Things to Do in Portland This Week, August 2025
Image: courtesy Nationale
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Nudity is a quick path to vulnerability, especially in a photograph. Intimacy, however, is something else. A nude photo of someone inside their home, like most of the pictures in onetime Portlander ricardo nagaoka’s show surrogates at Nationale (reception 6–8pm Friday, August 29; through October 5), gets closer to the latter.
With hard shadows, spare framing, and queer subtext brought to the fore, nagaoka’s pictures are in a direct line with a few very famous (infamous to some) gay photographers of ’70s and ’80s New York City. While they seem to be after the delicate knowingness of Peter Hujar’s black-and-white portraits (as intimate as a picture could hope to be), aesthetically, nagaoka’s careful compositions are aligned most closely with Robert Mapplethorpe’s. The show notes describe a fascination with the comforts of home, suggesting that a photograph of a person in the privacy of their home ought to be the truest image of them. At least it would be a chance for self-reflection instead of appealing to or protesting against an outside gaze. The homes seen here are unnaturally free of clutter, sparse with gauzy curtains and aged wood, which makes the bodies that live in them appear foreign—almost abrasively organic, with tattoos, patterned Band-Aids, and nipple and tongue piercings intact.
Untitled (JieHao), showing the soft arc of someone’s back in a loosely posed forward fold, directly references Mapplethorpe’s Donald Cann, to the point that you could map one image over the other (Mapplethorpe’s own image owed a debt to Man Ray). Though whereas Mapplethorpe cropped his photo to abstract the arched back into a sculptural form, nagaoka has extended the view to show the person this arched back belongs to. Less excised from life, the photo invites the viewer to experience the beauty of the abstracted shape within life.
Many of nagaoka’s influences used the confines of portraiture for subversion. A chiaroscuro studio portrait of a penis upsets all kinds of understandings about what both photos and penises are “for”—how we’re supposed to view them, what we’re supposed to “do” with them. Like Mapplethorpe, nagaoka seems interested in removing the vulgarity a photo of a penis connotes without forfeiting its sexuality; Untitled (Rex) is a soft study of shapes, for instance, but it’s also a phallus shot through the clandestine crack of a doorway. It too has more context, more limbs attached, than Mapplethorpe’s studies, as if to put these ideas back into the world, to bring them into the home—to turn these abstracted forms back into people, hoping the world is capable of and willing to understand them.
More Things to Do This Week
COMEDY Jordan Klepper
5, 8 & 10PM SUN, AUG 31 | ALADDIN THEATER, $38+
You might call Jordan Klepper “slick,” or perhaps a “quick talker.” But he usually functions as a cleverly placed mirror, asking upsettingly basic questions about Trumpian rhetoric. As a correspondent for The Daily Show, and now as one of its rotating hosts, Klepper has done a lot of work reporting from campuses in red states and the parking lots of gun shows across the country. As the title of his stand-up tour presenting his findings suggests, you might call this work suffering fools.
BOOKS Alison Cochrun
7–9PM TUE, SEPT 2 | LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL LIBRARY, $25 (INCLUDES BOOK)
Cochrun left a career teaching high school English for one writing romance during the pandemic. Her debut, The Charm Offensive, hit bookstores in 2021, and she’s managed to publish a novel each year since. Every Step She Takes, her fourth, follows a 35-year-old woman who, on a last-minute vacation that turns out to be a tour of Portugal for queer women, falls for the woman she vents to on the plane. Once an English teacher, always an English teacher: This book launch event, presented by Portland’s only devoted romance bookstore, Grand Gesture Books, will be held in the library at Lincoln High.
BROADWAY Some Like It Hot
VARIOUS TIMES Tue–Sun, SEPT 2–7 | KELLER AUDITORIUM, $57+
Disguised as women, two male jazz musicians flee Prohibition-era Chicago and their regular speakeasy gig after witnessing a mob hit. Adapted from the 1959 Billy Wilder movie with Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn Monroe, the Broadway version won four Tonys when it premiered in 2022, including J. Harrison Ghee’s award for best actor in a musical, making Ghee the first nonbinary performer to win the award. (Oregon-born Cole Escola recently made history as the first nonbinary performer to win the Tony for best actor in a play.) This touring show is in town thanks to Broadway in Portland.
Elsewhere...
- The growing alt-weekly group—not a phrase you’re likely to hear much these days—that purchased the Mercury and the Seattle paper The Stranger last summer just added The Chicago Reader to its roster. (Portland Mercury)
- A brief history of Portland’s truncated hip-hop scene. (OPB)
