Kerry Char, Wolf Model Electric Ukulele made of Birdseye Maple, Port Orford Cedar
Oregon’s Portland International Airport has a nice exhibit featuring the work of eight Oregon luthiers who make everything from guitars and ukuleles to mandolins and lutes – from scratch.
The one-of-a-kind instruments are on exhibit in Concourse A and use ‘ingredients’ that include 700-year-old reclaimed wood, stunning inlays and rosettes, tropical woods and scalloped fretboards.
Josh Humphrey’s Irish Bouzouki, with redwood soundboard, mahogany back and sides, East Indian rosewood fret-board & trim
In addition, the airport is displaying (just till mid-April) four decommissioned violins that have been ‘re-interpreted’ by local artists for the Painted Violin Project – a national fundraising program that raises money for youth orchestras.
An exhibition of “Tales of an Unknown Aviator,” a photo series by Julian Hibbard and Demetrious Noble, is now at Portland International Airport.
The photos are of a series of model planes made to look both life-like and model-like, constructed by Chilean artist Luis Greenhill using recycled materials, including historic photographs and vintage encyclopedia sets, photographed by Hibbard and digitized by Noble.
The project documents a collection of palm-sized French, Italian, Polish, Japanese, German, Russian, English and American model planes from the World War I & II (1914 – 1945) originally made by an elderly man in Southern Chile.
“Like objects glimpsed in a dream, the model planes have been photographed and then digitally treated in away that further blurs the line between fact and fiction. Seen as a whole, the project speaks of time, nostalgia, memory, simulacra, repetition, intervention, layering, courage, loss, sacrifice and the nature of conflict,” is the way the project is described on Demetrious Noble’s website, which displays 20 of the images.