Taylor Schefstrom of the Willamette Week took these awesome photos of us during the December installation of Tedd Nash Pomaski's Willful Obedience. We were really behind on the flip. I think this was Wednesday. Usually we're done by then. We were getting pretty stressed by Thursday when nothing was merchandised, everything still in a pile in the middle of the floor. But somehow, some way, the way it always works, everything turned out beautifully. It's one of our best months yet! Add Comment If you haven't made it in yet for January, we're a very new space, and a very magical space. If I don't say so myself, January rivals November for being a flawless showcase of the very best furniture, fashion, art and artifacts we've ever had at GR. True to our intentions, Golden Rule in January is rocking a sleek, clean, minimalist medical-chic/industrial aesthetic. The space is open and airy, and much more customer-friendly than things were in December. And the inventory is 90-percent new! The November to December flip was, I think, the toughest in the history of Golden Rule. Maybe it was the lack of a coherent vision (in honor of this month's group show, UNNATURAL, we'd decided to be "unnatural" and do away with the monthly synthesis of furniture-fashion-art-artifacts and to focus on Christmas gifts and guilt-free affordable fashion)? Maybe I'm feeling a mid-year (yes, this is our seventh entirely new space) burnout? Maybe it was just not wanting November to be over just yet? We packed everything up on Monday, instead of Sunday, per usual. Sunday I procrastinated on the packing by doing the books and the consignment accounting (a couple of my least favorite things, if that says anything at all about how much I was looking forward to packing up the space). Monday was hard, with Navid not feeling well, Amanda Luna hurting from a monthly visitor, us missing the heck out of installation director Jessica Reaves. Fortunately, Hannah Spas was a pro with the putty and paint! We're going to a couple of off-site Christmas sales this month, so we had to pull a couple of our outside racks in anticipation of that. To make up for the lost rack space, we brought in this very strange collapsible rack from the MTF estate. My mother had three of these in her spare living room (AKA, her closet), but we were only able to disassemble one to get it out the door. It's for sale here at $180 if you need a 360-degree closet for your loft, spare bedroom, or your retail establishment. Let us know! The new desk configuration doesn't give a good view of our fixed shelving, where we usually put our top-shelf jewelry and artifacts. Hate to say it, but we've got a small theft problem here at Golden Rule. Well, 5 things have gone missing in 6 months, so it's not too bad. We didn't want to risk it this month, so we used those shelves for shoes, which have been notoriously hard sells here, since we've historically just stuffed them in on the floor under the clothing racks. Hopefully this month is better! The sorting out of piles of accessories and oddities was a real challenge this month, since our display space is limited to pretty much the 16" cubes Evan Jones built for us, and the 3" deep drawers in the flat files. We got it almost all in, though! Huge, huge, huge thanks Maya Rose for her excellent merchandising, and to Delphine Bedient for mad-crazy scarf sorting skills! Our new desk, a custom stack-laminate drafting table built by Jay Cryer, makes for a tight fit for whoever's behind it. These cedar cubbies designed by Evan Jones off of a modified pattern from a 1970s home improvement book are my favorite thing in the space this month. They smell SO good, look SO good, and are the perfect solution for home storage and/or display. Sara, Hannah, Wally the Dog, consigner Jillian Barkley (not pictures), and I worked for hours on the tedious task of tying 71 silk scarves from the MTF collection into tight little donut florets. We had initially planned to make them into soft-sculpture Christmas ornaments on a colored-tape Christmas tree we put on the wall for about 10 minutes until we decided it looked ridiculous. Instead, we strung them through a piece of thick twine and draped them from the steel rods coming out of our ceiling. We had lots of dog visitors this month. Agnes, who belongs to Sarah Radcliffe of Yo Vintage, is my absolute favorite pup ever. Sarah holds up our silk scarf snake. Looks awfully nice, but probably not the best way to sell scarfs we don't suppose. We were going back and forth on whether or not to have a Christmas tree in the space. Fortunately, Jen Erickson from Project Grow lent us two brightly-colored yarn wrapped banboo trees made by her coworker, Illene Godofsky. They are SO beautiful! The new configuration with the clothes