Walking into the Michelangelo Gallery to view Andrea Borsuk's current show of paintings is like walking into a bazaar during a storm. The variously tenebrous winds set in motion the tinkling and jangling of an improbable display of jewelry and artifacts; we are temporarily distracted by the bountiful arrays and all the time anxiously aware of the dark rumblings outside. And as at a bazaar, the various paintings, like clamoring vendors, proclaim themselves with equal zeal in the high-pitched color palettes of, for example, European Rococo sugariness, Latino exuberance, East Indian spirituality, etc. It is impossible to decide which painting to "buy from": each is more enticing than the next with a mix of gaudy gorgeousness and kitschy hilarity. Borsuk"s handling of paint and articulation of imagery is as eclectic and far-ranging as the images she constructs. In these works, strings of pearls and a variety of delicate chains function as funiculi strung at dizzying heights over a variety of highly romanticized bravura landscapes while bearing a plethoric cargo of charms and baubles imprinted with a seemingly encyclopedic range of icons from diverse cultures and civilizations. Equally adept in the languages of Abstract Expressionism and the sleights-of-hand of European mimesis, Borsuk performs her paintings deftly like someone who revels in the perplexities, provocations, and paradoxes of her legacy as a painter.

One of the works that serves as a lynchpin of sorts to the show as a whole is Luxury of Guessing providing as it does a panoply of disparate icons: a classical sculpture on the mid left evokes an intact Winged Victory, perhaps; a string of those elegantly androgynous Cycladic figures swings down towards the lower right; while cutting diagonally from lower left and evanescing up high to the right, an endless sequence of cameos depicting female forms in soft-porn poses--some from ads of previous decades, some in poses that we've seen countless times in movies, museums or art history books, etc.; while on the upper right Fragonard's exquisitely titillating girl on a swing hovers blithely over all on high. All of these charms or amulets hang precariously over an ominous-looking, gesturally-painted abstractionrecognizable earth in a state of primal ooze far, far below.

The luxury of guessing, Borsuk may be suggesting, is perhaps not so much a luxe --all those lush jewels notwithstanding--as a state of excess. How do we even begin to sort through the multifarious forms and materials through which human behavior has expressed itself, and continues to do so with seemingly inexhaustible invention? How are we ultimately to take the sweetly painted little cameos of women at times pleasuring themselves (owning their bodies) or exposing themselves in ways that we have come to recognize as framed by the male gaze (women's bodies as commodities)? The co-presence of all those jewels and women's bodies --from the Venus of Willendorf to the Playboy girl types-- would beg the issue of a feminist agenda operative here. But, however daringly close Borsuk brings us to this reductive kind of reading of her paintings, the most compelling aspect of this work is not an easily available feminism. Rather, Borsuk provokes by her picaresque approach to "the feminine adventure" throughout civilization; her "bazaar" of cultural constructs, and their uses and misuses as adornments, ultimately belies the ongoing primal storm of guessing...

There are two types of images that human beings have always loved, says local painter Andrea Borsuk: landscapes and beautiful women.

Borsuk's current exhibit, oil-on-wood panel paintings, combine the two -- tongue firmly in cheek -- juxtaposing landscapes and stereotyped portraits of women .

Tucked under the Hawthorne Bridge at Savage Art Resources, Borsuk's "Charmed" depicts moody, blurred landscapes that hiss with fire and mist. Chains and necklaces, meticulously painted link for link, stretch across the foreground, and from them hang a variety of charms and pendants. The subjects of these baubles are the first thing to catch the eye: women, all kinds of them. Disco-era nude pornography models, Victorian coquettes with pink flowers in their white wigs, Japanese geishas and tribal fertility symbols hang side by side on chains that crisscross Borsuk's crimson and aqua skies like telephone wires.

"They're charms; they're interchangeable," Borsuk said in a telephone interview last week. "They're constructed ideals through male fantasies." She describes her subjects as caught in "a moment of glory, of heightened beauty, dressed up. A lot of it is about fleeting beauty and about history."

Borsuk has been working on this body of work since 2000. Her ornamental women are all re-created from found images -- paintings, statues, actual jewelry -- that she has rendered as true to the original sources as possible. She frames the women in pendants, hanging from chains that pulley them across oily, mysterious landscapes that Borsuk describes as "funny backdrops that are supposed to be epiphanies."

