Mel George, Portland Hue, 2009
kilnformed glass, 4.25 x 15.25 x .625 inches (installed)
photo by: P. Foster
PORTLAND
Mel George: “Reminders”
at Bullseye Gallery
Mel George has made a career out of exploring the dynamicbetween being “at home” and being an outsider. As an Australianof Greek heritage growing up in Canberra, she was perenniallyaware of the duet within herself between dueling nationalidentities. When she moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2002, sheexperienced a profound longing for Australia and began makingintimately scaled sculptures about her homesickness: a shoppinglist of foodstuffs she had loved back home—a certain brand oftea, a typically Australian preparation of lamb...
After seven years in Portland, George last year returned to hernative Canberra, where she had graduated more than a decadebefore from Australian National University’s famed Glass Workshop.Once back in her homeland, the artist, to her surprise,began to feel an intense homesickness for Portland. “Reminders”is her fond, grass-is-always-greener backward glanceat the city she never quite considered home until she had left it.The show takes the form of kiln-formed glass planes in theshape and size of Polaroid snapshots. George fills the tiny picture squares with abstract and semi-abstract imagery culled from hermemories of the Pacific Northwest. Portland Hueis a successionof four color fields in deepening shades of gray. In Land to Sky,a vertical totem of six plates shades from verdant moss to gunmetal blue. More whimsically, the four components of Servewith Loveare filled with chilly pastels that allude to the wellknown seasonal berry milkshakes at Burgerville, a beloved local fast-food chain. There is something more poignant in West Bank, in which no less than 100 Polaroids span the length of thegallery’s east wall, their imagery recalling the cherry blossomsthat bloom each spring in Portland’s Tom McCall Waterfront Park. In the specificity and sheer prolificacy of these planes of pink, there is an aching sadness, as if each piece were a teardropshed over a place and time that the artist recognized as integralonly after seeing them vanish in the rear-view mirror.
—RICHARD SPEER