You Should Have Gotten Here Sooner, Analog Collage by Kirk Read

When

June 1–25, 2025

Days vary, Times vary

Free

Where

Replicant Bar and Bottle Shop

7033 Northeast Glisan Street Portland
OR, 97213 US

The following description was submitted by the event organizer.

Collage artist and writer Kirk Read presents 30 recent analog collages that explore the twin heads of urban nostalgia: perpetual disintegration and resuscitation. The central series uses telephone pole scraps and won a Bronze award from Contemporary Collage Magazine. The work is a meditation on moving to Portland during the pandemic from San Francisco, where he worked as a street and shelter nurse. Other works on view use vintage schematics and children’s books to assemble dreamlike Southern Gothic narratives. Read is the author of the memoir “How I Learned to Snap” and co-leads the Pacific Northwest Collage Collective.

Read writes:  “In every city I’ve ever lived, I’ve encountered the repeated lament from predecessor citizens that The Golden Era Of That City Had Passed. For this series, I harvested four-inch layers of telephone pole posters, removing all of the staples and sorting the pieces into color groups. I gathered the paper during and after the pandemic. The posters had survived Portland rain and occasional fires set to remove them. Working with this paper was like being a gardener, embracing the fungal ecosystems in the paper. Layers of in-person events reassured me that the cultural health of Portland was just fine. The Portland metal scene survived the Get The Hell Away From Me era of COVID regulations. I excavated evidence of subcultures that exist outside the vast digital tarpit: porch sales and basement shows, lost and found animals, burgeoning cults of wellness. This series freed me to explore abstraction, color and composition in ways that surprised me. I am grateful for nostalgia when it confirms that it’s actually disintegration and renunciation that’s beautiful. It’s not about bands playing their most recognizable records in their entirety. We are not preserved in amber, we are decaying in front of each other.”
Opening Reception: 6/1, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.