A 1990 graduate of Columbia University's fine art graduate program, Borsuk moved to Portland eight years ago, teaches at Portland State University and has been active in exhibitions such as last year's eclectic Core Sample. She says landscapes never entered her paintings until she came to Portland. She'd been superficially sampling what she calls goddess images for some time, resulting in collections of work like 2001's "Ornaments."

But the move west gave her characteristically figurative paintings a sense of place, with skies and mountains that she believes have only begun to surface.

In "Charmed," her heroines' interactions with their surroundings are darkly enigmatic, strung as the characters are on chains that extend endlessly into the skies, carrying them forward like meat on slaughterhouse hooks. Strings of startlingly white pearls and detailed beadwork descend from the sky around them like towropes, or the strings of colorful wind-catching pennants at used- car lots. The women exchange glances with each other and the viewer, at times dangling their legs playfully outside the gold filigree borders of their cameos as if swinging at a playground.

Borsuk's charms go beyond the typical feminist grappling with ideals of beauty. Her skill makes the inherent politics more than just a pithy prop. She is also not without a sense of irony. To Borsuk, these images are about seduction -- a critique of the culture's allure and fascination with exotic, hypersexualized images of women. The images are testament to their pull over the artist, too.

"The question is posed: 'Is this from a feminist perspective?' Well, yes; I want to show (these images of women) out of their context and dislocate them -- but I'm also attracted to them in the first place, so I have to question my own attractions. Am I just following a pattern that's been set up for me?"

A roadblock that deters some women artists is how to address issues of femininity without simply contributing to a cycle of repeated imagery. But Andrea Borsuk's exhibition "Ornament," at Alysia Duckler Gallery, is exceptional: It rises to the challenge and invigorates a feminist dialogue.

Borsuk's technical skills are well-defined. Her formal choices set a solid stage for her measured critique of women's prescribed representations in society. "I am interested in how we envi'sion the (woman's) body," she writes, "and how it is represented as an icon or 'ornament' of beauty."

She addresses the loaded subject not with a heavy hand but with playfulness ,and humor. Using a jewelry motif, Borsuk strings together various female archetypes from art history and popular culture. Each figure becomes an ornament in Borsuk's intricate necklace.

A background of brilliant, fiery red pigment makes the painting "Lucky Charms" the first work to grab the viewer's attention. The seductive color sets the tone for an unfolding carnival. Suspended from vines is a cast of nude and semi-nude female figures, each dangling in an entrancing pose. All are adorned with sparkling accouterments: ankle bracelets, necklaces and arm bands. They are sultry showgirls imbued with the soul of Josephine Baker. The voluptuous figures are intermixed with other charms on the necklace. Large stoic faces resembling stone cameos hang next to a beaded trellis of Venus of Willendorf figures. Borsuk writes, "Are these stereotypes accurate reflections of 'femininity' or constructions from fantasies of identity and desire?" She asks but does not answer.

In "Temperamental Ornaments/Ornamental Temperaments," Borsuk applies her pointed compositions to a nine-square grid. A closer perusal reveals women in various roles of entertainer and muse. The central element is the head of some classical sculpture, perhaps Aphrodite. She connects to other figures in the painting through a beaded network. Mermaids, Geisha girls and female jesters mingle.

Borsuk's work seduces the viewer with sexual imagery, yet the figures beckoning us are not real. She dares us to consider that what we are attracted to are merely plastic trinkets on a dime-store bracelet.

Sample a week's worth of Portland's most exciting work at the multivenue Core Sample.

It's been a hell of a few months. With PCAC's Modern Zoo, Jeff Jahn's The Best Coast, PAM's Biennial, PICA's TBA, and now Core Sample--not to mention the ongoing meta-aesthetic digestif of all the above in The Organ, the City that Works has been working its ass off to prove itself worthy of national and international attention. There's something both pathetic and noble about all this "Hey, look at me!" hoopla. Pathetic because it sometimes smacks of chip-on-shoulder desperation; noble because it reminds us of something we forgot somewhere between the studio, Coffee Time, Dots and the bong in the back room: that the only way to raise the creative bar and elevate a reputation, whether an artist's or a city's, is to aspire and follow through.

