Conceptual concerns in crafts? It's not an odd combination in this city, where Josiah McElheny achieved fame by using blown-glass -- the economic triumph and aesthetic embarrassment of Seattle's art scene -- to explore the history of art. Mitchell came to craft through art, not the other way around, and the histories of craft and high art flow through his work, sometimes setting up apparent contradictions -- like this one: Mitchell is a decorative artist who is attracted to minimalism. That's a hard-to-resolve tension, though Mitchell's recent work finesses it in a manner that appears effortless, almost off-the-cuff. One part of Mitchell's aesthetic makeup is about detail, another part -- a personal aesthetic and fast-paced working method -- gives his work a charmingly slapdash quality. Minimalism and its various modern-day offshoots tend to discard both detail and evidence of the artist's hand, and generally involve a smooth finish, the sense of an ideal perfectly transmuted into a physical object -- which typically leaves little room for slapdash.
Mitchell has been exploring this apparent contradiction since his 1997 show The Tomb of Ree Morton, when he showed sculptures, watercolors, and prints at Elliott Brown. One small plaster piece, Turtle on Its Back, seemed to mark a repudiation of the endearing little animals that are a mainstay of Mitchell's work. The turtle, as the title indicates, was upended, its flat belly lined in pink watercolor stripes -- a reference to the work of stripe-painter Sean Scully, whose work Mitchell follows with interest. Did Mitchell want to kill off his trademark animals to allow closer engagement with minimalist art issues?
Recent shows have come up with combinations that are less fatal in their suggestions about Mitchell's work. At Roy McMakin's Domestic Furniture, Mitchell showed a grab bag of ceramic and plastic sculptures -- Chinese Fu dogs, elephants, and such -- atop McMakin's sleek, cool, unadorned furniture. And currently at the Seattle Art Museum, Mitchell's work appears atop a Chinese cabinet in a group show examining Asian influences in the work of Northwest artists. These two installations inspired the main body of work in the current show, which displays glazed ceramic sculpture on cast plaster tables. The tables draw their forms loosely from Chinese cabinetry, but are abstracted in white plaster and crudely assembled from flat-poured slabs with cut-outs, held together with loops of twine. Here in these tables are most of Mitchell's main themes -- the slapdash, the abstract, the decorative, the useful (Mitchell's sculptures often take the form of utilitarian objects: lamps, bookends, vases).
The tables apparently satisfied Mitchell's interest in minimalism, freeing him to do the kind of profusely decorative art he excels at. He covers the tops of his tables with mini-bestiaries: a council of penguins, a pair of rhinoceroses, an Edenic spring garden of kissing bears, a Chinese garden of coral-like forms being navigated by a turtle and a Babar-like elephant, a trio of "Pride Ponies" that could certainly improve Seattle's drab yearly parade, and ranks of bunnies and trumpeting elephants standing on their hind legs in a piece titled Hip Hop Hurray.
Mitchell's ease with cute ideas that in other hands could be cloying is also displayed in a piece consisting of 3-D letters made of thick paper. These letters, as appropriate in a child's room as they are in this gallery, spell out A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-L-O-V-E-U. This easy emotional generosity contrasts with the central piece in his last Elliott Brown show, which was titled Hello, I'm Sorry. It's great to see evidence of Mitchell's new confidence in his work, which touches all his conceptual bases, is drunk with the joy of creation, and opens up new routes instead of suggesting possible creative dead-ends.
