Leiv Fagereng: Quicksand Years
Vital 5 Productions, 254-0475.
Through June 4.

These days I am overcome with lassitude. All I want to do is drink Coke, smoke cigarettes, and read Japanese comic books. I most emphatically do not want to consider the fate of the natural world, and man's effect on it. Well, as it often happens in the art world, such things are not scheduled with me in mind. The artists responsible for jump-starting me into consciousness are Alexis Rockman and Leiv Fagereng, and their vision is--very loosely speaking--the present and future states of nature.

Of the two, New York artist Rockman has the more specific agenda. In 1997, he was commissioned by the Washington State Arts Commission and University of Washington to create a mural that now lives in the university's fisheries building. It's called A Recent History of the World, a map of extinct species all over the globe, and it's less preachy than sobering and dark: witness the Great White Hunter languidly posing in front of an enormous pair of tusks.

The logical extension of this idea is at the Henry, where most of the work is the result of Rockman's collaboration with UW Professor of Geology and Zoology Peter Ward. Together, artist and scientist imagine what things might look like at some unspecified point down the line. It's not science fiction, exactly, although it does function as a kind of dystopic cousin to it. The best example is a billboard that originally appeared on Houston Street in New York, courtesy of Creative Time's project DNAid. In it, Rockman takes familiar animals--a cow, a pig--and shows us what transgenic, bio-engineered creatures our tinkering might produce. (In this case, a square cow, for packing the creature more efficiently into feedlots, and a huge blobby pig, nothing more than a farm for transplant organs.) It's a little obvious, but pretty stunning nonetheless.

Four of the works, a loose combination of drawing and watercolor, are in a form known as a clade--that is, a visual narrative of a species' evolutionary path. These are less successful. I don't doubt that as much thought went into them, but it's less clear why each species is mutating. Why would a pig turn into a manatee? Why would a crow turn into a dodo? Is Rockman suggesting that through evolutionary culling we'll back ourselves into recovering a lost species? Here speculation overtakes art, and the work becomes textbook. The super-detailed, storybook-like paintings on the opposite wall, which depict survival in a weird, out-of-control future, are far more compelling; their very precision creates horror--the possibility of reality, however distant.

Fagereng, on the other hand, is much less polemical. His work seems to be addressing the world of our making, but he's loathe to conceptualize himself into a corner. He spoke to me more about his movement from a labored style to an intuitive one, about the difference between rural and urban life--quite a contrast to Rockman's deliberate scientific method. The best paintings are large collages of images: always a lush natural background (usually including Mount Rainier) layered with signs of human presence. One is dominated by a man, a woman, and a baby; the genius of it is the faint outline of an open doorway imposed on top, inviting the viewer's gaze into the work but also dissolving into the composition. Another contains a thicket of trees, a few lumberjacks, and a table set with wineglasses--the process and price of surrounding ourselves with luxury. There's often a tiny airplane in the far distance, a reminder that we're never far from the noise of progress.

The images are variously worked: some rich and full, some faintly sketched, some nearly rubbed out altogether. At times they recall textbook drawings, but the effect is far different from Rockman's clades. Here, the work straddles art and illustration. It's subtle--somewhere between lesson and simple observation, not quite finger-wagging, not too personal.

Both artists project a kind of ambivalence about the issues they raise. Neither has an absolute truth--man bad, nature good--to ram down your throat. And ambivalence is much harder to live with than certainty; ambivalence belongs to art. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some comic books to read.