At James Harris Gallery, Seattle artist Claire Cowie has only a small interior room to herself, but her show, Dead Reckoning, is just plain major. The centerpiece is a grid of paintings on paper. According to the artist’s explanation—Dead Reckoning refers to a navigation system by which movement is calculated based solely on previous positions, generating cumulative distortion—she began with the center panels and worked outward, returning to previous panels to rework. The effect is entropic, like the screw dislocation in the growth of crystals that late (Spiral Jetty) artist Robert Smithson found so enchanting.

This is Cowie’s fifth show at the gallery in a decade. Her imagery is consistent—stark, drippy landscapes populated with trees, animals, and people (sometimes all three combined into hybrid creatures), presented as single views but incorporating shifting scales and perspectives.

In Dead Reckoning, her colors have grown more intense, her patterning more dense, and she’s using collage. The result is exuberant, throbbing. The scenes are like elaborately staged Victorian dollhouses crossed with the busiest and brightest city market in the world, fully stocked.

Subjects sit looking out of windows embedded at an angle inside other windows, each frame the color of a ripe tropical fruit or the deep-hued cover of an antique book. In the center panel, numbered eight, a row house falling off the axis of the earth is bounded by two upright others, one made of brick and sporting proper family portraits on the top floor, the other just a dripping royal-blue silhouette where a home has been excised from the spot. Three shadowy men stand above the buildings in the corner of a frame that hangs in the sky like a giant window; a tree juts up behind them. These are nonspecific places, but they do have systems, implied by flags that connote unknown citizenships, and designs that express a patchwork of unspecified heritages and histories.

The subject matter isn’t overly serious—stony-faced cats fly down from one window, turning over as they go—but the undertones of the events are somehow dark. And by not seeming to take herself too seriously, Cowie surprises you when you slowly realize what a master painter she is. She’s accomplished in so many techniques: applying paint so it’s solid and saturated, dripped, staining the paper, hatch-marking, shadowing. She forces your attention to toggle between the aftereffect of what’s literally happened on the surface (a stain has been made, for instance) and the illusion of three-dimensional space—while also providing collaged elements with striking patterns the eye just wants to caress.

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...

6 replies on “Dislocated Screws”

  1. first of all, do you mean cross hatching or hatch marking as in a form of mathematical notation used in reference to paint handling and technique? Please be clear.
    Claire Cowie is at the head of the local ‘pack of girl artists’ that annoy and offend the sensibilities with their frivolous, neurotic, delicate, and idiosyncratic tendencies in their art, much like a Jane Austin movie. Her mousy scratching of graphic notations filled in with so many “accomplished techniques” from the world of painting is…UGH! Boring and indulgent. She is clearly one of the most overrated artists in the scene which causes one to wonder when you chance upon oneof her whims of a piece here and there… “are they serious?” It figures you would choose to celebrate her ‘mini show’ as the “runaway of the night” show (although possibly not difficult in light of the alternate offerings Thursday) Your use of “exuberant, throbbing”, superlatives is ridiculous in this context, your Smithson reference unbelievable, and abuse of the term ‘master painter’ in regard to her capabilities-foolish. It brings this all to one note, you really DON’T get painting…
    Maybe you should stay on Duchamp’s jockstrap, it seems safer. (see below)

    as seen in CITYARTS:
    January 25, 2011 at 9:52 AM | by Goerge Laden Warhol

    Can’t believe anyone takes Jen Graves seriously. I am not an artist, nor have I been bothered by anyone she has criticized.Every article of hers I have ever read is a combination of snarky meets wannabe academic. She is everything that is wrong with an art critic, and perpetuates redundancy. Everytime I read one of her articles I feel like someone is paraphrasing an art history book, or a modern art magazine from the early 1970’s. Get off Marcel Duchamps jock already. World War 1 has long since been over, and Dadaism is old and worn out at this point. Maybe not if you sit in your closet sobbing about how meaningless the world is cutting yourself I guess.People who have trailer park names like “Jen” and look like Blossom, should not be taken seriously by the art world. Praise for another art instillation or performace art piece? For fucks sake, I am going to sit in a dark closet listening to goth music and cut myself if I have to here about anymore of that crap.I never hear her discuss symbolism, composition, or any other way an artist uses the mechanics of art to accomplish the task at hand. Her opinions to me are boring and cliche. She seems like someone that wishes they were part of the Warhol scene in New York, or even worse, someone who tries to re-create it.Alexander Calder write ups? Good grief what next a Jackson Pollock rocks the art world article?Jen Graves the year is 2011. If the art world ever comes to an end, I will move into the art world of Jen Graves and be safe for another 50 years.

  5. I finally went down to see the show. Really wonderful work, I haven’t been a big fan of her work in the past, but I think it is one of her best pieces and some of the most interesting work I have seen around Seattle in quite some time. I think Jen’s was a brief but thoughtful review.. — And to the Stoeszian fucktards that took some pot shots above, I don’t think YOU get painting. Rather than paying attention to details, and perhaps trying to discover what the artist is trying to convey, you prefer finding superficial qualities that annoy you and then make some smart ass comment. Try exercising critical/imaginative thinking for a change. Looking at art is about paying attention and withholding judgement for a time, essential tools for anything in life really.

    But I digress. Cowie’s centerpiece work titled “Dead reckoning” creates the effect of looking out of a window pane and joining the onlookers within the piece. The entirety of the landscape fits together in a disjointed way, oscillating between interior and exterior spaces full of people and portraits, myths and animals. Some of the dwellings are collapsing and rotting, others dissolve like a ice cube, others are hidden behind a grate of baroque filigree. It didn’t seem to be about a hundred different ways to deftly handle paint but rather there was a point to the disparate places and textures pulling on one another. To me, the whole thing is about dealing with apathy and a sense of helplessness. One home burns wood while a home on another plane burns down…How do we digest the realities of the world? How do you still find some sense of peace? what do you make for the world to digest?

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