Am I imagining that the trees at Cal Anderson Park are changing color? Probably. This is my favorite time of year, and I will fake it if I have to. This week's art walk marks the official resetting of the annual art clock, when all the gallerists put on their knee socks and plaid skirts and try to look smart with new shows. "R U Ready to Rumble!?!" is how the New York blogger Edward Winkleman put it, and while the lineup in Seattle isn't as full of risky surprises as Chelsea—we have had a risky, surprising summer with outstanding shows at Bumbershoot (curator Yoko Ott, wherever you are, somebody should give you a bottle of champagne and the day off today) and Lawrimore Project (Scott, may you sell something big today)—but the shows opening here this month are many and solid.
I can't wait to dunk myself in a roomful of Jaq Chartier's fugitive abstract paintings at Platform, first of all. In her drawn-out process, she makes stains by performing chance-based experiments on inky-bright acrylic and spray-paint marks on wood panel. For an idea, watch Sun Test on www.platformgallery.com, a time-lapse movie of a year in the life of a painting that transforms before your eyes from a series of purple fingers of paint dominating a white background to a series of reddish marks that look to have receded both down the panel vertically and back into imaginary space.
Patrick Holderfield is an artist whose last solo exhibition at James Harris Gallery in 2004 referenced Gericault's The Raft of Medusa in an installation of two large sculptures interspersed with drawings, and his new show, Pilgrim, is similar in its components. Holderfield is an amazing conjurer of the explosive potential of destruction. His works often look chaotic, but they are tightly controlled, intensely charged, and deserving of a sort of hypnotic attention, like a film.
Katrina-land at G. Gibson Gallery is a group exhibition of photographs of New Orleans (artists include the affecting Chris Jordan), but that aside, this month is all about solo shows: the mischievous jeweler Jana Brevick at SOIL; intriguing installation artist Eric Eley (he got his MFA at UW last year) at the Lee Center for the Arts; photographer Chris Engman's debut at Greg Kucera; and, opening next week at BLVD, David Choe, the San Jose—based graphic novelist who finances his work and travels by thieving. "One day," he tells Wikipedia, "when people stop buying my paintings, quit wearing my T-shirts, I can still rob your fucking house."
There's a household name in the solo show at Howard House—Ryman—but this is Will Ryman, the figurative-sculptor son of the lifetime painter of whiteness, Robert Ryman, and the equally serious painter/sculptor of steel wall works, Merrill Wagner. Ryman's New York gallery, Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, calls the figures theatrical "anthropoids" that reveal the influence of his decade spent as a playwright. Theater? Figures? What can the breakfast table at the Ryman/Wagner house be like?
