“Freese merges painting, photography,
design, and printmaking into a seamless but disparate display of
beauty, energy, intimate human interaction, and the
motion created as masses of people collide”

-Jan Spellar (PACC art critic).

Shows:

2008.
June: Upper Playground, Portland.
Feburary: Laced Up, Seattle.
January: Elysian, Seattle.

2007.
December: Magnolia Grill, Durham.
November: Backspace, Portland.
August: Jace Gace, Portland.
August: Audiocinema, Portland.
April: Ogle, Portland.

2006.
Dec-Jan: Upper Playground, Portland.
Oct: Ayden Gallery, Vancouver BC.
Aug: Audio Cinema, Portland.
July: Disjecta, Portland.
June: Portland Modern, Issue 4. 'Saturation' curated by
Kristan Kennedy and Matthew Stadler
May: Mark Woolley Gallery, Portland
May: Sugar gallery, Portland.
April: Backspace Annex gallery and live painting, Portland.
Feb: Zitegist. Portland.

2005.
Sept: 21st Bar. Portland.
Sept: Holocene. Portland.
Sept: Petrol gallery Holocene. Portland.
June: Petrol gallery. Portland.
May: Everett station. Portland.
Feb: Backspace gallery. Portland.

2004.
Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla, WA.
Grapefields winery. Walla Walla, WA.
WSU. Pullman, WA.

Design:
-Mural designed for Providence Medical Clinic. Located on NE Interstate ave. & Alberta, Portland.
-Clothing designs created through Entire Catalogue sold at 360 vinyl, Just Be Clothing and Nac. Portland, 2006.
-Artwork designed for Ziba Design and Mahlum Architects as the conceptual backbone for Ziba's central office. Portland, 2006.
-Web design for Audiobulb, Black Market Media, Elephant Grey, and Entire Catalogue. 2006.
-Clothing designs created for Portland Trailblazers. Portland, 2005.
-Print design commissioned through Whitman college, 2004.

Education:
2004: BFA. Whitman College. Printmaking.
2003: Internship, Crow’s Shadow Art Institute, Oregon:
Lithograph printing.

ART REVIEWS

Drips And Splatters
Backspace scores a hit with action-painting duo.
BY RICHARD SPEER

"If gonzo artist Ralph Steadman were a Gen-Y Portlander instead of a 59-year-old Brit, chances are he'd be making work like Justin Gorman and Caleb Freese's collaborations in the Backspace annex. Gorman and Freese deliver dynamic silkscreens, combining design elements, photographs, drawing and action painting, synthesized with invigorating spurts, splatters and drips. The artists (who have shown before in the Everett Station Lofts, Portland's most vital petri dish for emerging talents), will soon be contributing work to an upcoming issue of Portland Modern. Complementing the silkscreens, a video loop shot by Gorman shows Freese action-painting on a plexiglass lightbox, shooting arcs of black ink out of a squirt bottle. The team's splashy expressions contrast with their dry, subdued wit. One of the silkscreens is titled Trucks, street lamps, and going reverse in a Taco bell parking lot. Their First Thursday show card promised "Live nude models appear at 2 am," while their website, squadup.net, offers Web surfers a quid pro quo: "Support our art, and I'll share my girlfriend." Technically accomplished, winningly sassy, this is a duo to watch. 115 NW 5th Ave., 248-2900. Closes May 3."

-review courtesy of Willamette Week

" Photography, all over Portland. Mitigating photography's literalism. Then something new!"
by Jim Betsy

"The Caleb Freese / Justin Gorman collaboration at Ogle, on first look, takes a similar strategy to Fulford's. Foot-square photos,
perhaps over a 100 of them--at eye-level you find a horizontal line of these square-format images, but three-quarters of them fly off
above and below. Each contain fast takes, clipped impressions like through alight-rail train window. Urban imagery fluttering by, buildings or rather their fragmentary impression. The colors, textures, surfaces of architecture--disentangled from utilitarian fact. Flashes of meaningless lettering, graffiti. Sky appears white as often as blue.

Like Fulford's banal (also square format) images, meaning might be inferred from one image's relation to another. Red catching the eye in one picture, jump-pushing the eye to a red flash in another. Blue to blue, gray to gray. But Ogle's scatter-gun wall arrangement has more to it than Fulford's. Freeze and Gorman shrewdly prompt you to look at each image briefly then jump to the next like listening to a funk-jazz score. But more than that, look closely at each image. Freese and Gorman's pictures are not banal. Not even one picture of the hundred or so images. Each are solid pictures!

