CRIS BRUCH

To make Pilgrim, Cris Bruch took a roll of paper, inked a yellow-and-black pattern on the ends so the marks were picked up by the paper's edges only, and then wrapped the paper around a large acorn-shaped structure. The result is a refined and inscrutable object that sits on the floor. Because of the way the striped edges of the wrapped strips are lined up, it shines as though it has an internal spotlight. It is totemic and cinematic, ancient and brand new. There's a toying with pointlessness and a materialistic ingenuity to everything Bruch does. He takes on new mediums constantly. His recent show at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland included a map in Diebond (a plastic and aluminum material used as a light building skin) of a cul-de-sac housing community his father developed; wood puzzles twisting so strenuously they could not be sketched first, only built; black, pointy cones made from polished paper and resin snaking down from the ceiling; and architectural drawings of blister packs, the see-through plastic packaging that contains consumer products such as hairdryers and toys. In May, Lawrimore Project will show a 25-year retrospective of his work. JEN GRAVES

DAWN CERNY

Dawn Cerny's art is playful, mischievous, and cockeyed. Much of the imagery comes from other centuries, or the lineage of American presidents, or the imagined banalities of eccentric millionaires' closets. In her theory-driven installation Schönbrunn (A Failed Attempt at Something Grand) at 4Culture this year, a giant dripping mural of a vicious gang of dogs fighting was painted onto one wall, where it bled into the frames of genteel portraits of unruffled aristocrats as if they were all in the same place at different times. On the other wall were portraits of heads lined up in rows like consumer objects on single sheets of paper, copied from artworks Cerny saw in Sotheby's catalogs. It isn't easy making art about historicism, aristocracy, art, capitalism, and revolution that is funny, but Cerny does it. She's a brainy blasphemer, but there's also love in her art. Her biblical sea of delicate, printed body parts in Tacoma Art Museum's Neddy Fellowship show this winter floated long and high across the gallery wall, like a rainbow of dismemberment. JEN GRAVES

JEFFRY MITCHELL

The abject-baroque flowers and animals and whatever-else-have-you by Jeffry Mitchell are an established highlight of artmaking in Seattle. Mitchell makes paintings, drawings, and sculpture that are equally sad, garish, and gorgeous. But earlier this year, on a commission from Ruth and Bill True for the exhibition Boys and Flowers at Western Bridge, Mitchell made what may be his most personal and most vulnerable piece: In front stood a glowing, beatific, eight-paneled screen of cast white paper decorated with an effusion of white, childlike designs (some with less-than-innocent protuberances and emissions). Behind the screen, enclosed in a glass vitrine, was a clay representation of the three floors of the infamous bathhouse Club Z, a place Mitchell says he frequented in more self-destructive days. The sorry ceramic rooms and the stubby little naked men were also white, but a streaky, watery, unheavenly white. The whole Tomb throbbed with sorrow. This summer, James Harris Gallery showed drawings by masters next to pages from Mitchell's sketchbooks. His curves and curls resonated with Matisse and Klee, and his little flower bursting with life was as painfully delicate and devotional as anything there. JEN GRAVES

CAT CLIFFORD

Cat Clifford is always in her own videos. Sometimes, she is walking like a deer. Or jumping out of a short tree, repeatedly. Even in her stop-motion animations, there is an author, not one whose personality or particular skill matters, but whose presence adds an enigmatic inflection. What are her intentions as she runs her hand across a freshly dead buck? She discovers them as we see them, one part of herself grabbing another part on film. She is sorry for the buck's death, repulsed, guilty. The slow movements of her hand reveal this. And finally, there's the title: I Knew This Buck. Her black-and-white animations, at Howard House earlier this year, depicted birds and tractors passing across the screen, leaving in their wake trails of mowed-down paper. Clifford had drawn the moving object in one position on thick paper, filmed the image, then cut out the object and drawn it again in its next moment, hundreds of times over. Her work is a bracing reminder about how elastic time can be, if only we don't rush it. JEN GRAVES