American Craft, April/May 2012, pg. 20

“Deliquesce” is a fancy word for what happens to mushrooms when they rot and liquify. It’s the concept at the center of Michael Endo and Emily Nachison’s exhibition, of other spaces. Sculpting mushrooms and other fungi out of cast glass, Nachison uses installations such as the circular Portal to illustrate the cycle of life and death as each of 20 mushrooms grows, withers and melts into the soil. These images of organic decay are complemented by Endo’s images of urban decay. Using oil paint and kiln-formed glass, Endo depicts desolate cityscapes with burning tires and derelict houses. It’s a thought-provoking thematic pairing. Through April 28.

Michel Foucault outlined a theory of history which places the emphasis of human experience not on the passage of time but on our physical place and the spaces around us. In Foucault’s 1967 lecture “Of Other Spaces,” he talked about how the world hovers and bounces between spaces either “sacred or profane,” and “protected or exposed.” There are “urban places and rural places” and cosmologically speaking, “celestial” versus “terrestrial.” What does this mean for two mixed media artists collaborating in the same space? Bullseye Gallery in Portland, Oregon has the answer in the form of a duo exhibition presenting the work of up-and-coming collaborating duo Michael Endo and Emily Nachison. Their exhibition, which opens this evening, is named for Foucault’s posthumously published lecture of the same name. The pair’s work “explores mythmaking through the accumulation of meaning and history,” according toEndo’s website. The artists will be available to discuss the influence of this philosophy among other things at the Bullseye Gallery Artists Talk Sunday, April 15th at 2 pm (entry is free, but reservations are required for attendance).

Endo and Nachison work in a variety of mediums from oil on linen, wool felt and yarn, cast glass and the kiln formed glass for which Bullseye Gallery is known. Both artists are based in Portland, and were awarded the Regional Arts and Culture Council Grant from the city just last year. In addition, they each earned their Master’s Degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, Endo in painting and Nachison in fibers. However, the similarities end with their imagery. Much of Nachison’s work plays with dreamy and quirky worlds, reminiscent of spending summer hours in your best friend’s backyard playing “Little House on the Prairie.” Every bit as realistic as real life, and sometimes more so, the boring parts are omitted on a whim, and small embellishments added to suit the scene.  Toadstools created out of drippy, bright red glass as in Deliquesce can be seen alongside larger than life glass sculpture, Fairytale Trees. The twin trees sprout spindly November branches sparsely adorned with glowing white orbs teetering in the fragile tops. The effect is sad and precious, like a child’s missing tooth or a single lost mitten.

In contrast, Endo often creates landscapes and still life in conventional mediums based on unconventional subject matter. His gallery on the Cranbrook Academy of Art website depicts two haunting scenes, the first of which comes across like a portrait – it shows an abandoned mattress in a swamp. The second are hunters celebrating their kill in a dusky forest – the kill of a man. For Of Other Spaces,he works with kiln formed glass in minimal and spooky tones, as in the black and white Telegraph and Olympic. The Bullseye Gallery News categorizes this work as a, “reference [to] spaces that are on the outskirts or in the margins of our built world.”

How these artists will marry their seemingly disparate aesthetic worlds remains to be seen by Portlanders with gallery access. It seems the Foucault theory of Heterotopia – places within society that simultaneously mirror and invert the known ethos — is a natural and thoughtful through line for their work. This videoon the Bullseye Gallery website gives insight into the real life imagery that provided much of the inspiration for the exhibition. Fairy tales blend with the all too real world, black ink is etched into smooth glass, and the viewer is left to wonder, is this dark? is this hopeful? and where am I? Foucault answers, “From the standpoint of the mirror…I see myself where I am not.”

SOURCE

Of Other Spaces

February 29 - April 28, 2012

Michael Endo, Strega, 2011, oil on linen, 38 x 38 inches

(excerpt) painter Michael Endo offers quiet, meditative paintings that depict desolated landscapes, nearly devoid of human habitation. This is a vision of a society that is either pre-technological or postapocalyptic, and in either case far removed from the information overload evoked in Radon’s, Shaw’s and Zemel’s work. Endo paints in a palette of dingy grays and blacks, except in the sinister Grim Reaper fantasia Strega, whose diabolical reds and Pepto-Bismol pinks telegraph a garish menace. Life off the grid might be less than utopic, Endo suggests. (excerpt) - Richard Speer

Of Other Spaces

Michael Endo & Emily Nachison

February 29 - April 28,  2012

A duo exhibition of sculpture, installation and painting that explores mythmaking through the accumulation of meaning and history.