Core Sample, the entreaty du jour, is doing plenty of raising. Over an eight-day period, the "temporary consortium" of artists, writers and volunteers will showcase a total of 30 discrete exhibits, installations, performances and screenings, promising enough fat and cud for all of us solipsistic Stumptowners to chew on for at least a few months.

The event (organizers don't like to call it a "festival") grew out of a lunchtime conversation between Oregonian writer Randy Gragg and Clear Cut Press co-founder Matthew Stadler. According to Gragg, the men wanted to document the current moment in art with "a rigor and self-scrutiny that wasn't going to come from the institutions here in town." They also wanted to lure the bigwigs who'll be in Seattle for the opening of Seattle Art Museum's Baja to Vancouver down to Portland to discover, if they didn't already know it, that we're not a bunch of lumberjacks who paint watercolors of Mount Hood on the side. Well, not many of us, anyway.

At first, Gragg and Stadler invited some key local DIY-ers to dinner and suggested they build a show around new works based on a Portland theme. Cheesy was the immediate consensus. "They wanted to do their own work," Gragg told WW, "not to conform to some kind of art assignment." Gradually the idea evolved into something approaching Core Sample's current incarnation, an exploration of "regionalism but not provincialism," which aims to chronicle an extraordinary synergy of under-employed, overeducated and highly creative young artists and the elder generations upon whose shoulders they stand. To preserve this auspicious moment in time, Clear Cut will release a catalog in April with a lead essay by Lawrence Rinder, curator at the Whitney Museum and one of Portland's most vocal and credentialed champions to the wide world beyond, i.e., Manhattan Island.

So what can you expect from the festival's--sorry, the "temporary consortium's"--eight-day run? Here are some highlights:

Red 76 (sans Sam Gould, who can't make it back due to prior commitments in Chicago) is staging a multimedia project called Community Jukebox, which will somehow parlay cell phones, wireless Internet connections, voice-mail services and vending machines into a meditation on communication technology that will prove that "the jingling of keys can be louder than the megaphone."

Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July will offer yet another installment in their Learning to Love You More series, which we pray they will infuse with more edge and less maudlin-masquerading-as-profound mush than in previous outings. (Don't hold your breath; the current entry's goal is "the creation of an article of clothing to be crocheted.")

Curators galore will round up artists to prove their various theses. Robert Gamblin gathers a century's worth of painters to examine the evolution of the Oregon landscape and Portland cityscapes, while Jeff Jahn will survey the interplay between the natural and artificial in our state, in which those elements are blended with especial incongruity. Maria Jensen curates Draw, featuring the likes of Henk Pander, Melody Owen and Laura Ross-Paul. Flush features such up-and-comers as Chandra Bocci, Paige Saez and James Boulton. Nan Curtis reminds us in Later of innovative local DIY-ers who were shaking things up before the current generation of whippersnappers were shaking their rattlers.

Abstraction be damned, Andrea Borsuk focuses on how figurative painting can elucidate the dark themes of violence, sexuality and fantasy. In Second Cycle, Stephanie Snyder and a grab bag of multimedia artists examine our fair city's obsession with thrift stores, vintage clothing, yard sales and recycling, and the paths by which garbage winds up in galleries.

In the realm of performance art, damali ayo continues in her preoccupation with race relations by panhandling for slave reparations. David Eckard will use dirt, clipped grass, scrub brushes, improvised tools and his own body to inscribe perfect circles on a variety of surfaces. Eckard's work is either very powerful or utterly pointless, transgressively original or embarrassingly derivative, depending on what mood you're in when you see it. Pop a Xanax beforehand and you'll love it.

If the Biennial left you thinking there isn't a single film or video artist in a 300-mile radius of the South Park Blocks, Core Sample will rectify your misimpression with works by Steve Doughton, Bill Daniel, Greg Pond, Matt McCormick, Lee Krist, Steve MacDougall, Chris Rhodes, Johnne Eschleman and Philip Cooper.

Independent projects round out the lot, among them James Harrison's meditation on "the mystery and eroticism of the humble two-by-four." Be sure to bring a condom--the splinters can be a bitch. Bruce Conkle indulges his longstanding fascination with Sasquatch by interior-decorating a mock-up mountain chalet for the elusive furry fella.

