Gamesmanship: New Works by Reed Altemus & Frank Turek
Saturday, 18 September 2010 at 17:00
Front Room Gallery
As active as the Portland art scene is, rare is the appearance of ‘new media’. Any Portland artist straying from the Painting-Sculpture- Photography trinity will usually get attention simply for doing something ‘different’.
Two Portland artists, Reed Altemus (digital prints) and Frank Turek (boxed assemblages) have been doing something ‘different’ for more than a decade. These artists have dedicated their artistic talents to their respective marginalized media and in the process they have garnered a local and national following.
Their media may be worlds apart, but Altemus and Turek share some basic philosophies of art’s role in contemporary society. These ideas form the foundation for their joint collaboration: a game board. The Fluxus Board Game came out of Turek’s career long desire to design a board game and Altemus participation in Fluxus, an art movement which brings many game concepts into the world of art. This game board will be set up as a playable interactive part of the exhibit.
Featured among Turek’s work for this show will be his 4 Sonnets. Each piece is a visual representation of the strict classical poetic form., the Sonnet. The sonnet form is a 14 line poem with a specific rhyming scheme and rhythmic structure.
Turek’s box assemblage enclosures echo this scheme visually, with paired images acting as rhymed couplets and the sections of the box’s structure acting as the 14 lines.