Plenty of young Seattle people go to Portland for the porn. Strip clubs are bountiful in Portland. The rules are looser there. Organic meets porn—organic is just what porn needed, right? Something the opposite of all that creepy Larry Sultan San Fernando Valley silicone? Since the Lusty Lady shut down in Seattle, there's nothing here with this quality. Portland porn has a ring of innocence and experience to it—appealing to urban grown-ups who are post-shame and all that. Healthy. Kind of like the rest of motherfucking perfect Portland. Naturally, this is not reality, just its surface. Which is fine, since all other possible realities are a lot more interesting.
Take the reality in Portland artist Ty Ennis's first solo show in Seattle, at Prole Drift. It's called JKJKJK, as in he's just kidding, just kidding, just kidding, but the letters also refer to porn starlet Jill Kelly, and judging from a tender watercolor portrait of her, Ennis takes her seriously. He confirmed this when I interviewed him by phone, at which time it also became clear that JKJKJK, which is full of porn—dancing watercolor ladies, blurry spankers with spankees eerily removed from the picture, a naked woman impaled on a man in a window—tells a whole layered story about porn and identity.
Ennis grew up in tabooey Spokane. His parents were a misogynistic pervert (his words) and a strict Catholic. He snuck into porn shops before he was even of age. Some of the characters in his paintings are people he ran into there, with strange postures and appearances—they feel sort of like friends and compatriots. But Ennis left Spokane, and he didn't go back. He went to college and came of age in Portland, the current American prototype of the literate, progressive city. There may be something here about reconstructing oneself from a Spokaneish person into a Portlandish person—the basic outline for a common enough recent American migration story. It helps explain why the paintings depict porn but with conflicting twists of refinement. The DVD for the movie Weapons of Ass Destruction, with flashing, heavily made-up women on its cover, sits delicately in a still life with flowers and a hat as if it were simply the next phase in the historical European painting tradition.
2nd and Bernard (Spokane, WA), taken from memory, depicts an actual shop Ennis visited, but it does not look seedy enough. What must have been cheap wood-paneled walls and luridly colored stacks of dildos and movies and magazines here become more like a refined Northwest-modernist hardwood interior (Portland or Seattle, not Spokane) designed by a geometric abstractionist with a thing for candy colors.
"I feel like I'm always skirting that line: Is this a problem or am I okay with this?" Ennis told me. "I don't know." The thing about porn for progressive urban types is that it can be mindlessly upsetting, or it can be liberating, and it can easily be both at the same time. Somehow this seems related to Ennis's repeated use of mesh—highlighting as it hides, a classic tool of taboo.
Underlying the tenderness that's in JKJKJK are two portraits, one of Ennis's father and one of his grandfather. Neither looks like the men actually look. The portrait of the father is an ink drawing of black-and-white flannel, which his father wore for hunting, with an extremely vaginal oyster superimposed on it; his father would grill oysters with his hunting buddies. The inheritances are complicated. The grandfather portrait shows a meshy UW baseball cap that once belonged to Ennis's grandfather; the day of his funeral was the day Ennis discovered he was starting to go bald. The portrait is a memorial for his grandfather, but also for Ennis's early life, marking a time when it seemed like he passed a point of no return as a man. It's art by someone far from where he started, figuring out where he is. 
