It may take a second to see the sex. Ty Ennis’s show at Nationale this month consists of petite paintings featuring prominent textile patterns, done with the gentlest touch. Look a second longer and you notice the erotic: porn dvds, romance novels, a vaginal oyster. The paintings are mostly still lifes, and even though there’s sex, they’re not sexy (and not meant to be). They’re[.....]

In Thomas Zummer’s partial retrospective of works I should have done, on view at PNCA’s Philip Feldman Gallery, things are not what they seem. For starters, the show is more replete than it sounds. The Brooklyn-based writer, artist, teacher, and curator presents an assortment of drawings, prints, and sculptures spanning his career. The pieces are a motley crew: portraits of robots butt against blurred, interstitial[.....]

My Apocalyptic Moment, by New-York-based artist Glen Fogel, and currently on view at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, is a show about impact and identity, mediated by desire. Projections of wedding rings fill an empty loft; love letters are reproduced at five feet tall; a model’s collaged portrait hangs on a rooftop in the middle of the city. Fogel works at the scale of[.....]

The Northwest may be absent from the Whitney Biennial (as usual), but the region reconciles the blind spot with self-awareness. On display at the Tacoma Art Museum until May is the 10th Northwest Biennial, a survey that includes 11 Portland artists (nearly half of the show’s line-up). Even more massive is Portland2012, a sizable though scattered exhibition of 24 of the city’s artists. To give[.....]