Just out., March 15, 1996, Page 21, Image 21

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steps from the mailbox to the front door, what she
or he wants to be when grown up.
“I’d written ‘artist,’ ” she muses, “ I must have
been 4, maybe 5.”
In school she continued her interest in creating,
loading up on every art class she could find. Her
advisers did their best to be true to their job descrip­
tions: Be practical, Kristy, they warned. Take typ­
ing.
Her family moved around a lot, mostly in the
Northwest— Seattle, Spokane, Portland, Bend, with
a foray into Minneapolis— necessitating that she
find ways to connect in unfamiliar surroundings.
Luckily, she was an athlete. Sports provided a
medium for readily making friends and establishing
a niche for herself in the stratified realm of school
society. But Edmunds’ creative inner life— and the
permission and freedom her mother gave her to be
herself—allowed her a stability and a sense of
purpose that many kids in the same situation missed.
She remembers, “Moving a lot as a kid is hard.
You can lose yourself. Imagination helped me.”
dealers and members o f the press gathered to dis­
cuss what could be done to keep a venue for contem­
porary art and performance alive in Portland. Con­
servative attacks in Congress on the National En­
dowment for the Arts, resulting in massive funding
cutbacks, had trickled down to the local level.
Things were getting pretty bleak. Following the
dismemberment of the Portland Center for Visual
Art, Northwest Artists W orkshop and other spaces
that were dependent for funding on the NEA; fol­
lowing the loss of the vibrant Portland State Univer­
sity Dance Department, a casualty of budget cuts in
spring 1995, local artists and art supporters ques­
tioned how space for alternative performance and
exhibition could be preserved. A collaborative ef­
fort was proposed, and the Portland Institute for
Contemporary Art was unveiled. Edmunds was
asked to direct and curate the program.
risty Edmunds is on the cultural battle lines
PICA is a bold step in a new direction. It’s a
all day at work. And her name and pic­
privately
funded arts exhibition program, one of a
ture— coupled with the names of her cur­
few such programs in the country. Artists want
rent choice for reading material and her favorite
people
to see their work, Edmunds says, so the
beverage— are in the paper often enough that she’s
withdrawal and drying up o f government provided
become virtually a household figure of the Portland
support is contributing to the evolution of different
art scene. You can imagine that she might have a few
kinds of organizations. She sees the process as
things she likes to keep, as she says, close to the
heartening and radically creative.
bone. One is her personal life.
“Artists are getting together and they are creat­
ing their own situations. They’re saying,4 If we work
together, how can we take care of this need, or how
can we create some kind of structure, or a space for
the community? Maybe we should start doing art in
store windows.’ So they start changing modes if
they kind of band together, which is a very exciting
thing.”
Edmunds believes that this cooperation, kindled
by a sense o f shared adversity, can pose a welcome
alternative to the old model, which often pitted
artists and art programs against each other.
Breaking into an impish grin, she says, “Ulti­
mately, applying for grants is essentially competi­
tive. Typically when there’s a grant deadline, you
don’t see a bunch o f artists gathering together,
helping each other out on how they’re going to each
individually apply for this money.”
So maybe the current harsh environment, the
“contract on culture,” will help the arts to flourish?
“Art has always survived,” Edmunds says. “The
mechanisms for how people interface with it and
where it exists change. I think ultimately the NEA is
not going to get completely cut. They [conserva­
tives] need it there; it’s very ironic. They want it
there, so they can hammer their political agenda
through that discussion.”
Cale, Susie Bright— issues o f gender identity and
gay and lesbian sexuality are central themes in their
work. Unhappily, those are “fightin’ words” in these
parts, and Edmunds periodically got phone threats
from hate mongers and cranks.
“It’s to be expected,” she shrugs.
But even those who aren’t cranks or bigots
wonder about the queer content of a lot o f the work
she brings to town.
“I get asked, ‘Why are so many o f these perfor­
mance artists dealing with gender and homosexual­
ity and things like that?’ I answer, ‘You know:
contemporary art, contemporary culture, contem­
porary issues— well?’ [Laughs.] I get asked that a
lot. And I know that people will make an assumption
that ‘Oh, well, that’s because she is.’ ”
K
Fund-raising dinnerfor the Pacific Northwest College o f Art, March 5,1996: patrons make donations
to spend an “Evening with an Artist” — tonight, at Bima with Kristy Edmunds
Sports came in handy again when she won a
volleyball scholarship to Montana State University,
where she earned a degree in film.
And early on, her inclination was toward the
frontiers o f expression, the arena where conven­
tions and presumptions are abandoned. She studied
the interfacing of audience reactions with film and
theater, the intersection between art forms. Flirting
with the merging of production and performance,
she projected silent films outdoors onto the sides of
buildings, where people passing by would happen
on them unexpectedly.
Edmunds got interested in the surrealists; in
surprising, nonliteral ways o f communicating ideas
and emotions. In her career-oriented film school this
tendency was met with skepticism. This is the
movies, she was told, this is not the Avant Garde.
