Through Jan 25 (closed Dec 22-Jan 1).

Allen Moe
Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, 1203 E Lauridsen Blvd, Port Angeles, 360-417-4590.

Through Jan 12.

Some years ago, I was held conversational hostage by a young man who claimed to be a shaman. He was certain that at some point all the world's energy was going to ball up and collide, and he would be one of the few people able to negotiate the spiritual collapse that would follow. Also, he could travel through time. At least one of us, I think, was stoned.

Shamanism in art is a concept I've approached with skepticism, because, like so many second-generation ideas, it has become perverted beyond recognition. The original, in this case, was Joseph Beuys, the German installation/performance artist. For Beuys, art had less to do with intellect or aesthetics than with the transformation these things made possible. He made amazing work under this rubric, but it allowed a lot of crap to sidle in on the assumption that every artist is a shaman; work that insists on this connection tends to be dead rather than invigorating, narrowly confined and self-indulgent instead of intricately philosophical.

There's also a sanctimoniousness that often accompanies it, which is why Allen Moe's Life Vessels are such a surprise (you have to drive to Port Angeles to see them, so they also have the air of a reward). They are simple black pots adorned with the organs, skin, and bones of animals that have died unnatural deaths. Large pots covered with cow stomachs look like contour maps, or shoals of shifting sands seen from above. Hundreds of rock crab shells assembled under translucent, resinlike deerskin cause the object nearly to burst with implied life, bringing to mind Walter Benjamin's dictum that the collector of objects struggles against dispersion. What look like lovely gilded nubs of Venetian glass are actually salmon eyes.

These are not useful pots. Vessels are usually built to carry necessary elements; these are built to bear some kind of witness to the dead creatures they wear. But they're respectful and spiritual, in a way that is "born of clear-eyed confrontations with mortality" (and this is from the wall text; I can't say it any better).

Moe is a former ranger and wildlife biologist, so encounters with dead animals can't be anything but everyday for him, but it's something we think about so little, we who buy our chicken on little diapered trays. He gathers his materials not only from forest roads but from supermarkets: chicken-foot skin from a Food Pavilion; smelt from an Anacortes Safeway; the cow stomachs from a local butcher. They are crazy, at times strong-smelling, and powerful in a very weird way, vacillating between decorative object and lesion that needs healing.

It's worth pointing out that the rift between different realities is one traditionally healed by shamans, with powerful objects of their own making.

John Feodorov's new work is a different matter, harder to penetrate. The paintings feature large, floating, disembodied heads, often with things coming out of their mouths (bubbles, swords, other heads), and there are usually animals present: a whispering bird, a dog in a protective cone-collar, a rabbit poised for confrontation. I spent some time in front of these works, trying to read them like Renaissance allegories, looking for symbols, signs of orthodoxy, directions from above. In the end, though, I was unable to derive real meaning from them--not, I think, because I was being stubbornly European, but helplessly so.

But this seems appropriate, since Feodorov's territory is cultural clash and resolution, the possibility of reconciling contradictions in his own pedigree (Navajo, Russian, Jehovah's Witness). His paintings may or may not bridge the gap, but his sculpture clearly does, as with several variations on the child's game "Operation" that are turned into ritualistic healing objects--a throwaway reference in one culture misunderstood/transformed by another, à la The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Whether these objects actually heal is grist for another conversation about alternate realities, one that might poke hard at what art is actually good for, and one in which the artist-as-shaman might turn out to be a less ridiculous concept than I had originally assumed.