Two years ago, Corin Hewitt locked himself inside a cramped, cluttered room-within-a-gallery at Portland’s Small A Projects. He had a refrigerator, stove, groceries, various cooking implements, several cameras, and images of Native American baskets to copy (along with some Goodwill wicker as well). The peculiar culinary results are documented in “Weavings: Performance # 2,” dozens of photographs jumbled on the walls. You can scan them in any particular order, or no order at all. His “pasta baskets” were created via “intention, accident, and improvisation,” said Hewitt during a recent Seattle visit. In his small, ad-hoc kitchen space, not unlike a darkroom, cooking became an analogy to photography—the materials changed with time, melted, shifted in form. Snapshots of his source materials include frozen blocks of peas and blueberries gradually thawing on the counter. Elsewhere fruit gently decays. Photography, like cooking, is a durational process—how long you open the aperture, how long you process the negative, how long you boil the fettuccini. Hewitt’s images are all essentially documentary still lifes that explore the boundary between “the perishable versus the inert.” One day, when fresh, you can eat that woven, tricolor pasta. The next, when dried out, you can photograph it. And on the third, it’s ready for the trash—or the gallery. (Closed Mon.) BRIAN MILLER

Wednesdays, Saturdays, Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, Fridays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Starts: April 1. Continues through Oct. 18, 2009