Why? Why so consistently good--so compelling, even? Photographs are banal by nature, picturing ordinary everyday things, literal
translations of bits of the seen world. There is, in these works, some collaging and/or montaging present, rearranging fragments here and there. But this is occasional, haphazard. No. What makes these photos is the bits of silkscreening. Just a strip of black in this photo. Dot-pattern of white in that. Utilizing a rigorously restrained silkscreen template, each photo adds a sparse amount of extra
information. Just enough to edge the photo an inkling out of its literalness. Into something uncanny. Some deeper meaning is
recognized. Not found via juxtaposition (not via Rauschenberg's type of witty irony). Nor via mental overlay (not via Toedtemeier's type of passionate analogy). No. Freeze and Gorman's images are off in some way. Literalness is subverted, breaking the photographic-vision (analog) "spell," refusing not just a cliché image (which good photos are smart enough to do) but refusing the stereotypic photo-look (a part-classical, part-modern "look" which Erwitt, Rauschenberg, Toedtemeieir, Fulford, and most art photographers are never able to shake).

With Freeze and Gorman--lines, colors, textures jump to life. They represent no particular thing (not one, simple small piece of the real world). Analog literalness is neutralized, dead, defused. These bits exist in their own right, sing without accompaniment. This is a new kind of literalness, digital literalness. Building blocks for a new way of seeing--playing a new game by a new set of rules. On close inspection, what a smart, eerily right-on show this proves to be!

If you want a keyhole glimpse into the future--not just of photography but of the arts generally--drop in to Ogle this month and take a
peek..."

Quick and dirty reviews April 2006
By: Jeff Jahn
"At Ogle Justin Gorman and Caleb Freese put on an impressive display of 100 works in white frames. This is good because they have been showing in too many group shows.

Everything here seemed to combine graffiti, snippets of urban photography and the shattered modernism of Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Mehretu with the net effect of elation and dismay. It lacks a unique voice but the one it uses speaks clearly.

On one hand this is a solid effort but with so many small statements rather tethered to other artists' and architect's vernaculars it
seemed like it was quoting a scattered force. Yes, I know it is "about fragmentation" but it was too fragmented to be about anything else beyond the diaspora. Verdict: a talented duo searching for the right way to present their work."

STATMENTS:
"I'm not sure why it's so hard to maintain some sense of community in the city streets. Perhaps it is just arithmetic. At a certain point numbers make strangers."

Everyone becomes the same and people become immune to individualism. Forced to ignore eighty percent of what we see....along with the inability to remember ninety percent of our day- in effect we are all blind. Slowly this becomes more prevalent: people soon never deviate a block or two from their consistent path of travel. By necessity we must attempt to distill a function out of every interaction.... if this function is not beneficial we rarely engage. Time stands above us all.

We as the artist have the ability (or maybe just the time and desire) to recognize the beauty of everything. But more importantly we have the power to select and arrange. The ability to give meaning. Slowly everything becomes the same so we sample without regard to the source. This is how we immortalize everything: the wall of the building worked in, the cracks on the road driven on, the bum ignored (and probably for good reason), the catalogs thrown away daily... it's all there. Texture. Colors. Shapes. Perspective.

Our process is fluid: as both photographers, painters, and printmakers the execution of our art is as varied as the elements that make it up. Our process starts with a series of paintings or photos. We both capture the same locations and models, as this gives us a shared experience and energy about where to take the piece next. Within the digital world is how we trade the piece back and forth, working and re-working as a digital collage. Transparency is a key element to how we see our art functioning: so the final product is printed or painted on a large, 1/2 inch thick pieces of plexi-glass. Each piece is at least 2, up to 6 separate layers. Giving the piece an immense sense of depth, presence, and consistently changing viewpoint. Details and colors reflect off each-other while the paint and silkscreen give a feel of texture. Ultimately, the pieces have a beautiful presence while also pushing the ever-feared element of technology in art.

Our art is the attempt to distill meaning and beauty from a world of over saturation. Our lives do not have to be complex. With enough of a perspective and good taste we can create our own simplicity and beauty from what compels us. Intuition decides what presents itself and this is embraced. Even better: to share this intuition is why we have combined our efforts as two artists creating and arranging a shared experience.
This is our collaborative. I can tell you now that it will last a lifetime. We have attempted to immortalize the beauty and destruction of our everyday lives and in the process have truly immortalized our aesthetic of life. This is all we have, so along the way we prefer to share a beer before opening the next one.

Pictured here is my studio

Random comments from past customers:
"Your illustration style has a really nice ethereal quality that elevates it above much of the other similar directions that i've seen around. One of the nicest strengths of your illustrations in general, and the Fresh Option shown here is the unusual composition and lightness. It's a very, very idiosyncratic composition that catches the eye and the accompanying lightness which provides real beauty. These tandem qualities equal a pretty cool aesthetic, and they are what drew me to your work originally. I'd extend myself here, and claim that these qualities are what draw others as well."
"I like the complexity and the overlay of seemingly disparate images and colors"
"Your artwork is the best I have come across in… well… forever. It’s raw, and innovative, and I think I want to marry it."