She found herself driven to document and validate
the history behind the ideas. To awaken awareness
o f the strength, value and legitimacy of what may be
perceived as errant voices. To point out that these
voices are trying to tell us something that we might
want or need to know.
Hello?
I
She shies a bit like a skittish horse when we come
to the topic: She says in a flurry, as if ticking off a list
of private thoughts that shouldn’t have to be re­
vealed, “Yeah I live with a woman; yeah I love her;
I didn’t necessarily expect it; don’t have real prob­
lems with it; what’s the big deal?”
Relaxing a bit, she says, “Linda and I got married
three years ago, my mom came, everybody cried.
But on the other hand, who cares who you sleep
with— besides your parents, which is a totally uni­
versal thing.”
“But everybody knows," she says, “Vera Katz
knows."
Despite an admitted personal disinclination to
perform (it makes her want to vomit), she and Linda,
a dancer and choreographer, have appeared together
in several dance performances in the past few years.
One was a trio o f duets choreographed by Bonnie
Merrill, who built her compositions around pairs
who were already bonded by love or friendship.
“ I was the only person who w asn’t a dancer,”
Edmunds says. “[The piece] was very much about
our relationship, and it was very much about this
physical, athlete person versus a very powerful
dancer person. And I got to jum p a lot. Jumping—
I’m good at jum ping.”
n 1990, at the age of 25, Edmunds became the
curator of the Portland Art M useum’s Art/On
the Edge, a program of contemporary perfor­
n March 1995, changing priorities at the Art
Museum signaled what Edmunds saw as creep­
mance and visual art exhibits, which she originated
ing erosion of the contemporary arts program.
and helped expand phenomenally. In five years the
subscriber base of the series grew from four to more 1 With several big commissioned works o f her own
coming up, and Art/On the Edge in good financial
than 200. The shows were the talk of the town.
shape, she felt the time was right. She quit, not
Denizens o f the cutting edge and the blunter edge
knowing for certain what would come next. Call it
alike were buzzing about performances by Spalding
an athletic leap o f faith.
Gray, Meredith Monk and Diamanda Gates. For
Shortly thereafter a number of artists, collectors, j
many of those who appeared— Holly Hughes, David
I
f all the labels journalists like to try to pin on
Edmunds, “activist” is the one that really
makes her squirm. And in a sense, it’s not
hard to see how the connection gets made, because
a revolution o f sorts is happening in the contempo­
rary art world— which is, o f course, part of the rest
of the world, our world. The revolution recalls an
earlier one that occurred in the Middle Ages. Both
upheavals hinge on perspective.
The earlier controversy concerned “accurate
O
depiction,” the proper way to portray three-dimen­
sional objects and figures on a two-dimensional
surface. It raised heated arguments and a variety of
approaches, which eventually settled down into a
generally agreed upon “way to see.”
After 400 years— and a few jolts to the para­
digm, like Impressionism— things have been turned
upside down again. Artists are again challenging the
way we see. This time the perspective question has
to do with point of view: the dynamics of who gets
to depict whom, and the inclusion of viewpoints that
have previously been on the outside, unwelcome
and unvoiced. That means inviting the viewer into
the work in an unprecedented way.
But Edmunds is clear that if she’s issuing any
rallying cry— despite the fact that both as an artist
and as a curator she raises issues of personal in­
volvement and responsibility, o f homelessness, of
the dividing chasms of class, gender, sexuality,
age— that rallying cry is for unfettered esthetic
expression. Period. What happens from there is for
you to create.
“As somebody who is dealing with aspects of
representation— in my personal life, my own inter­
ests, curatorially— it’s like trying to instead of [di­
recting the viewer] to stand at one vantage point of
a canyon, with a telescope pointed exactly to here,
I want people to come and stand here, then next time
maybe they’ll look at it from that viewpoint, then
maybe next time there, maybe next time from the
bottom; maybe they bring their own binoculars if
they want. I make very sure that just because I’m
most interested in this one particular composition,
that that’s not where I ask people to view from.”
When Edmunds describes her experience with
college sports, the cooperative striving toward total
involvement and commitment is what she empha­
sizes.
“To me, sports was not about winning. It was
about playing as good as you possibly could, as a
team, as this unit, which forced the opposing team to
play as good as they could, and if you both were
really at your best, you were improving the sport.”
With gentle prodding, she concedes that the
same spirit infuses much o f her work as an artist and
a curator: an invitation, a beckoning to “the audi­
ence,” “the other side,” to enter fully into the expe­
rience, the conversation, and in so doing to enhance
the game for everyone.
The next PICA performance is Elizabeth Streb
and her dance company Ringside. ( “Anyone who
doesn 't see that show will have missed out huge, ”
Edmunds says, “and I don't say that about many
things.... It’s like looking at somebody who’s
truly trying to see if it would be possible for the
human body to fly. And it lifts you... and it’s
beautiful to watch. ”) It's a movement style Streb
calls PopACTION. The show will be at 8 pm
Saturday, April 6, at the University o f Portland’s
Chiles Center, 5000 N Willamette Blvd. Tickets
are $17; call PICA at 242-1419.