Bullseye Gallery
300 NW 13th Avenue
Portland, OR 97209 USA

Fresh off his eerie exhibition at FalseFront, Michael Endo departs from painting in his mixed-media installation, Et in Arcadia Ego. Based on two works by 17th Century painter Nicolas Poussin—with a skosh of fashionable “Detroit ruin porn” thrown in—Endo’s show evokes a grungily post-industrial, post-apocalyptic dystopia. The show posits that even amid the most arcadian perfection lurk the memento mori that portend decay and death. Don’t get too comfortable, Endo’s works imply, for, as poet Robert Herrick warned, “This same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.”

Project Background: Tapping into the growing fascination with the remains of America’s industrial past, artist Michael Endo presents his installation, Et in Arcadia Ego, at the Portland Building. The central focus of the installation consists of a full-size shroud of a 1970’s era muscle car resting among a slew of industrial and automotive debris. Accompanied by an auto windshield altar piece, the scene creates a wistful homage to an American industrial utopia that never delivered on its promise. Endo’s installation, which draws on his recent series of paintings with similar themes, underscores the folly of our romanticized interest in the decayed remains of America’s once gleaming industrial past. Although aesthetically alluring at first glance, the stark scene he renders moves us past nostalgia to point out the failure and disappointment such ruin represents.

“I am often enthralled by the discarded, decayed and unfinished. An abandoned gymnasium retains an imprint of the events and people that passed through it. The gnarled lines and cracked asphalt of a parking lot hold a glimmer of the utopian ideal that suburbia represents. These places are between time, existing in their physically experienced state and as a phantom of what they were.”

About the Artist: Michael Endo currently lives, works and teaches in Portland, Oregon. He received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 2009 and earned a BA from Portland State University. His work has been exhibited internationally and has been selected for multiple group and solo exhibitions.

Viewing Hours & Location: 7 am to 6 pm, Monday – Friday. The Portland Building is located at 1120 SW 5th Avenue in downtown Portland.

For more information on the Portland Building Installation Series including images, proposals and statements of all the installations featured since 1994, go to www.racc.org/installationspace.

Issued 7/20/11.

Michael Endo’s haunting show at False Front this month, Pain Scale, is compelling for how uncomfortably it stretched the meticulous painter’s working methods. Endo, 32, normally lavishes time on his paintings, which generally never include human figures and are almost always in a subtle grayscale palette. This time, he forced himself to paint seven canvases—incorporating figures—in only three days, working not in the familiarity of his studio, but in the middle of the gallery itself, with a palette of bright, saturated colors. WW asked Endo why he made things so hard on himself.

WW: Pain Scale is based on the hospital pain-management scale, right?

Michael Endo: Yes. About eight years ago, I had my appendix removed. I had never felt pain like that before. There’s this flash moment when that doctor asks you, “On a scale from 1 to 10, how much pain are you in?” It was difficult to assign it a number. I had to find a union between my memory of pain in the past and my perception of what was happening to me physically in the moment. It seemed arbitrary, in a way similar to choosing which colors you use in a painting. It fit in with my ideas about my work, because I’m always interested in the difference between perceived reality and the world that exists—that weird, liminal space between the psychological and the physical.

Was it frustrating to make all seven paintings in such a short amount of time?

To me, it was liberating. The last two years, I’ve been working with such strict parameters, so in this series, bringing color back into it, I didn’t have to think too much about it. If I had been sitting there meditating on which colors to use, I would have tortured myself, overthinking it. So it was great to just get it out there.

The big, 4-by-7-foot piece you did is really eerie. Who are those people, and why are we just seeing their outlines?

