By Allyn Cantor

MARK COHEN: GRIM STREET Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, February 3-27 Mark Cohen’s Grim Street is a selection of innovative street photographs taken in the 1960s, 70s and 80s in his home town of Wilkes- Barre, Pennsylvania. Using a flash and wide-angle lens, he focused on the foregrounds and captured details of articles of clothing or body parts while leaving the backgrounds dark and obscured. The mysterious portrayals provide a fragmented view of the daily life of the Pennsylvania townspeople. As a result of Cohen’s confrontational, voyeuristic approach, they also show a residue of fear-based reaction and mistrust.

KRIS HARGIS: ME AND YOU Froelick Gallery, Portland, March 1-April 2 Unconventional still-life drawings and self portraits are the primary means of expression for Oregon artist Kris Hargis. His spare drawings revel in the emotions of loss and isolation as reflected through his visual investigation of self. Hargis works in a signature gestural style with delicate lines that move like threads and washes of earthy colour to give form to his ethereal subjects. Approached with an authentic immediacy, there is beauty in the heartfelt truth of these works.

WHITNEY NYE: LIBERTY Laura Russo Gallery, Portland, February 3-26 “Letting go of the familiar,” a practice often difficult to achieve in a routine-oriented cultural paradigm, is the essence of Whitney Nye’s new series of paintings. The Portland artist is known for her lively and delicate abstractions that move with the grace and subtlety of organic occurrences. Liberty represents a personal search for independence, and a meditation on the art-making practice as a means to free herself of expectations and presumptions. Using concrete forms normally associated with a more rigid or formal approach to abstraction in these new pieces, Nye moves further into the territory of bold geometry.

MATT MCCORMICK: THE GREAT NORTHWEST Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, February 17-April 2 Matt McCormick found a scrapbook t a thrift store documenting the epic road trip of four single thirty-something women who travelled across the Pacific Northwest in 1958. McCormick re-created their route to examine how 50 years of development has changed the towns, the National Parks and roadside attractions along the way. The Great Northwest presents a portrait of landscape history through photographs, writing, maps and a 75-minute film, and reminds viewers of the fragility of time and memory.

BRENT OZAETA: INTROVERTED FLOATING WORLD Chambers@916, Portland, February 3-26 Brent Ozaeta combines drawing, painting and printmaking in fragmented, collage-like compositions that resemble a modern-day take on Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben-Day dots. Directly influenced by visuals found on Japanese internet forums, Ozaeta’s anime-influenced style of silk-screened painting has representational elements among highly graphic, sharp-contrast designs resembling pixillated computer patterns. The Texas-based artist has exhibited widely in his home state and was included in the prominent publication New American Paintings (2008).