Thursday, May 31, 2012

Presenting Partners



The Graeter Art Gallery proudly represents the contemporary outsider, visionary, brut and street-art inspired artwork of Portland, national and international artists. Our mission is to bring our gallery artists creative purpose to the national and international limelight, while serving as a trusted and top gallery destination for patrons, collectors and artists both locally and abroad.

We also provide professional art consulting services to law firms, banks, hotels, restaurants, and corporations, as well as to private collectors. We assist our clients with every aspect of the process of selecting, purchasing and installing artwork. Whether you are just beginning to build your art collection or are an experienced collector, we can assist you in finding artwork that fits your style and taste. We also provide assistance with framing and installing your artwork, whether you purchased it from Graeter Art Gallery or elsewhere.

Located in the Historic Merchant Hotel, the Graeter Art Gallery and Wine Bar stands as a new Portland Contemporary Art gallery model.

 

  Sang Froid Riding Club

 

The Sang-Froid Riding Club is an Oregon nonprofit organization dedicated to the sport of motorcycle riding and racing. "Sang-Froid" comes from the Latin Sanguis Frigidus - "cold blood" - and means "cool under pressure." Motorcycle riding requires calm and concentration to achieve excellence, and this sang-froid is both our motto and our goal.

Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, SFRC was formed to promote skillful motorcycle riding and to bring creative and alternative motorcycle events to the Portland community. SFRC hosts rides and events throughout the year, and encourages local and national riders to check out our site for information on the club, riding, and to learn more about motorcycling in Oregon.

SFRC is partnering with Graeter Art Gallery by helping to source 1950's-60's racing bikes, including flat track racers, cafe racers, motocross and drag racers from the era. SFRC President Courtney Olive and SFRC member Jeff Foster have been particularly instrumental in negotiating all our prized bikes and guest motorcycle racers, including the esteemed and awarded David Roper.
The gallery is especially fortunate to be working with such a knowledgeable, hard working, enthusiastic and fun Oregon motorcycle club. Long live cold blood!
Check out thee SFRC history, present and future force right here: http://sang-froidridingclub.com/


 

 Bridge City Cycles Ltd

 

 Bridge City Cycles is a Portland, Oregon custom motorcycle fabrication, repair, restoration, and customization shop, specializing in motorcycles of the European, Japanese and American vintage varieties. We work on newer bikes as well. We provide paint & body, powder coating, and polishing services as well as machine shop, and CNC mill on premises. We also cut custom control cables and hydraulic brake lines. Parts, tires and mounting, accessories and helmets, we do it all.
 
Graeter Art Gallery is proudly partnering with Bridge City Cycles and BCC owner Anthony-Michel Mautemps on several different levels. Being a motorcycle repair and customization shop, BCC has  been an encyclopedic resource for general motorcycle mechanical engineering, 1950's-60's racing bike builds, race bike components and custom retrofits. Between all the shop mechanics, BCC knows their way around any British, Japanese or Custom bike build like a racer through a hairpin turn.
Check out their services, builds and locale here: http://bridgecitycycles.com/
 
 
 
 
 

 

 Partners in Speed

 

The Langlitz story begins with the birth of Ross Langlitz July 10, 1918 in Plymouth, Idaho. When he was young, he moved to McMinville, Oregon, where he grew up. At the age of 17, he lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident that the doctors predicted would end his riding career. Much to their surprise, the first thing Ross did when he returned home is to get on his bike and defiantly ride it back to the hospital. That was the nature of Ross … to do what others said he couldn’t.

One of those who thought he couldn’t, was Mavis Edwards, a beautiful young woman living in a nearby city who thought Ross was pretty arrogant as he did wild things on while riding his bike. Well, once again Ross proved ‘em wrong… Ross married Pinky (Mavis’ nickname) shortly thereafter. They moved to Portland and in 1947 Ross officially founded Langlitz Leathers, after building jackets in his basement for a couple years for himself and his friends.

We have a dozen others who share in the production responsibilities. All production is done on one of 4 cutting tables, and 8 sewing machines. As what must surely be a modern business anomaly, one can enter a single room and order a custom jacket, watch it being cut and then sewed all from the same vantage point!

