Shortlist: Visual Art

Gretchen Bennett

Gretchen Bennett is perhaps Seattle’s greatest artist’s artist, a
modest grande dame who brings and holds people together—and who
is always working. On any given day, you can find her walking in the
International District where she lives, wearing a focused expression
that makes her look lost—not in thought but in deep observation
of her surroundings. Her work is always about landscapes, and often
about mapping, about being located somewhere and being absent from
somewhere else. It’s romantic but specific, virtuosic but DIY, and
never academic, always personal.

When she tracks geography, it’s through dislocation. After she moved
back to her native Northwest from Brooklyn a few years ago, she
stenciled the streets of her new neighborhood with symbols from her old
one. Using street stickers, she pieced together unbelievably elaborate
collages—one, seen at Western Bridge, in the size of a
19th-century history painting—after photographs of the places she
missed. This year, she turned to the remote but overly familiar
geography of Kurt Cobain’s Seattle, re-creating grainy YouTube stills
of the singer and of his fans in impossibly luminous, rubbed-on colored
pencil. As usual—Bennett has been shortlisted for this award
before—she achieved the perfect, slightly painful balance of lost
and found. JEN GRAVES

Jeffry Mitchell

Jeffry Mitchell was supposed to peak years ago. He had his first
solo show in Japan, where he studied ceramics, in 1984. Seattle’s
contemporary art museum, the Henry Art Gallery, honored him with a
survey—sometimes, but not always, reserved for the high point in
an artist’s career—back in 2001. In addition to being held in the
permanent collections of area museums, his work quietly lives in
unexpected places, too: at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, at the
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in
the collection of the New York Public Library.

What is most impressive is his continuing expansion into
installation. In 2006 at Western Bridge, he created The Tomb of Club
Z, a monument in white ceramic and frostinglike cast paper to an
infamous Seattle bathhouse. It was devastatingly beautiful, and very,
very sad. This year, for the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards at
Portland Art Museum, he created another shrine, a zigguratlike facade
whose reverse side, like a dollhouse, contained a menagerie of
sparkling white and gilded ceramic animals and skulls in “rooms” lined
with tinfoil and lit by naked bulbs. Across the room was a large,
meditative, black-on-black pattern painting. If Mitchell has a medium,
it is devotion. JEN GRAVES

Oscar Tuazon
and Eli Hansen

So many people got so excited about these two brothers this year
that it seemed a little silly. After showing up seemingly out of
nowhere, they found themselves having simultaneous shows at Seattle Art
Museum, and at Western Bridge and Howard House.

But they didn’t come from nowhere. They came from here, having grown
up in Indianola on the Kitsap Peninsula, and having gone their separate
but similar ways as young adults: Oscar Tuazon to a prestigious art
school and a life lived half in Paris, half in Tacoma (his daughter’s
name is Tacoma), and Eli Hansen to a life as a trained and working
glassblower.

In their work, they draw together many of the untended strands of
contemporary art and Northwest identity politics: They theorize and
also hand-make, they are urbanites and remote-outpost survivalists,
they display shiny reflective baubles as well as utilitarian homemade
tattoo guns. In their breakable shelters made of liquor containers, in
their folded and faceted photographs, in their gemlike solar cookers,
in their tested-for-strength architectural columns made of beer
bottles—there is not only sexiness but the feeling of a new home,
not a frontier based on what is left behind, but a sturdy, new, crazy
idea. JEN GRAVES

Susie Lee

Susie Lee’s appearance on the scene in 2006 was kind of wild. She
was the clear standout at the show of University of Washington MFA
graduates that year, and by the end of the year, she was selling out
editions of her work at Miami Beach Art Basel, where she was
represented by Seattle’s hot new dealer Scott Lawrimore.

But beginner’s luck exists even in art, and the real test of Lee’s
promise was this year, with her first solo show at Lawrimore Project.
Before that, her best-known work was Consummation, an elegant,
erotic little abstraction that involved her own body represented in a
length of wood, J. S. Bach, and a video of two burning strands of twine
projected horizontally across the wood. It insisted on primal
disconnections, between people and between dimensions (especially
digital and physical), and their refusal to resolve.

Her Lawrimore Project show, Refrain, was a Herculean effort
that included a giant virtual rainstorm and several complex pieces
involving sound, video, and sculpture. But it also
demonstrated—especially in one elegiac landscape made of moving
liquids and a video projected through a tank of water onto a screen
above, in a dark room—that Lee can make the complicated
technologies she uses disappear. Her work can feel like a new,
naturally occurring discovery. JEN GRAVES