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Is my crotch supernatural? Let me tell you why I ask. A large photograph by Swedish artist Annika von Hausswolff called Self Portrait in the Studio with Flashlight and Pulled Down Pants stars her crotch, dead center, encircled by a halo of light. The halo, reflected on the camera lens, comes from the glaring flashlight she holds in one hand, which is pointed right at you, the viewer. There is plenty of underlying feminist humor in this photograph. But there is just as much menace. The source of the menace is harder to pin down. It might be the artist herself: In the hand not holding the flashlight, she clicks the shutter switch. She controls the whole operation, so if she's under some kind of threat (her eyes are closed either in ecstasy or terror), she's part of its mechanism. What's really eerie is the dark, empty room she's in, with a single light pressing in from her left. Without being theatrical, von Hausswolff has taken us into a scary wilderness, a foreign place, where you're exposed, and where everything you look at seems to be looking back at you.
No less disturbingâthough very different in styleâare the works of two other female Swedish artists, the well-known Nathalie Djurberg and the also fairly established Johanna Billing, currently featured at Howard House in an exhibition curated by Swedish-born gallery manager Sara Callahan, Ask a Banana, Baby: Contemporary Swedish Video and Photography. (The title comes from a mishearing of an ABBA song.) The show raises the question: My goodness, is Sweden okay?
At the very least, it's quite the alluring outpatient, misbehaving gorgeously. Djurberg's Claymation digital videos, which have risen to fame just in the last few years, are full of assaults: assaults on the viewer's presumed decency, puppets assaulting one another, thick strands of breast milk from a lascivious woman assaulting the throats of hungry babies, hungry babies assaulting the breasts of said woman.
For all this, architecture is the real operative behind the scenes of the show. Callahan smartly chose two Djurberg videos that demonstrate her use of architecture as a kind of infected skin or metaphor for infiltrationâapropos, considering Sweden's lurching, anxious transition out of relative isolation and monoculture. Djurberg's Feed All the Hungry Little Children (2007) begins with a brief shot of a disheveled, short-skirted woman walking past a white facade to its tunnel-infested reverse side. The orgylike feeding that follows is a shocking climax, but on repeat viewings, what's just as unnerving are the naked babies swarming from the building's crevices toward the woman, like the ants out of the man's palm in Luis BuĂąuel's 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou. In Djurberg's other video, In Our Own Neighbourhood (2007), a building bleeds. It's a white old-world mansion subjected to ransacking and ruination by thieves, savages, and sadists, all to ominously childlike music by Djurberg's usual collaborator, Hans Berg.
By contrast, von Hausswolff's photographs use unplaceable, anonymous interiors as a force of uneasiness. Billing goes in yet another direction. Her video Look Out! (2003) is in a setting of total banality. Teenagers follow a real-estate agent around, not speaking but looking at almost-finished condos for sale. Nothing happensâagain, there's a dearth of theatricality, except the basic sense you get that these are not actual customersâyet there's a mood of dread and entrapment. The teenagers gravitate immediately toward the condo's seams, its ways outâmirrors, doors, windows, chrome surfaces, toilets. Silently, they add to the ghost of extreme worry that presides over this entire intelligent show.
Jim Riswold: Make-Believe Artist
G. Gibson Gallery
Through Aug 16.
WHEREAS, the Portland artist Jim Riswold was recently revealed to be on Tacoma Art Museum's short list for its next biennial, and WHEREAS, Riswold has had not one, but two solo gallery shows in Seattle in the last year, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that I will now bring my personal hammer down on this artist.
Riswold makes big, glossy, colorful photographs that reach for satire but amount to little more than low-calorie artistic cannibalism. His current show at G. Gibson Gallery attempts to skewer the art world's cult of personalities and money hunger by skewering artists who've done that already, like Warhol, Koons, and Hirst. Riswold is by no means the only artist picking on the remains of pop art's meatiest bone, but he must be made an example of. Selling shallow parodies of artists who have parodied selling by selling profound parodies is hereby no longer allowed.
SMS: A Collection of Multiples
Davidson Galleries
Through Sept 27.
Shit must stop! That was the rallying cry of the SMS Collective. It is not apparent what the shit was, precisely, but the year was 1968, when the world was full of ill-defined effluvia worth getting worked up over.
In that year, the SMS Collective released six folders, each one containing about 10 or 11 works of print art by various artists, in editions of 2,000. Once this was over, the SMS Collectiveâwhich comprised pretty much anyone who stopped by American surrealist William Copley's Lower East Side loft to make a print for the edition and received the universal $100 compensationâceased to exist.
The lasting results include (Davidson Galleries is breaking up one full set and selling each print separately) a naked girl jumping out of a Baby Ruth wrapper sculpture by Mel Ramos, a loop of tape you're instructed to listen to for as long as you can stand by Bruce Nauman, a boat hat by Roy Lichtenstein, a record to spin by Marcel Duchamp, a prescription for "conception control" by critic/dealer Julian Levy, a Mylar model of a storefront by Christo, and plenty more affably unprecious treasures by the still-influential artists of the day, including Joseph Kosuth, Lee Lozano, Bruce Conner, James Lee Byars, Ray Johnson, Yoko Ono, Claes Oldenburg, Meret Oppenheim, H. C. Westermann, and On Kawara.
Much of the art involves instructions. If you buy it, or if you speak very, very kindly to a gallery assistant, you can play with it.
MetaphorM
Suyama Space
Through Aug 22.
Exit the world of play, of puppetry, of any pageantry whatsoever, and enter MetaphorM. It's a series of hanging shapes that fill up Suyama Space. Made of thin metal tubes, the shapes are like drawings in the air. Punctuating the room are weights of various shapes, sizes, and colorsâa spectrum of scattered geometryâsuspended from systems of counterbalancing pulleys. On the walls, summer light reaches in from the high windows and casts shadows of the metal shapes on the walls. Video projections, also on the walls, manipulate the same metal shapes, moving and changing them. The layering of images extends the room into a purely imaginary zone.
The artists are Carolyn Healy (responsible for the sculptural environment) and John Phillips (responsible for video and sound), and they've created a reminder of how bracingly pleasurable abstraction can be, how truly direct and modest, regardless of its modernist ties to holiness and asceticism. The catapulting of lines into shapes, the discovery of the relative weights of objects, the transparency of mechanics and structures, the evasive behavior of light: All these things are ends in themselves. It is, for a few minutes at least, as though there is no world outside the gallery. 
