First Thursday: Dame Darcy & Tim Root Art @ Pony Club | September 3
Celebrated work from Dame Darcy and new work from Tim Root, featuring a live musical performance by Dame Darcy's "Death By Doll".
Pony Club Gallery
free entry
Thursday, September 3, 2009
6:10pm – 9:10pm
Pony Club Gallery 625 NW Everett St #105 Portland, OR 97209
Related: Portland EVENTSÂ LISTINGS
THE SHOW:
The Pony Club Gallery is proud to present work by two Portland artists with intensely unique approaches to drawing and line. Both artists tackle wildly different subject matter but both also display an attention to line and form like few others, and present artistic worlds that electrify the viewer with contradictory thematic elements that perhaps should not work, but work very well indeed.
Dame Darcy, a recent transplant to Portland, will be represented by a selection of her comics and illustration work from the last 10 years. Single pages, snippets of her own comics history, as well as two complete stories written for her by the esteemed Alan Moore will fill the wall, giving a previously unseen look at the scope of her comics work. Her lush black and white drawings recall Edward Gorey, Victorian and Gothic art styles, and the zine revolution, while the subject matter veers into surreal punk rock irreverence. Wolves in tuxedos dance with wailing banshees and not-so-proper ladies pine half-heartedly for the love (or at least attention) of hunky heart-throbs designed to both evoke and mock the conventions of Jane Austen.
Tim Root's bright drawings and watercolors delineate a sort of Stoner-Americana via a subtle depiction of the most normal minutia crossed with a palpable sense of magic realism. Is that crowd of drunks standing around looking at their friend climbing into a window or up the side of the wall (in his underwear)? Ramshackle households evoke the simple pleasures of family, but the chickens in the yard are pecking around giant crystals more at home in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Deciding for yourself which elements ring more true is half the fun.
BIO INFORMATION:
Dame Darcy — Dame Darcy is an internationally renowned cartoonist, illustrator, musician, and reality TV star. She has written and drawn her celebrated comic book Meat Cake, since 1989, and has been published primarily by the Pacific Northwest's own Fantagraphics Books since 1993. Her most recent work is the graphic novel Gasoline, as well as the short story “Pandora's Aquarium” in the Comic Book Tattoo anthology. http://www.damedarcy.com/
Tim Root — Tim Root is a legend of sorts in the Portland art world, and a true “cartoonist's cartoonist.” He's best known as the illustrator of perhaps the only “Auteur-style” advertising campaign, for local Stumptown Coffee Roasters. He's self-published several mini-comics and an art book, as well as being published by Sparkplug Press, Teenaged Dinosaur and Tugboat press.
Show runs through September 29th
