’s great men may look, in the end, like children on chutes and ladders, their fates determined as much as by their grand strategies as by a roll of the dice.

In a solo show at SE Cooper Contemporary, “My Hands Were Waving As If My Feet,” Seattle artist Rob Rhee engages with gourds as a sculptural medium. Gourds are among humankind’s earliest cultivated plants, points out the artist, and thus serve, in his view, as an ideal example of the interaction of human intention and, as it’s put in press materials, “biological agency.” (And yes, the artist is well aware of the humor classic “It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.” I asked.)

Rhee employs JADAM, a Korean natural farming technique that employs fermentation from spent plants, transferred to the next year’s crop. For Rhee, fermentation is analogous with “memory work,” in which something living is passed on from one generation to the next. A new culture, he writes, inherits part of the past, in an analogue for artistic practice. 

A wall sculpture recalls a frieze from the Parthenon in which young women weave a garment, known as the peplos, to clothe a sacred sculpture of Athena. Shards of gourds are grouped together as if to form characters in the sculptural program. Elsewhere, one large, lumpy gourd is on display in the metal armature that helped to shape it. Another piece preserves brine in a bottle; in remarks at the gallery opening, Rhee mentioned backslop, a fermenters’ term for adding leftover brine to a new batch. Like Fischer’s and Radon’s projects, his show makes you very aware you are at but one moment in the ongoing sweep of multigenerational time.

Rarely does a performance make you wonder whether you will live through the night, but Portland artist keyon gaskin did that for me. At Barn Radio, a Black-led music club and electronic music platform, the artist performed against the backdrop of a new installation by fellow Portlander Sidony O’Neal, in which sheets of white Tyvek hang from both sides of the small storefront space, marked with a pattern based on the molecular structure of an insecticide associated with a 1940 fire at Natchez, Mississippi’s Rhythm Club. Spanish moss that had been sprayed with the chemical caught fire, killing more than 200 Black people who had assembled at the club and injuring many more.

As dozens gathered in the darkened space, gaskin looked down from a loft above, unraveling rolls of toilet paper and then lobbing them down at the crowd, all while tunelessly singing about the paper product’s history and what the artist sees as its racial and colonial implications. After descending to the main floor, wearing only a white lab coat and a plastic hair net, gaskin partially closed a security grate at the front of the space, as if to trap us inside, or at least allude to the possibility, and then asked if anyone had matches. Standing on a gathered pile of toilet paper, they then began literally playing with fire, after which they danced while wrapped in the paper streams.

Things got even more uncomfortable when, in the midst of the performance, gaskin called out, “You can’t spell Converge without con!,” and accused the Converge organization of insufficiently compensating them for two years of conversations about a performance that was, in the end, canceled. “Pay me for my time” was part of the refrain. (In an email, a Converge rep said, “Converge 45 has a signed agreement with keyon gaskin for their performance, including compensation for prior planning time on a related project that was cancelled due to budget constraints. Converge 45 and keyon worked together to reach terms both sides agreed to, and Converge 45 is paying them per that signed agreement.”)

So, what’s the deal? Was the artist paid sufficiently or not? It’s unclear. But this bracing performance suggested that if an artist feels they’ve been subjected to enough shit, they will seriously flirt with burning it all down.