Charm Bracelet's Brad Adkins and Christopher Buckingham stuff a life-size elephant made of clear vinyl with five years' worth of art-gallery press releases. What does the elephant symbolize? Adkins and Buckingham can't agree, so they decline comment. Finally, M.K. Guth and friends provide a pair of magic red slippers to fatigue-footed Core Samplers; click your heels together three times, say, "There's no place like [evening's next venue]," and they'll whisk you away in a fancy-schmancy art van. Toto, whatever Portland once was, I have a feeling we're not there anymore.

A stronghold of abstraction, Portland also harbors a healthy subculture of figurative artists devoted to the timeless practice of telling stories. Such artists mine traditions of folklore, religious iconography, theater, the family photo album, fashion and comics. They engage in an intimate, alchemical process--what Cézanne called "thinking in images"--that twists imagery into a language imbued with cultural codes and cues. Reallegaries: The Poetic Narrative in Painting brought together the work of nine painters who share a knack for spinning contemporary experience into captivating tales. the exhibit, curated by painter Andrea Borsuk, was part of Core Sample, October's citywide art extravaganza.

A standout in a field of formidable competition, Ryan Boyle's mixed-media Company Chode employs Victoriana as an organizing principle. Boyle paints miniature dramas involving slug-like creatures on dilapidated, antique book covers. Here they act out a kind of "boy's life" allegory in which the hapless squirts rebel against the obligations of civilized life. There are boy chodes brawling in beanies and long johns, a mother chode pinched into a corset and doctor chodes performing mysterious operations. Wooden stumps, old jar fids, crumbling finger protectors and a fusty red ear syringe protrude here and there, framing a world that is ridiculous, contentious and entirely captivating in its attention to arcane detail. Equally outstanding are Erik Stotik's large acrylics stacked with snaking, distorted figures that morph between animal and human form even as they merge into pieces of architecture from a hodgepodge of cultures and periods. The staggering mix of imagery, solidly held together by Stotik's technical mastery, evokes at once the spirits of Diego Rivera, Max Beckmann, Giorgio di Chirico, M.C. Escher and the Count de Lautreamont.

Paul Green embraces the allegorical impulse without reservation, rolling out delicately tinted Venetian landscapes behind his languid young men and shorthaired women. Steeped in an updated religious iconography, the easel-sized canvases press an idealized nature into service. Even so, disjunctions of scale and odd juxtapositions suggest that more than one tale may be hidden beneath the surface. Jumping only a few centuries ahead in art-historical influence, Stephen O'Donnell brings the tradition of royal portraiture to center stage. O'Donnell reconfigures himself as a diva or prima ballerina, relying on the obvious visual gap between the trappings of the femme fatale and his male attributes. But it is the finely tuned craft of his jewel-like panels that keeps us involved in the masquerade. Borsuk likewise examines gender stereotypes and standards of feminine beauty. The show's curator paints exotic landscapes sprinkled with cameos and fetishes, beads and lots of breasts, as if the female of the species were a grab bag of trinkets and charms. The paintings operate as whimsical compendiums of the represented female form, mixing the contemporary with the ancient, the demure with the pornographic.

Sara Dochow's work suggests that the key to one's present behavior may be found in a simple undressing of the past. She isolates small groups of children from fifties-era family photos against stark, white grounds. One series shows boys dressed up as tramps, slouching and lounging, another girls and boys posing with bows and arrows in their Sunday best. By leaving only stark shadows attached to her figures, like a page out of Peter Pan, Dochow seeks to throw the posturing of the children's games into high relief. Trude Parkinson, also working from family photographs, concentrates on color and abstract form as she attempts to dissect memory and build a sense of personal myth. The small, square canvases, each with a central adolescent figure progressing along a path are hung in an arch toward the gallery's corner, like a climb to a summit. Interested in paintings as objects that take up space, Parkinson adorns their backs with diagrams, diary entries and bits of poems, inviting viewers to thereby glean another kind of knowledge.

