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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Visual Art Porn and Portland: Ty Ennis Looks at Dirty Pictures

Posted by Jen Graves on Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 11:08 AM

Ty Ennis, in his show JKJKJK at Prole Drift (review), unveils a portrait of his father, the flannel-wearing, oyster-eating hunter:

Courtesy Ty Ennis

He also made a portrait of his grandfather, who had a vast hat collection, and the day his grandfather died was the day that Ennis realized he was beginning to go bald. This is a portrait of that man/that day:

Courtesy Ty Ennis

And here is a portrait of a porn shop in Spokane, where Ennis grew up before he left that tabooey place for progressive Portland. The piece is called 2nd and Bernard (Spokane, WA), and it's taken from memory. It depicts an actual shop Ennis visited but it does not look seedy enough. What must have been cheap wood-paneled walls and luridly colored stacks of dildos and movies and magazines here become more like a refined Northwest-modernist hardwood interior (Portland or Seattle, not Spokane) designed by a geometric abstractionist with a thing for candy colors.

Courtesy Ty Ennis

More about where this artist is coming from here. If a show can be modest and lurid, this one is. You should really just go see it, hanging alongside Christopher Buening's Illustration of Events Happening in the back gallery, before it closes October 14.