Painting with Bob Dylan and Your Best Friend
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Margaux Ogden and Tess Bilhartz, the two New York–based painters featured in Blonde on Blonde at SE Cooper Contemporary (1–4pm Saturday, July 12; through August 30), aren’t twins, or biologically related. But they have shared studio space and much else for over a decade. Effectively, they’ve grown their painting practices in tandem. Playing off the Bob Dylan album of the same name (they have matching tattoos of his face), this show is a study of symmetry and asymmetry—how two things, two people, traveling through the same obstacle course of life and work, wind up in such different places. They refer to their working relationship as an “informal call and response. Not actively responding to each other, but observing each other’s work closely, over time.”
And then there’s Bob Dylan. When Dylan won the Nobel Prize in 2016, Vanity Fair picked out Blonde on Blonde as the reason, writing: “Dylan is constantly playing hide-and-seek with his own image, his own legend, the expectations he himself has set.” It’s reductive to assume you might decipher what the album is “about,” not to mention tedious—all those Dylanologists untangling his life. But it does feel safe to call the album a roundabout self-portrait of sorts, someone making art as a result of, or means of, studying themselves.
Ogden makes abstract paintings that nearly mirror themselves right and left (“I am interested in what happens when you try to copy yourself. It’s never a perfect replica,” she has said), using bright acrylic paints straight from the tube. Bilhartz uses intense color, too, but that’s where the similarities run out. Her Nickelodeon greens and electric magentas are the highlights of her surreal and excitingly cropped landscapes. The artists describe their work—and perhaps themselves— as kind of like siblings. Side by side, you can see the through lines, “but when you meet them separately they could be from different planets.”
More Things to Do This Week
MUSIC Leo Kottke
8PM FRI, JULY 11 | Aladdin Theater, $45+
Kottke found his first break in 1969, releasing his debut, 12-String Blues, on legendary Oregon guitarist John Fahey’s small label. Similar to Fahey—a monumentally influential finger-style guitarist—Kottke plays acoustic guitar, alone, with the enchanting, conversational ease of an enrapturing storyteller, bending notes softly to his whim over syncopated rhythms. His open tunings and brass slide shines with so much wild, tactile texture, yet he has such ultimate facility with his instrument that’s unmissable even on a casual listen. “In the pocket” doesn’t quite capture the feeling. “Vaseline Machine Gun,” a favorite song from his 1997 record Standing in My Shoes, articulates the sound pretty well.
COMEDY Blair Socci
FRI–SUN, JULY 11–13 | HELIUM COMEDY CLUB, $29–45
Socci’s latest special, Live from the Big Dog, is something like a study of all the facets of her consciousness. Jesse David Fox described her as being made up of all the different Simpsons characters—punky (Bart) then idealistic (Lisa) then sweet (Maggie) then lizard-brained (Homer), and with a voice “like Marge doing an impression of bully Jimbo Jones.”
BOOKS Gabriel Urza
7pm WED, JULY 16 | POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS, FREE
Urza teaches creative writing at Portland State University, but he used to be a public defender—like the protagonist of his new novel, The Silver State. Eight years after a murder trial he lost at the outset of his career, Santi Elcano receives a letter from the convicted murderer, Michael Atwood, of whose innocence he’s grown increasingly convinced, and his life and work are upended. “Urza wisely keeps readers guessing about Atwood’s guilt,” writes Publishers Weekly, “but the book’s real strength lies in its nuanced portrayal of a public defender’s work and the psychic friction it creates between personal advancement and the pursuit of justice.” Urza will chat with fellow Portland author Willy Vlautin.
