In Art News

Sometimes a Seattle artist just needs to go to Tacoma. Things are
wound too tightly in Seattle, too formal, everybody watching. In
Tacoma, given a supportive curator, anything might happen. Last
week, the supportive curator of Kittredge Gallery at the University of
Puget Sound, Carol Adelman, worked quietly on her computer while
Seattle artist Jeffry Mitchell made a royal mess of the place.

It was Wednesday afternoon before a Thursday-morning opening, and
Mitchell was still at his cluttered craft tables, occasionally running
outside to dash off a spray-painted skull reminiscent of Warhol’s late
silk screens. Several distinct installations could be detected across
the low-ceilinged vista of this sprawl: strings of paper skulls flying
out from a frame on the wall, a kiosk of silk screens advertising an
upcoming project by Seattle artist Dan Webb that involves a gnome
watering plants, an old bookshelf turned into a totemish stack of
cut-paper woodland scenes, a Picasso bull head on a stick body with red
lightbulbs for balls, a cardboard owl-bat casting a menacing
shadow on a sheet of plastic cut in the general manner of Hannibal
Lecter’s strung-up prison victim (or possibly a chicken), and, finally,
lanterns of various sorts. It’s a party.

The fact that some installations were unfinished was immaterial:
Even the completed ones lack finish in a vital way. The show is half
substance and half shadow. Everything is loose and contingent and
humble and exhilarated. Climbing up one corner is a skull shadow the
size of a small car but somehow also faint and missable.

The show is sponsored, adorably, by the campus Sustainability
Advisory Committee. All the works but one are new, but the
materials are recycled (from campus bins or Mitchell’s own work), and
creative moves are inventively reworked, too, from Warhol, Picasso,
Webb, Jason Rhoades (all those lights and cords), Cady Noland, Ree
Morton. Mitchell has never been stingy about shout-outs. His promotion
of Webb’s as-yet-unveiled public-art gnome—the kiosk even
reads “DAN WEBB” across the bottom—is unadulterated
admiration. (The two artists are in no manner of cahoots.)

Years ago, Mitchell yawped similarly in this same gallery for a show
curated by the supportive Greg Bell and called Life. The new
show, Some Things and Their Shadows, has the added bonus of an
exquisite adjoining show of 20th-century Mexican political prints by
Arturo Garcia Bustos and Rina Lazo: Diego Rivera’s great
wood-block-printed defiance (and chin), women with heads down in
the prison shower (hung next to Lazo’s own jailing papers for her crime
of supporting the 1968 student movement). Both shows have the same
spirit of fuck-yeah liberation. Pump fist.

It is high time that an exhibition of macho glass art had a weight
bench in the corner. Sharing the room with glass pieces on pedestals at
Tacoma’s Helm Gallery is a Weider 245 Training System. Artists Eli
Hansen and Joey Piecuch, in Truths We Forgot to Lie About, have
titled this ready-made If I Had to Do It Over Again, I’d Rather Be
Feared Than Loved, quoting a criminal who regretted not having
scared his girlfriend off ratting him out. Knowing how to mock well is
another adolescent-guy trick; Hansen and Piecuch employ it to sly
effect.

If you add enough clichés together, do you get a whole
truth? Hansen and Piecuch, like the proverbial Northwest “mystics,”
scoured the local landscape for this exhibition. It wasn’t a spiritual
search—they drove around retrieving Northwesty stuff: Puget Sound
water; brick from the homes of Frances Farmer, Ted Bundy, and Kurt
Cobain; radioactive Hanford soil; pea-sized pink salmon eggs; beard
hair (both men are quite hairy); soil from a Green River Killer dump
site in Kent; hellebore flowers from Chief Sealth’s grave. These
generic but beloved Northwest elements are combined, suspended, and
preserved with high-strength alcohol in (too precious) handblown glass
bottles. Their labels detail the ingredients, a borrowing of Dario
Robleto’s alchemical process.

But Robleto is sober; Piecuch (background in botany and chemistry)
and Hansen (a glassblower) are not. The underlying motif of
Truths is altering consciousness, whether by drink, drugs, or
burrowing in the minds of icons.

The glass pieces sharing the front room with the weight machine are
fermenting jars with pouches of peaches floating on sugar water.
Five mason jars of clear liquor—moonshine they made—are
lined up on a table like the identical black boxes, with illegal drugs
sealed inside, by Seattle artist Jack Daws. Two lusciously filthy
cheap-print photographs of their basement cooking setup (very meth
lab) hang on the wall, encased in thin layers of slightly
obscuring, slightly glamorizing bubbly clear resin.

At the opening, while everyone else got drunk on their liquor, they
didn’t drink any, and when they said they’d meet everybody at the bar
later, they never showed up. Truths We Forgot to Lie About isn’t
either an ironic depiction of a tourist trap or an outpouring of
identifications from two native Northwesterners: It’s both.