For the past eight days, the series of artist-organized exhibits called Core Sample has dazzled Portland with a rare concentration of persuasive work: Bill Will's larky homage to nationalistic fervor, featuring an American flag that moved menacingly forward on retro-fitted garage door rails and then folded around the seated viewer. Andrea Borsuk's brilliantly curated show of complex allegories that revealed a well-developed underground of Portland artists working the same dreamscape territory with considerable skill. Andrew Dickson's funny and touching multimedia retrospective of a mysterious artist named Wren, complete with an installation made out of Lego blocks. Pablo de Ocampo's thinly veiled commentary on Middle East politics using grains of sand as words. Malia Jensen's extraordinary cast-soap purse sculpture that caught every hand-clutching detail of this everyday necessity.

These were only a few notes in the dense cacophony of the more than 20 exhibits, one-night events, and roving installations and performances presented by scores of artists at several citywide locations last week.

At first glance, Core Sample simply reaffirmed familiar evaluations of the current scene -- that it's energetic and vibrant, in large part because of the thousands of young creative types who have moved to the city in the past several years. (Many Core Sample exhibits, however, showcased seminal Old Guard artists like abstract sculptor Mel Katz, realist painter Henk Pander, conceptual artist Paul Sutinen and others.)

But ultimately, the mammoth event, which was inspired by conversations between curator Terri Hopkins, writer and publisher Matthew Stadler and Oregonian architecture critic Randy Gragg, revealed an art scene that has finally shed its image as a one-dimensional art village. There is an unprecedented level of artistic sophistication, discussion and variety now. Find one major realist painter such as Pander, for example, and you'll quickly reference several others of differing attitudes and temperaments, such as those included in "Reallegories": Borsuk, Paul Green, Michael Brophy and Eric Stotik.

Presenting a representative sampling of this fertile art scene was the simple brilliance of Core Sample. Like ripples from a tossed pebble spreading across a lake, it took over industrial warehouses, showrooms and clubs, presenting wave after wave of creative work. Observed casually, the extent of the activity wasn't surprising. But experienced intimately over eight days, its depth and magnitude took on the air of revelation, a frisson, as if we were seeing the art for the first time.

One obvious measure of this breadth was the sheer number of mediums employed by the participating artists, which ranged from postmodern advertising and design principles to ephemeral and none-too-slick film and video work to tried-and-true sculpture, photography and painting.

Look at one of the event's best locations, the Belmont Factory, 1875 S.E. Belmont St., for one handy microcosm of the event as a whole.

Near the rear of the 18,000-square-foot space brilliantly designed by Ovid Uman stood James Harrison's heroically erotic conceptual sculptures made of 2-by-4 blocks of wood. Adjacent to these tilted, staircaselike towers was de Ocampo's sand installation, Bill Daniel's sculptural work using a '65 Chevy van, Borsuk's "Reallegories" and another group exhibit, "The Hunt," curated by Brophy and Vanessa Renwick. "The Hunt" wove an evolving and wryly funny narrative on big game and other types of hunting using Brophy's landscape paintings, archival photos of hunters supplied by Tom Robinson, Jenny Ankeny and Scott and Brandi Gregory, and a video installation by Renwick. The videos -- contained in a row of refrigerators -- played continuous loops of grainy footage of wolves dragging down their prey.

Paces away from this multimedia assembly was a flight of stairs that led viewers to "Capture and Release," a breathtaking, subterranean maze of film and video art by 18 artists.

The Belmont Factory was a dizzying experience that took two separate tours to absorb -- the video work alone required hours to soak up -- in part because of the depth and sophistication of the work, and in part because viewers often had to reorient from watching one medium to another and then back. The many different ideas, forms and creative approaches on view in this one Core Sample location told many stories, but perhaps the most universal of them was that conceptual art practices have grown exponentially from 20 years ago. It is, in the most literal sense, an exploration of the entire visual landscape around us in all its crazy variety. Fusing craft and conceptualism The art world tradition of well-made and polished objects, which has been long beloved in the Northwest, looms as large as a redwood in Core Sample. Take, for example, two curated group shows -- Jon Raymond's "Crafty" and Stephanie Snyder's "Second Cycle" -- and an on-site interactive installation created by the duo Charm Bracelet, called "Untitled (Elephant)."

