The Gift
An Unlikely Venue Shows Some Uncommonly Good Art
Nordic Heritage Museum, 789-5707. Through April 1.
A beautiful and unusual thing happened in Ballard: An art exhibition opened. This in itself was not so strange, given the New Ballard Renaissance, led by a hip cavalry of galleries such as Fuzzy Engine, Black Lab, and Mix. This show did not open in a groovy reclaimed space, however, but in a longtime bastion of Scandinavian culture, the Nordic Heritage Museum, and the people attending the opening reception were not the vintage-funky, the elegant bohemian, or even the culturally obsessed, but an old-style Ballard crowd of older folk, some with heavy Scandinavian accents. And here's the real surprise: It was a show of absolutely great, cutting-edge contemporary art.
Between Space and Time: Contemporary Norwegian Sculpture and Installation gives us the work of six of Norway's best artists. It's a kind of cultural mission, curated by Louise Shaw, formerly the director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (with the support of various Norwegian entities, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), intended to break Norway out of its perceived isolation from the rest of the world. Art, of course, is an excellent ambassador, and if the mission seems obscure to us we would do well to remember how obscure Seattle must seem to them.
Stranger Personals
What at first seems daunting--understanding the work of artists whose culture we may know nothing about--quickly dissipates. Some of the work is simply tremendous. Per Barclay's installations--rooms flooded with used motor oil--are here represented by three sumptuous, large-scale Cibachrome prints. The dense black floors--in an old boathouse, in an Italian palazzo, in a Greek church--provide a pure reflective surface in which light and dark resolve in their starkest forms, a kind of excess made simple. But what seems purely aesthetic is also quietly political, a taut comment on Norway's oil industry and the toll it takes on everyday life.
Ambivalence about industry also underlies the work of Bente Stokke, a performance artist who often uses ashes collected from waste incineration plants in her installations. Like Barclay, the portable form of her projects is made manifest in documentation, and what you get to see here is a roomful of small square frames containing altered maps, star charts, photographs, collages, and ash referring to an ongoing investigation she calls The Ship. Conflating Norway's shipping past, from the Vikings forward, with a personal look at time, navigation, and artistic process, Stokke gives you a disassembled book that can be read in many ways. Toward the end of the series, the phrase "Je n'y arriverai jamais" appears, which I translated as "I'll never get there"--implying that meaning remains elusive, that whatever you bring to the making or viewing of art is infinitely variable.
Bård Breivik refers more abstractly to the ship tradition with Traveling Form #4, a beautiful mesh form that suggests, but does not insist on, a cross section of a boat with a gently curving keel. In this work and in Small Score for a Longer Conversation, light and shadow are as important as the forms themselves; the latter is a series of about 20 interpretations of one vertical shape in different materials (sticks, perforated metal, something that might be parchment or skin) that shows a range of density, weight, and translucence. Even the most opaque version has a delicacy, a single-minded intensity that would be as interesting alone as with its brethren. Breivik's work seems to be the least specifically Norwegian work, along with Kristen Ytreberg's practical objects that contrast beauty and utility. I mean no disrespect to either.
Tradition surfaces again in Gunnar Torvund's sculptures, which hark back most clearly to Viking woodcarving and folk art. In fact, they most resemble funerary artifacts from an Egyptian tomb, alluding to otherworldly and totemic uses that are not available to us (Quiet Vessel looks like a tiny mummy cartonage with an icicle-like crystal where the face would be). Another, called Thought House (Helmet), has a helmet-shaped front, and in back Torvund has hung a variety of body parts and detritus, suggesting the way that tradition contains--or, alternately, subsumes--people. In an institution most of us associate with Viking boats and traditional masks, music, basketry, and other arts, Torvund's work reminds us of the individual souls that create a culture.
Conversely, it seems to me that Americans are consumed with defining what makes American culture. It's essential that we look outward, even if only to better understand ourselves. This show is a gift. Don't miss it.
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