In the last year, Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo—working as Lead Pencil Studio—have become the emerging Seattle artists to watch. Not just the ones who are fashionable, but the ones who seem to have that elusive quality: staying power. It can come in many forms, but its source is always depth.
They've risen steadily since their breakthrough installation at Suyama Space in 2004, curated by Beth Sellars. Henry Art Gallery curator Liz Brown picked them for a coveted solo show in 2005, and the clever, burgeoning dealer Scott Lawrimore chose them as his most trusted advisers as he planned his gallery. Lead Pencil Studio found and designed the playfully elegant Lawrimore Project space, which opened a year ago and has provided something no other gallery in Seattle can come close to: a built-in sort of wry delight. Using funds from Creative Capital, LPS pulled off the major Maryhill Double installation last summer—a double of the isolated Maryhill Museum of Art across the Columbia River Gorge from the museum, made of blue construction netting and scaffolding. After that, few could be surprised that the pair won the Rome Prize last month. (They won a 2006 Stranger Genius Award, too.) Han and Mihalyo are among the most promising artists in the country.
Linear Plenum at Suyama Space was, by all accounts (I wasn't there), a landmark achievement for the artists, as was Maryhill Double (I can wholeheartedly testify to that). Now they're having their first-ever major gallery survey, at Lawrimore, and this show is an incremental step forward, not a quantum leap. It is unfair to expect every show to be a quantum leap, but from artists this good, it's hard not to have the craving.
The greatest rush comes just inside the door, in a brand-new installation of two reflective black "windows" hung high on the wall of the gallery with light-blue strings that stretch to steel plates fixed on the floor as though the strings were beams of light coming through the windows and falling on the floor. The steel plates are painted gray so as to look like pools of light.
The title is Arrival at 2AM, referring to the quality of light that would appear from windows of that precise height at that precise time at a particular moment in the monthly lunar cycle. We have to trust the artists that this is accurate, but why would we? They've used precision to fake everything else. They've hung arched windows that look like they belong on castles, mimicked the black night with dark mirrored glass, and then replicated a light that never actually passed through this building to a puddle on the floor that's actually sturdy metal screwed into the concrete.
I never thought I'd see fairy-tale minimalism. But this is what Han and Mihalyo do in all their work: stage a never-ending debate between the standardized-industrial and individual-totemic lives of built environments and their parts (columns, corners, windows, scaffoldings, foundations, rebar; in fact, I'd love to see them actually work in rebar).
Their medium is ethereality, as though they're both impressed by and a little skeptical of the act of putting any solid thing in space at all. There's both sweetness and melancholy to this line of inquiry. And everything they make is a drawing, even the things that aren't. (For instance, the choice to display a small welded-wire sculpture of a dead power-transmission tower lying on its back on a piece of paper instead of a pedestal is exquisite.) Each object they make seems to have an ongoing life that we are catching at some point in its process of being imagined, being built, being experienced, and being forgotten or destroyed. Such are the dreams of architects.
In 4 Corners (2007), a room within the gallery room is lightly outlined in four meshy welded-wire "corners" hanging from the ceiling. Something about this installation was off for me; at one point, I found myself with one foot inside the implied "room" and one foot out, and I mourned a little that I felt nothing about it. I was more drawn to another installation, 6 Columns (2006), in which cylinders made of hanging filaments dangle almost all the way to the floor, running in a line that strays from the ceiling's long lighting fixture, drawing the architecture and the lighting into a soft, room-wide game.
The actual drawings of Lead Pencil Studio are heavenly. A column suspended over a shallow hole stretches toward an empty sky and is unfinished at the top, where shaded angular planes of rebar and cement resemble the fractious simultaneity of futurist painting. In a sumi painting from 2003 of a river crossing, mysterious white objects like whited-out buildings stick out from the rocks, trees, and water. The imagery is familiar, but the forces that shape these scenes are always alien and unseen.
The central problem of the show is that Maryhill Double is represented in almost every room. While the artists, clearly aware of the possibility of turning a past work into a tired cliché, made documentation itself the subject in their varied approaches to the Double in photography and video, the result is still repetitive. Because the Double was torn down at the end of last summer, the best of the Double doubles function the same way as the other works, hovering on a continuum between being and not being. Take the big, blurry photograph, for instance, in which the Double sparkles slightly, like something recently unburied.
The prospect of a living artwork gets raised directly in Charged Column (2006). It is a column of thread hung from the ceiling that puffs out with static electricity in the shape of a chandelier. Like the Minus Space installation at the Henry in 2005, this work reacts to your electric charge as you pass by. I wanted to touch it, but worried about touching it too much. Would I wear down the static electricity, the magic? Was it right to touch the art rather than to let the art touch me? What a simple, complex thing. 
