{"id":2134880,"date":"2026-09-08T17:52:30","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T14:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2134880"},"modified":"2026-09-08T17:52:30","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T14:52:30","slug":"five-standouts-at-converge-45","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2134880","title":{"rendered":"Five Standouts at Converge 45"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tThe US art world has in recent years worked hard to bring a focus to cities outside the market capitals, mounting recurring exhibitions like Counterpublic in St. Louis, the Medina Triennial in upstate New York, and the lamentably discontinued Front Triennial in Cleveland (adding to long-running shows like the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh). One that has remained a little under the radar is Converge 45, established in 2016 by Portland dealer Elizabeth Leach in hopes of getting the art world to converge on the 45th parallel, halfway between the Equator and the North Pole.<\/p>\n
\n\tCourtesy of the organizers, I traveled recently to the City of Roses for the opening festivities of the latest edition, \u201cHere, To you, Now,\u201d overseen by New York\u2013based independent curator Lumi Tan (shows at multiple venues remain open to various dates, some into 2027). The title draws on the 1985 novel Always Coming Home <\/em>by Ursula K. Le Guin, a daughter of the city, in which a narrator describes how the people described in the book understood language: \u201cThe written language is \u2018there<\/em>, for anyone<\/em>, at any time<\/em>,\u2019\u201d as Tan explains in a broadsheet accompanying the exhibition, while the spoken language is always shifting: it is \u201chere<\/em>, to you<\/em>, now<\/em>.\u201d The artists, she says, \u201ctake up Le Guin\u2019s challenge: to imagine other ways of living while remaining grounded in the present, producing new forms of thought and feeling that can be offered to others.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe show contains some fine work, but overall it was a mixed success. Tan\u2019s curatorial conceit is a stirring concept in the abstract, but it was hard to see how it played out in many of the works on view; moreover, does not much good art produce shareable new forms of thought and feeling? The show takes place at 16 sites around the city, mostly arts and culture venues, such as the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon Contemporary, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). One might have hoped for more offbeat venues that could have told visitors more about the host city; a several-day itinerary organized for visiting press was mostly taxiing (on a party bus!) from one white cube to another.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tSome of the show\u2019s 28 artists hail from art world capitals, like Trisha Baga and Rose Salane of New York and Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork of Los Angeles, but more than half are Portlanders, some prominent, like Srijon Chowdhury, Keyon Gaskin, and Ido Radon. A number are members of studios that support artists with intellectual disabilities, including Aaron Cunningham, Michelle Fromme, and Annie Rose Macer. This seems like an admirable gesture, but it was hard to see how those artists were integrated into the curatorial concept.<\/p>\n
\n\tSome artists responded to the local context, for example Linda K. Johnson, whose dance-and-installation piece refers to an earlier performance she conducted in the same city. Salane offers a video installation in which she offers the public access, at a local shopping center, to a pair of shoes she bought at auction that once belonged to Princess Diana, whose death was grieved by Portlanders along with mourners around the globe. Patricia V\u00e1zquez G\u00f3mez\u2019s audio installation and artist\u2019s book come from her work with local young people learning the Mayan language.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat is the local context? It\u2019s a challenging one. When Bean Gilsdorf wrote about Portland\u2019s artist-run spaces for Art in America <\/em>in 2019, the city had lost some important institutions and already seen rents skyrocket\u2014and that was pre-Covid. In a study two years later, Gilsdorf noted that the city was rich with artists but poor on arts funding. Tan\u2019s own informal survey of the city\u2019s arts community, she reveals in the broadsheet, yielded a common refrain: \u201cThe city needs a comeback.\u201d Let\u2019s hope Converge 45 can help facilitate that.<\/p>\n
\n\tFollowing are five standouts from the show.<\/p>\n
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Trisha Baga\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Mario Gallucci. Courtesy Converge 45\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tNew 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. \u201cMore\u201d 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\u2019s diaper-clad offspring is one character in the video footage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWall texts near the entrance set the stage, discussing the legendary 1912 wreck of the supposedly unsinkable Titanic<\/em>. 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. <\/p>\n
\n\tA large video installation on the rear wall is projected behind white picket fences and shelves of children\u2019s 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, \u201cDid you have a happy childhood?\u201d The artist\u2019s kid, sometimes wearing a headlamp like some tiny explorer, waddles around a homey setting, until, as an exhibition text puts it, \u201ctoys and furniture resemble an asteroid field\u2026 What feels immense becomes intimate.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tBaga\u2019s show made me reflect on how the titanic burst of the AI bubble may be coming, with disastrous consequences for us all. If it\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Marcus Fischer<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Mario Gallucci. Courtesy Converge 45.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn \u201cReliquary at the Veil,\u201d at Portland State University\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tA performance at Portland Community College Sylvania, We Are the Confluence of Two Rivers<\/em>, 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\u2019s voice, meanwhile, played on speakers, discussing his cultural inheritance and his parent\u2019s varied life experiences, including hiding to save their lives amid war. The final question resonated deeply: \u201cWhat things will pass into legend? What things will die a quiet death?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Ido Radon<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Mario Gallucci. Courtesy Converge 45.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tPortland artist Ido Radon\u2019s show at Pacific Northwest College of Art, \u201cMen make their own history\u2026,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tA 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\u2019s 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 \u201cautomaton\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe show\u2019s title draws on Karl Marx: \u201cMen make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.\u201d Combining the game of kings with games of chance, children\u2019s toys, and elaborate deceits, Radon had me thinking about how in the sweep of time, history\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Rob Rhee<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Conner Enloe for Mario Gallucci Photo. Courtesy Converge 45.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tIn a solo show at SE Cooper Contemporary, \u201cMy Hands Were Waving As If My Feet,\u201d Seattle artist Rob Rhee engages with gourds as a sculptural medium. Gourds are among humankind\u2019s 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\u2019s put in press materials, \u201cbiological agency.\u201d (And yes, the artist is well aware of the humor classic \u201cIt\u2019s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.\u201d I asked.)<\/p>\n
\n\tRhee employs JADAM, a Korean natural farming technique that employs fermentation from spent plants, transferred to the next year\u2019s crop. For Rhee, fermentation is analogous with \u201cmemory work,\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tA 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\u2019 term for adding leftover brine to a new batch. Like Fischer\u2019s and Radon\u2019s projects, his show makes you very aware you are at but one moment in the ongoing sweep of multigenerational time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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keyon gaskin<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Mario Gallucci. Courtesy Converge 45.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tRarely 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\u2019Neal, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThings got even more uncomfortable when, in the midst of the performance, gaskin called out, \u201cYou can\u2019t spell Converge without con!,\u201d and accused the Converge organization of insufficiently compensating them for two years of conversations about a performance that was, in the end, canceled. \u201cPay me for my time\u201d was part of the refrain. (In an email, a Converge rep said, \u201cConverge 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.\u201d)<\/p>\n
\n\tSo, what\u2019s the deal? Was the artist paid sufficiently or not? It\u2019s unclear. But this bracing performance suggested that if an artist feels they\u2019ve been subjected to enough shit, they will seriously flirt with burning it all down.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/best-PCC-Marcus-Fischer-Photo_-Mario-Gallucci.-Courtesy-Converge-45jpg.jpg?w=1024″] The US art world has in recent years worked hard to bring a focus to cities outside the market capitals, mounting recurring exhibitions like Counterpublic in St. Louis, the Medina Triennial in upstate New York, and the lamentably discontinued Front Triennial in Cleveland (adding to long-running shows like the Carnegie International in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2134880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2134880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2134880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2134880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2134880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2134880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2134880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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