in the window makes for a very den-like shopping experience. Unfortunately, it's awfully private-looking, so we're noticing people are walking by without thinking it's okay to come in. We hope they stop it with that! We'll hit you with some not crappy iPhone photos in a bit, but for now we wanted to share with you a bit of the loveliness that's been shared with us via Aidan Koch's awesome guest curation. We're totally lovng it! Check out some of these great pieces by Lahaina Alcantara, Shawn Creeden, Austin English, Dennis Foster, Israel Lund, Mia Nolting, and Paul Wagenblast. Huge, huge, huge thanks to Amanda Luna, Hannah and Ted Spas, Jamieson Diemer, and Navid Harmsen for your incredible help during this flip, and to Aidan Kocn and all her wonderful artists for making the art part so easygoing and awesome! December is going to be a wonderful month at Golden Rule. We can feel the love already. Hope to see everyone soon! I've been bracing myself for this article to hit the press, thinking it may create the biggest PR nightmare in the world for us. Fortunately, writer Riley Hooper was able to cut through my self-deprecating and my tendency to be the queen of TMI in order to share our complicated story in a clear, conscise, and almost 100-percent factually accurate human interest piece. Wow. My hat is off to Riley, as well as to photojournalist Taylor Schefstrom who took some really stunning photos of me and the space. This article made me really optimistic about the future. I feel like it opens the door towards being slightly more legitimized as a gallery (which we strive to be, what with the providing almost full representation to our artists and all). It also implicitly presents our monthly showcases as the conceptually grounded environmental art that they are (as opposed to retail installation alone). Most promisingly, it didn't tell all. There's still a lot more story here, and hopefully other members of the press will follow suit. This was an amazingly smooth transition. Usually they're a bit harder. The only real issue this time was, as always, the desk situation. It's hard to have a new desk that's high in form and function each month in a different place and different style. Maybe it's just been more smooth because the November aesthetic is more my own? Or maybe the clothes for this month are not as bad memory-laden as the ones from last month? Or maybe we're just figuring out how to do it better faster? We'll be laying low on the inter-webs while we flip our space out from October to November. In fact, our computer at the space is unplugged. The credit card machine, however, is fully operable. Now's a great time to stop by and see what we do, and it's also a great time to dig through boxes of discounted treasures from last month, and as-of-yet unpriced goodies for November. We're super excited for November. We've got tons of great new furniture and clothes, and some stellar art. Since her September show at Belmont Stumptown, Lynn Yarne has produced a new series of small drawings as well as two LARGE pieces we're just in love with. We'll have all of her older work in the flat files, as well, in case you missed her past shows. We've done a SERIOUS overhaul on the space. Like, we moved the giant 400-pound flat files on our hands and knees with our heads and feet using the ground and walls as leverage. So we've been too busy to update our blog, and you've noticed: But don't worry, everything is set up, lovely and ready to go, and as soon as we've finished pricing everything we'll hit ya hard with tons of beautiful images of our process and our product, though we're secretly hoping you'll come to see it in person Friday! P.S. That huge peak in page views on August 30th? The day we posted swimsuit photos. What is it they say about sex sells? | Our ability to continue this labor of love depends on you!
Please support Golden Rule by buying and selling with us, spreading the word and contributing to our cause! GOLDEN RULE
www.goldenruleportland.com 811 E. Burnside Suite 122 Portland, OR. 97202 (503) 477-5124 ALL DAYS, 12-6 GOLDEN RULE is a social experiment in creativity and commerce (and craziness). Each month we curate a unique showcase of furniture, fashion, art, artifacts, ephemera, etc., to complement the art on our gallery walls. We are an inclusive space, welcoming the goods and services of both emerging and established designers, consignors, artists and subject-area specialists from near and afar. Stop by. Say hi. Participate. Reciprocate. We're a totally new space each month!
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January 2011: Medical-chic, minimalist everything. BLOG ARCHIVESNovember 2011 BLOG CATEGORIESAll PARTNERS IN CRIME
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