EXHIBITION | Bean Gilsdorf: An Exhibition That Might Exist
Philip Feldman Gallery – PNCA 1241 NW Johnson, Portland
January 21 – February 28, 2014

Opening reception, Thursday, January 23, 2014 6-8 pm

Artist Talk | Bean Gilsdorf
Swigert Commons, PNCA Main Campus
Wednesday, February 12, 2014 6:30 pm

The Philip Feldman Gallery + Project Space at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) presents a solo exhibition of work by Bean Gilsdorf entitled, An Exhibition That Might Exist from January 21 through February 28, 2014.

Gilsdorf makes works including sculpture, performance, and writing. The conceptual point of departure for this exhibition is Gilsdorf’s experience as an art critic. Each day of the exhibition Gilsdorf will place a three-page review for an imagined exhibition—a different imagined exhibition each day—in a vitrine on the front of a two-sided reading desk. The previous day’s review will be moved to the back of the table. The spent reviews will accumulate over the course of the exhibition, and on the final day of the show, the main review will assess the exhibition of the title—which is to say, it will review itself.

By presenting these speculative productions as a fait accompli, Gilsdorf examines the potency and vulnerability of assessing objects that exist in the ideational stage, as well as the role of the viewer as a co-author of the work. She addresses subjects such as subjectivity, viewership, criticism as historiography, and the threshold at which text becomes object. Gilsdorf’s recent projects, including the Bean Gilsdorf Living History Museum, resist the security of a single, finite reality, and instead suggest parallel, alternative propositions that alter the way we perceive the past and present. An Exhibition That Might Exist offers an opportunity to consider art criticism and artmaking as a unified field of inquiry.

An Exhibition That Might Exist is curated by Mack McFarland. McFarland has served as curator for the Philip Feldman Gallery + Project Space at the Pacific Northwest College of Art since 2006, and has organized or curated over 30 exhibitions, with a focus on artists whose practices involve social or politically engaged themes, including Joe Sacco, Sue Coe, Sandow Birk, and Regina Silveira.