While we usually build 6 garments per day, it usually takes from a few weeks to a few months to build a custom set of leathers, depending on how many orders we have. A garment can usually be cut in a half day, with the sewing taking place several days later. Depending on the difficulty of the garment, it can take another day or more to sew up. The leathers are cut by a single cutter, and sewn by a single seamstress. No mass production assembly lines can be found at Langlitz!







The Rainier Story is one of a pioneer city and an entrepreneurial family of legendary proportions. Seattle, the major metropolis of the Pacific Northwest, grew up fast as a center of the lumber and fishing industries. The loggers and fishermen grew thirsty and the brewing industry naturally followed. A.B. Rabbeson started Seattle's first commercial brewing, Washington Brewery in 1854. In 1878 Rainier beer was launched - 15 years before the city was officially incorporated and 35 years before Washington became a state. Rabbeson's establishment became the Seattle Brewery in 1872, which survived until 1888. In 1883, John Kopp and Andrew Hemrich, founders of Seattle Brewing and Malting, acquired Rabbeson's brewery, and with it, the Rainier heritage.

Rainier beer brings together nature's bounty from the great Northwest. Pure spring waters combine with golden barley and verdant hops to produce a beer rich in taste and texture. Fermented slowly with a pedigree yeast culture under tightly controlled conditions, Rainier comes forth with a satisfying malty flavor over a slightly fruity background, spiced with Chinook, Mt. Hood, and Willamette hop notes. 



Building Speed Featured Artists

Anthony-Michel Mautemps



 About


    Anthony-Michel Mautemps is a bit of a Renaissance man. By trade, he is a professional motorcycle mechanic and owner of Portland's Bridge City Cycles. Turns out, he is also a highly talented & well versed photographer. Originally hailing from New York City, Anthony now calls Portland his home, and we are lucky to have him here for both his skill sets. And the guy just rocks.
    For the Building Speed exhibition, Anthony will be presenting a collection of "mechanic's eye view" photographs, which visually articulate and capture what it means to be a motorcycle mechanic. Disassembled Yamaha carburators getting a re-jet? Check. Mid-valve adjustment on a vintage Honda CB750 Cafe Racer? Check. A stream of hot black oil pouring out of a 67' Triumph Bonneville crankcase? Yeah, he photographs that too. Because, not all of us are found upside down, wrenching under a bike lift, and seeing the things Anthony gets to see.




Building Speed Featured Artists

 

Dan Ness


   Trixli 3
     Dan Ness
     Mixed media on panels
     40in x 40in
     Prints Available

 

About

Dan Ness is a collage, screen printing and painting visual artist. Dan sources his material from both obscure and well known historical pop culture images, local folklore and old 60's Time magazines.
He has an affinity for UFO's, old VW bugs and of course VW Vans, one of which he drives around in Portland.

Building Speed Featured Artists


Corey Smith

 

About

Corey Smith is a painter, sculptor and photographer from Portland, OR, who currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. His paintings and photography have appeared in Vice, Elle, ID, FHM, Frequency, Complex, and Arkade magazines, among others. His works have been shown in galleries across the country, including Upper Playground (Portland, OR), Versus (Los Angeles), On Six (San Francisco), KCDC (New York City), and the Orange County Museum of Art.

Smith's high-gloss, ultra-flat paintings capture the joys of plasticity and pre-fab environments, celebrity as the ultimate blank canvas, and the absurd hyperboles of modern leisure. But rather than repackage the manufactured world into an aestheticized form–a la post-Warholian Pop–Smith favors a post-Pop approach that brings into day-glo focus the dark vision at the corner of the spectator's eye. The paintings find their subject in the tension between the works' fatalistic undercurrents and the celebratory aura created by Smith's use of bold color and bright-lined contour.

His sculptures and mixed media works develop some of these same themes, but rather than map plasticity onto flat canvas, Smith instead maps flatness onto plastic forms–whether by painting across arrays of commercially molded objects or by making use of the naturally deflective precision-cut panes of modern machinery.

Smith's photography develops some of the same themes as his sculpture and painting–surface, extremity–but abandons ironies for a more intimate perspective. Most of his subjects are close friends or lovers, and Smith documents them at points where excess bleeds either into empathy or its impossibility, and where the romance of abandon intersects with abandonment.

His works are a Death Valley realism, infused with both sunny Californian optimism and morbid premonition. This is awful, deeply wrong, utterly fantastical stuff–a distillation of a time, a place, and a generation that are always already beside themselves.