313 Occidental Ave S, 624-7684
Through March 27.
Claire Cowie James Harris Gallery
309A Third Ave S, 903-6220
Through March 27.
Kevin Fletcher's monotypes show us an industrial world that may not, perhaps, be strictly real but in any case is real enough for art. In these prints, darkness is both muzzy and tangible, broken by hard-edged light glinting off girders, tangles of cables, ducts joined together like bones. Diagonal lines might be sparks flying or ship rigging. Some of the constructions revealed under this odd nighttime glare are so illogical and monstrous--jerry-rigged warrens seeming to balance on stilts above a devouring darkness--that they could be the product of a monomaniacal filmmaker, degenerate empty sets for a movie never made.
These landscapes are harsh and romantic, generating the kind of nostalgia that we mean when we say something is Dickensian and mean that its horror contains more than a modicum of the picturesque. Which is entirely appropriate: When the industrial age gave over to the information age (and the service age, and the entertainment age), those titanic structures, in their future uselessness, acquired a sort of stiff, ill-used dignity. Fletcher has a sly sense of humor about such recently acquired nostalgia; while some of his prints carry purely functional titles (Work Proceeding on Parallel Structures), others tilt toward the sad (Accumulation of Neglected Industrial Forms) and the sentimental approaching kitsch (Poorly Maintained Scrap Conveyance Device, with the added notation on the print itself, "in the gloaming").
The series is stunning, not least because each work is almost as abstract as it is representational, the surfaces activated with forms that are really nothing more than unbroken brushstrokes (look closely: each girder, each window, each sheet of metal was created when a rag or piece of cardboard rubbed black ink off a glass plate). Many of the prints are deeply layered, with forms emerging from darkness, all splintered light and futuristic structure; others are backlit dark forms grimed with photographic gray and moments of surprising organicity (a river seems actually to boil). You become aware of the presence of a grid--structures that are all up and down and side to side--like a Mondrian painting without the charming urban boogie-woogie.
By contrast, Claire Cowie's new works feel much lighter. Cowie has put aside, for the moment, her mutant cast figurines (hybrids of tchotchkes and toys and funny, horrible heads) and turned to collage, in this case mutant two-dimensional work made partly of her own scavenged work (drawings and prints that, for one reason or another, failed) and partly of her deceptively light-touch watercolors. The works in Land Escapes take as their subject the Duwamish area where Cowie has her studio, and the unstable relationship between industry and nature and art.
The collages are faultlessly clean, with old prints cut up to make new things--a lady's head in a factory wall, a chicken foot somewhere else--with amendations made in Cowie's deft, slightly cockeyed style of watercolor. Much, as a result, is suggested in efficient gesture--a path that runs to the top of a hill, a shoreline indicated by a sweep of cut white paper--rather than spelled out in actual form. Some of the collages of the natural world--a clutch of precisely rendered birds, for example--remind me of Laura Owens' paintings of monkeys and trees: charming, lovely to look at, but slightly precious, like illustrations for a children's book. (Sweetness, in Cowie's world, is usually balanced masterfully by darkness; not so much here.)
But when Cowie adds industrial forms to the landscape, the work is utterly energized. Her factories, evoked in a few smokestacks, a few perpendicular forms, belch out whole landscapes of mountain and water and sky. In one work there's a bit of pale floating red that could be a bird or the shoulder of a mountain or leftover smoke (since her work teaches you to see in fragments, it can be all three at once). This landscape is both romantic and not; to see something in purely visual terms is, in a sense, to ignore what it is, but Cowie keeps things uncertain by privileging neither bird nor factory. There's no need to heavy-hand it to steer us toward a certain truth about delicate balance and equivocal relationships; her light, formal forms are as real as Fletcher's dark, harrowing ones.
