Car Hole Gallery presents: Twin Twin Peaks

Car Hole Gallery presents: Twin Twin Peaks

feat: Helen Reed (Portland, OR)

& in conjunction with Open Engagement (openengagement.info)

Saturday 15 May 2010

8-10 PM

It addressed a contemporaneous national yearning, most vivid in

the cult of Abraham Lincoln, to wring a heart’s comfort from the

awfulness of the Civil War. The work is at once vulgar and

sublime, in ways that invoke a common term: American.

-Peter Schjeldahl on Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Sherman Memorial

Car Hole Gallery, in conjunction with the Open Engagement

Conference (15-17 May 2010, for more info see the website

above), presents Helen Reed’s Twin Twin Peaks (2009-10). For

those unfamiliar with the original television program, Twin

Peaks ran for two seasons in the early 1990s. Through the

direction of David Lynch and writing of Mark Frost, Twin Peaks

examines a fictional community set in the logging towns of

Snoqualmie, North Bend and Poulsbo, WA. Its distinct mythology

generated a huge cult following during and after its brief run,

as followers of the program began to coalesce into online fan

groups. And, with that, the eventual impetus for Twin Twin

Peaks.

(more after the jump)

Reed’s project actuates a collective response to media and

site. Drawing from the fan fiction of an online Twin Peaks RPG

group, the artist cast an additional sixteen fans from the

Portland area to act in their production. Fan actors were not

only set in the roles they identified with most, but placed

within the original setting as Reed filmed the entire project on

site, in and around North Bend, Snoqualmie and Poulsbo. What she

addresses here resembles the Schjeldahl quote above. Replace

“the work” with Twin Twin Peaks and replace “American” with

Pacific Northwest. For in Reed’s actualization, we find an

elegiac performance of the original and, just as Schjeldahl

evokes the collective struggle to understand America’s Civil

War, so, too, does Twin Twin Peaks reconnect—in both sublime

rendition and sometimes vulgar reference—the people to whom

these misty forests contain a rich televised mythology. Reed’s

project is at once tantalizing and sardonically sweet, as

actors, writers and directors give their best performance not

only of the feeling, but of Lynch and Frost’s vision of the

Northwest.

-Sam Korman

Car Hole Gallery

114 SE 12th Ave

PDX 97214

carholegallery@gmail.com