A Spectral Glimpse
Platform Gallery
Through Dec 1.
The word “glimpse” is onomatopoetic: a couple of consonants not
quite there, and then a sizzling disappearance. It radiates total
possibility, like A Spectral Glimpse, independent curator Jim
O’Donnell’s first show at Platform Gallery, with work by artists from
Seattle, L.A., Colombia, New York, and Chicago.
From cheap colored frames on the wall, more wall oozes forth in
beams of white foam core coated in plaster. They reach out like
abstract sculptures emanating from the architecture—as if the
frames were placed in hot spots where the building’s inner impulses
could escape.
These are by Bari Ziperstein, who built a colony of the white
constructions in her Spanish-style apartment (she lived among them for
three months) and had the apartment photographed in the style of a
glossy home magazine. These scenes with ghostly shapes issuing from her
vase or chair or chandelier are unnerving but also endearingly absurd
and funny, like early feminist collages or the Décor
Project interventions in other people’s homes by the artists
Hadley + Maxwell.
Ghosts also appear in Leyla Cárdenas’s photographs, of city
buildings torn away from scarred walls. They’re paired with bits of
paint scraped from the demolished buildings, pressed between glass like
archaeological finds.
What’s glimpsed hints at what can never be photographed (the feel of
the music, the air and light of the forest) in Lucy Pullen’s
photographs of a recording studio streaked with multicolored lights,
and Adam Ekberg’s flaring rings of the sun captured by a camera lens.
Small surrealistic drawings by David Dupuis represent something
unavailable in any other form: a daydreaming consciousness, rendered
with exquisite precision yet naiveté. His drawing style has been
compared to Louise Bourgeois’s, another artist who uses recurring eyes;
the bare, exotic environments with their echoing shapes also bring to
mind Martin Ramirez.
Ariana Page Russell took close-up photographs of her pink, porous,
and hairy skin, turned them into fan-shaped temporary tattoos, then
applied them to her skin and peeled them off. She attached a scaly
section of the remains, like a turtle’s shell, between a wall and a
window: the translucent peels are on the window, and the backings are
on the wall. So many tiny glimpses are the opposite of cumulative; the
shell is cracking and falling away.
On the gallery floor is Brad Biancardi’s scale drawing of the
underside of his first car, a 1983 Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue.
Beams of color drawn in chalk emanate from the guts of the car, but
they are busy disappearing as people walk on them. Each person carries
away a colored shoe sole and leaves colored footprints on the sidewalk.
Biancardi’s piece can only be glimpsed briefly, which is sadly apt. The
talented painter is moving from Seattle to Chicago later this month.
JEN GRAVES
Syndicalism:
The Art of Tend & Befriend
Washington State Convention & Trade Center
Through Dec 31.
Syndicalism, by definition, is a political and economic theory
advocating action through party organization to create socialism.
Historically, such organization has unfolded through uprising and
protest, not exempting force or violence. In Syndicalism at
the Washington State Convention & Trade Center, however, art
presents group movement through an alternative “tend-or-befriend”
model. The curators, Alice Dubiel and Deborah F. Lawrence, explain that
the “need to overcome isolation and alienation stimulates the forming
of connections, making individuals less vulnerable.”
Dubiel and Lawrence have assembled a collection of vulnerable
works—although the assumed curatorial intent is the presentation
of individual artists as representative of a syndicated group of
thinkers or doers. The works are vulnerable because, like Mar Goman’s
tiny compendiums, The Book of Yes and The Book of No,
they represent the sincere use of corny, yet demonstrably true
sentiments. Or as with Andrea Giaier’s Lunar Hand Project, an
international photographic survey of several dozen hands wearing the
same ring, they are vulnerable because so many just absolutely nice and
decent people are tied up in the project.
Dubiel and Lawrence contribute their own work to the show, and not
surprisingly, these are some of the most didactic pieces, the
too-excessively-on-theme. Both artists present busy, layered images
that act as vehicles for emotional texts and transparent fables about
feelings
and sweet potatoes. Standing in front of them, my
cynicism revolted and then my Protestant guilt set in.
Highlights include Polly Purvis’s Two Dummies, the most
casual and homey of her images of puppets posed and photographed as
people, and John Feodorov’s blown-up, black-and-white photographs of
his ancestors layered with simple, short slogans stolen from ad
campaigns for Native American–themed collectibles.
Anna Callahan’s audio library of oral histories recorded in Dublin
has smart, sometimes funny, and sometimes alarming
titles—They Threw Him off the Roof Because He Had a Colored
Girlfriend—but the listening experience, like this entire
show, feels like NPR and tea on a Saturday morning. ABIGAIL GUAY
Gaylen Hansen:
Three Decades of Painting
Seattle Art Museum
Through Jan 6.
Given the number of shows in Seattle right now devoted to the
ephemeral (Insubstantial Pageant Faded at Western Bridge), the
missing (Susie J. Lee: Refrain at Lawrimore Project), and the
hidden (A Spectral Glimpse at Platform Gallery), Gaylen
Hansen’s irrepressible retrospective of 30 years of painting is gooey
with presence.
Hansen is 85 years old, lives in Eastern Washington, and describes
himself as having grown up in the “horse age.” His paintings have been
categorized as neoexpressionist and endlessly compared with Philip
Guston, but they are much more varied and methodical than that makes
them sound. One of his favorites, 12 Balls from 2003, is a
pink ground, slightly raked, with 12 orange-red and mucky green balls
that look like they’ve come to rest, by chance, in an unruly grouping.
The color is so inviting that despite the banal subject matter, you
become hooked, and then you begin to notice patterns—those three
line up to form a vertical, there’s a diagonal. Some of the balls are
painted with more finish than the others. It’s a study in how to make a
painting: by design or by making it up as you go along? (Mound of
Grasshoppers, an update on Monet’s haystacks, is another.)
But the subject matter of most of the pictures is far less formal.
They include crickets and tulips and fish and buffalo and a recurring,
roughly drawn bearded character named Kernal Bentleg (Hansen’s alter
ego for years). The surfaces are rather smooth, but seem thick and warm
and inviting. (The paintings are also not framed but instead humbly
stapled to the wall.)
Hansen’s sense of humor is absurdist, like Gary Larson’s, his former
student. Hansen’s idea of a still life is a fish, a tulip, and a bison
all set on their heads in a row on a kitchen table. In Kernal with
Fire & Wolves (1984), smoke from a meat-roasting campfire
blazes past the Kernal toward a pack of giant yellow-eyed wolves
towering behind him. Is the Kernal as oblivious as he looks about
what’s coming? It’s impossible to believe that he won’t find a way out
of this predicament to ride another day. JEN GRAVES
