Henry Art Gallery looks tired this summer, and I suppose there's nothing surprising about that. After all, Seattle's contemporary art museum is publicly searching for a new director, making this a nadir moment of unwanted calm before what should be a thrilling storm of fresh energy and ideas. But because fresh energy and ideas are the currency of the one art museum in Seattle entirely devoted to the art of the here and now, well, it's disappointing. You have to wonder: Is this any way to show yourself to prospective director candidates?
The two main shows this summer are Mouth Open, Teeth Showing: Works from the True Collection and Viewfinder, both diffuse group exhibitions with some incredible individual works but very little curatorial fire. Like Swallow Harder, the Frye's punchy showing of the Krohn collection last year, Mouth Open, Teeth Showing has a luring title, taken from Zoe Leonard's army of found dolls in the show. But these 13 examples from the collection of Bill and Ruth True, owners of Western Bridge in SoDo, don't add up to much more than a quite already established appreciation of the Trues' good taste.
The show's centerpiece is the Seattle premiere of Doug Aitken's five-channel video installation i am in you (2000), which tells the fractured story of a little girl with unspecified troubles. It has powerful moments, but doesn't justify itself as a major production, which is often the case with Aitken's work. Conversely, working with nothing but the camera, her own body, and an empty room, South African artist Tracey Rose created the masterly, unsettling TKO. Ann Hamilton plants a tiny screen into the wall, and films water running down a neck, for her affecting contribution. It's a nice curatorial touch that these two works bracket Aitken's in the galleries. (Unfortunately, Stephen Dean's soccer-as-fascist-spectacle piece feels sloppy and crowded the way it's installed, and Maria Marshall's revelatory video, also featuring children caught in adult themes, is hidden in the elevator.)
Viewfinder is a show of recent additions to the collection, with some loans. It's mostly photography, and segmented into photographic categories, following in the example set by John Szarkowski in his landmark 1966 book The Photographer's Eye. The categories here are frame, focus, parallax, exposure, voyeurism, and cameraless, and consequently the show comes off as a tutorial in the one art form about which mass culture is already sophisticated.
There are high moments courtesy of artists such as Uta Barth, Amir Zaki, Josiah McElheny, Sharon Lockhart, Oliver Boberg, and Nic Nicosia. But the Henry can do more than passably bring collections out of storage. 
