The Seattle art world is a nice place to be. Sharks and
dickishness are at a minimum. Artists know and support each other.
They visit each other’s studios, go to each other’s openings, have
dinners, collaborate. This is a good thing.
Meanwhile, four good and likable leading Seattle artists make an art
show together in the kindest and most loving of spirits, and all
I can think is, it’s just okay. This is not a nice thing to say.
The show in question is From Whence the Rainbow Came (a
joke for grammarians, since it means “from from where”); the
artists are Claude Zervas, Dan Webb, Jeffry Mitchell, and Joe Park; and
the show is at Ambach & Rice Gallery.
This is a power quartet, and I can’t figure out why they do not
quite rock the joint (especially compared to, say, Second
Peoples, an electric show of four other Seattle artists at Helm
Gallery earlier this year). I certainly don’t want to warn anyone off:
See this show. These artists have never exhibited together
before, every one of them is important to the city, and the art is
fine, with some better-than-fine mixed in.
Above the bar: Webb’s patchworked yet perfectly continuous wood
carving of two kneeling figures under a blanket, emphasizing the
eternal tension between surface and center; Zervas’s pile of burly wood
scraps that is actually made of frail photographs; Park’s
high-modernist refraction obsession applied to thrift-store landscapes
(not the paintings in direct conversation with art history, but those
instead that impose Park’s super-gloss skills on soft-bellied
nightingales and snowy cabin idylls; Ann Lislegaard’s Crystal
World animation was a recent influence).
None of these artists is at his best here—Mitchell comes
across as a little thin, which is a trick, since he’s anything
but—and somehow there is less frisson in the room than there
should be. Still, it is striking to consider each of these men in the
context of what arises as a common concern: the two-sided coin of
breakdown and transformation, vulnerability and change. Maybe that
is in some way related to what Park meant when he framed a connection
between the artists in an interview about the show with artist/blogger
Joey Veltkamp: “I see gay,” Park said. “I see our relationship to the
gay.” (Only Mitchell is gay.) This is the kind of thinking that might
lead to a less lifeless show. 
Maybe the gallery active Seattle artists need to look to the friends they have not met. I am an artist, with great credentials and qualifications, and I say, it is not easy to meet the ‘right’ art friends that as you state, “show together in the kindest and most loving of spirits.”
In our current state of mind, there is just not enough space.
itsucksbutyoushouldgoseeit: the article on leo was well done. this article was retarded…the show is much better than she gives credit. Jeffrey Mitchell’s Kountry Kitchen hutch was a fine sculpture: half E.T. half Wall-e. Wide eyed and pure as a snowflake with a giant goey gourd for a heart. a bumpkin that just fell off the turnip wagon. joe park’s thrift store and paint-by-numbers works have been done before, but i like the futuristic worms wiggling their way in. Dan web’s knight’s armor, which was once slumping and made from quickfix ductape,now stands erect as the world’s largest rawhide chew toy (a yappy little dog came into the gallery and was very confused). claude’s transmogrified wood planks are his best approach so far, especially when they bend like rubber and become married (or copulate)with a real stump. and the wooden box with a flickering eye in a knothole seemed like an infinite window leading to every place at once.
everything in this show is a veneer on a veneer. from where it came, or to where it’s going? nice postcard fellers.
The show was good but the lay-out?
There was a lack of cohesion to the exhibition as a whole. I saw some interesting pairings like Joe’s fractured found paintings and Claude bending the “beams” of wood – but even that’s a stretch.
The commonality is that they are all good individual works?
It’s good to see you are impartial here – I thought you might be biased after your genius crowning. Your evaluation of the show is dead on – and the Mitchell piece was the weakest link overall.
the jeffry mitchell piece was great! The knights armor didnt make sense to me. the show lacked some cohesion but it was still more exciting than anything i have seen in quite some time.