There's a home for a curmudgeon in the middle of Greg Kucera Gallery, called Bovine, The Oregon Trail Reversed. It is a life-sized trailer with weathered, graying, plywood skin, and weighted down with rusty belongings. The door is ajar. "He's in there," the artist, Whiting Tennis, says. This is the first art Tennis has made since becoming a homeowner two years ago. After living like an itinerant artist in Seattle (and New York and then Seattle again) for years, he finally bought an old house in Greenwood, and he found himself sympathizing with the old man who'd lived there before him, who'd died there, in fact, and who left the garage stuffed with belongings. The realtors were going to clean it all out, but Tennis insisted they leave it. This show includes objects and maybe even ideas that were in that garage, waiting for him. The "he" of Bovine is a composite of Tennis, who is 47 this year, and that unknown old man.
There is nostalgia in a dilapidated shack that's readying to go back in time, to reverse the westward progress of the Oregon Trail, as Tennis's title describes. But it would be wrong to assume that this show, Tennis's first at Kucera, represents the graying of Tennis as an artist. He is showing as much a jangling mix of the finished, the messy, the found, and the made as ever. Thick, dotty plaster stitches between flats of plywood that almost look like headstones—as well as blocky lifelike buildings and animals in painting-print hybrids, and perfectly impure plaster low reliefs—show the influences of Philip Guston and maybe Richard Tuttle. But Tennis cuts his own, wider swath, and leaves the detritus to prove it.
