Gabriel Jesiolowski's work was brand new to me when I came across it a few weeks ago at the opening of In Search of Conjunctions at The Alice—and suddenly, tomorrow is the last day of the show already, and I want to know more, but first, I'm just going to tell you what I know so you can go to see it yourself (and then maybe visit the artist's web site here).

I kept wandering back over to Jesiolowski's installation that night. It's made of chips of laminate dangling from construction nails on the wall like a deconstructed whole now exploded into a postorgasmic scatter of nodes. Expansive. But specific. Modest but its own weather system. I kept falling for it, over and over.

There are five artists in Search—Demian DinéYazhi’, Kerry Downey, Jesiolowski, Ellen Lesperance and Sara Osebold—and several works that kept on my mind after I left. I dove into Downey's videos after not having been able to hear the sound at the opening; I've written about Lesperance's work before and am curious about what I read as a renewed anger, a swerve away from indirectness or abstraction, in the work that's at the Alice. Old slide-based geography lessons might have been more helpful to the entire species had Demian DinéYazhi' taught them. One of his slides: "THIS LAND: IS NOT YOUR LAND WAS NOT YOUR LAND WILL NEVER BE YOUR LAND." And one of Osebold's drawings seems to me the perfect vulvination of a Frank Stella, although that's almost an insult to it, since the last thing it asks for is to describe a modernist male reference in the center of its universe. It is its own alpha and omega.

There are more images of Jesiolowski's installation, and Lisa Mellinger's visions at Project Diana (adjacent to The Alice), on the jump.

Outside The Alice, in the hallway, is a dedicated area called Project Diana, and it's meant to be a place where artists can do things they otherwise have been afraid to do, or haven't tried before. It's always a good stop. This month's artist is Tacoma's Lisa Mellinger, who provided a large painting that's a view of a tree something like this one below, and beneath it on the floor, a painting of a sandy beach as if you were looking down on it—a welcome mat to your relaxation, during which you get the Pacific Northwest fantasy of water and forest at once.