I wanted to create a kind of apocalyptic landscape, where the figures are seeking shelter, but in the act of seeking shelter, their anxieties and feelings, which I assign colors, invade the space. They’re so wrapped up in their inner worlds, they can’t even see that the shelter is filling up with this black oil, which is erasing everything. Some of the figures are more realized, and others remain silhouettes. I wanted them to be in this flux of being there and not being there. Some of them are hanging onto some semblance of reality, and others are devolving into pure anxiety and fear.

There’s no question that certain colors contain emotional associations. We all know what it means to “feel blue” or “see red,” for example. But where do those significations arise? 

Are they somehow inherent to the colors themselves or are they ascribed to them through culture and language? For his second solo show at False Front, called “Pain Scale,” Portland artist Michael Endo argues the latter, exploring the arbitrary nature of color-coded systems of measurement. 

Most obviously, this investigation conjures the now-retired Homeland Security Advisory System, which quantified terror threat levels as a range of colors, moving from green (a “low” risk) to red (a “high” one). Endo’s application of this idea, as evidenced by the exhibition’s title, is more personal than political, considering how emotional states can be articulated chromatically — if at all.

The focal point of “Pain Scale” is a series of six monochrome portraits, painted in oil, which move from “cool” colors (lilac and blue) to “hot” ones (orange and red), passing through temperate green and yellow along the way. 

At the beginning of the series, the figure in “Pain Scale (Lilac)” is the most fully formed: a forlorn adult male in glasses and a pink-striped shirt, whose bald pate seems to dissipate into raw canvas. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the female figure in “Pain Scale (Orange)” is featureless and sublimated into color, radiating heat like the head of a match. 

At the time of my visit, it looked like a nondescript matrix of solid-colored rectangles, with no single ” mood” dominating the composition. Then again, perhaps the scale’s inability to add up to some legible information reaffirms the ideas in the paintings, suggesting a color scale is an arbitrary, even anaesthetizing response to the pitch-black reality of suffering. 

Michael Endo

Pain Scale

June 30 – July 24, 2011

Opening reception: Last Thursday, June 30, 7 – 10PM

FalseFront is pleased to present Pain Scale, a new large-scale painting and exercise by Michael Endo.  This marks  Endoʼs second solo exhibition with FalseFront  and will emphasis  one  monumental  painting,  executed  on-site,  days  prior  to the opening reception. Centered on producing  a  singular,  stately  painting,  Endo  will  work  from  six smaller reference works, each based on a self-constructed  color  code  system inspired from the present-day methodical diagrams of sensory and emotional measurement.

“On a scale from 1 to 10, how much pain are you feeling? 10 being the most pain you can imagine.”

Artistʼs Statement:

Arbitrary systems of value, such as medical pain scales and the now defunct terrorism color code system are only loosely based on concrete experiences, and yet, they can have significant impacts on our lives. These systems, given weight by the institutions that created them, can influence our actions and change our view of the world. The variegated pall cast by the threat levels of the last ten years may have had little measurable effects, but psychologically they produced an environment of fear and insecurity. Inspired by these systems,  Pain Scale  asks  no  questions  and  provides no conclusions; it manufactures a personal landscape dominated by the viewer’s chosen level of anxiety.

Michael Endo was born in Portland, Oregon, where he currently lives  and works. He received his BFA from Portland State University and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.

Viewing hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12 – 3PM and by appointment

Make Space is an artist run blog dedicated to showing new work in all mediums. The site will be constantly update with artists and feature studio visits, interviews and other in depth conversations about their work. The purpose of this blog is to create dialogue through further investigation.

…For all the civic teeth-gnashing about the city’s apathetic collector base, there are private collectors such as Intel global brand manager Bryan Deaner, who filled his new showplace home, designed by Portland-based William Kaven Architecture, with paintings by Sara Siestreem, Stuart Cornell, Michael Endo, and other local artists. “I like to collect cultural artifacts on my global travels and interlace those treasures with visual arts from the Pacific Northwest,” Deaner explains. “That allows me to bring dialogue and exposure back to the Portland art scene. I am drawn to the creative spirit in Portland and want to both collect and support artists where I have chosen to live. It coalesces with the general sense of community in Portland.” (excerpt)