Each show featured exquisitely made work that would have impressed even the most demanding craft lover, notably Jensen's purse from "Crafty" and Bill Morrison's sculpture from "Second Cycle," which reproduced strip-mall warehouses and freeways using sculpted cardboard. But almost all of the art took an ideological turn that upended the straight-line lineage of craft. The deftness and ability to paint, mold and sculpt material served conceptual concerns, not to create purely representational objects.

Charm Bracelet tweaked the formal aspects of craft in cheeky and spectacular fashion with its interactive "Untitled (Elephant)." The duo of Brad Adkins and Christopher Buckingham sculpted a riotous-looking elephant using one giant piece of 20-gauge vinyl material resting on a podium. Remaining faithful to the interactive principles that have defined their previous works, the artists asked visitors to fill this transparent skin by having them shred color cards from art shows and then stuff them into the slitted opening of the vinyl material. Piecemeal, the elephant mushroomed, growing into its familiar hoof-and-trunk shape as shredded paper inflated it during the week. Whither, a curating scene Core Sample featured many fine curatorial efforts (in addition to those of Borsuk, Brophy and Renwick, Raymond and Snyder). Nan Curtis brought together nine established artists, each of whom made their names outside the gallery system. Jennifer Rhoads' "Flush" explored with beauty and zaniness the metaphorical possibilities of the show's title. Jeff Jahn filled the former Margo Jacobsen Gallery with a mix of two- and three-dimensional work that attempted to narrow the gap between the natural and synthetic worlds. And Malia Jensen's "Draw" was a feast of hand-drawn imagery by more than a dozen artists.

This abundance of curatorial efforts teased out one of the glaring weaknesses of the local scene: We have relatively few curators here commenting on local work with penetrating exhibits.

Part of that is because the growing number of artists has exceeded the spaces, dealers and institutions that can adequately divine the rapidly growing art world. But an even larger reason is that most galleries and institutions haven't embraced the unconventional formats employed by such do-it-yourself groups as Red76, Charm Bracelet and the Portland Center for the Advancement of Culture. The latter mounted a Herculean, if unfocused, art carousel, "The Modern Zoo," in 100,000 square feet of warehouse space during the summer.

But for the best example of the established art world letting the moment slip by, recall the 2003 Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. Making his selections from cattle-call entries submitted by artists, curator Bruce Guenther excluded the instigator-style spirit and incredible diversity of voices that now define Portland art. Instead, he modeled a world of mostly midcentury-influenced abstract painting. It was a fine and worthwhile celebration of cool craft, but Guenther's biennial was inevitably more memorable for failing to do what such an exhibit is designed to do: capture the vigor and energy of the community's current art scene.

The hunger for dialogue that seizes the moment is what Core Sample boldly articulated last week. From Raymond's brilliant fusion of craft and concept to Borsuk's realist painting show, Core Sample shouted out the belief that the spirit of volunteerism and this flood of funky, independent exhibits were as crucial to today's scene as better funded and publicly validated museum and gallery productions.

Perhaps the proof of this was the presence of Lawrence Rinder from the Whitney Museum of American Art. The provocative curator of the 2002 Whitney Biennial, which focused largely on art from regional centers across the country, greeted artists and arts insiders on the streets while touring Core Sample sites Sunday afternoon. Rinder has volunteered to write a major essay for the hefty catalog documenting Core Sample, to be published in April by Clear Cut Press. Beyond Core Sample Like any massive enterprise, Core Sample had its faults. Some of the work was amateurish, for instance. And one important oversight was the small amount of photography in relation to other mediums. Photography is the art world's medium of the moment, and Portland is rich in practitioners of the art form.

But as art extravaganzas go, Core Sample was a success. And as a measure of the art scene, it was also right on. More than that, Core Sample was the current generation's statement of arrival. Their impressive show of volunteerism and eclecticism was a declaration to the public: We are here, right now.

And as participants now celebrate eight incredible days of art, it's hard not to ask a series of questions: What's next? What levels of excellence and sophistication can the Core Sample approach reach? Can the mostly twenty- and thirtysomething artists in these exhibits flourish without support from more established institutions around town?

Seen this way, Core Sample becomes a responsibility for the larger arts community: It's something to be nourished as well as celebrated.