The Invasion of Elar

Just over a year ago, the names Eli Hansen and Oscar
Tuazon
were on the lips of exactly nobody. Today, there may as well be a
banner over the entrance to Seattle with “ELI AND OSCAR” emblazoned on
it. This city is in the throes of Eli and Oscar mania. Because they are
the hottest couple out there, let’s call them Elar. The two young
brothers—their last names are different because Oscar took his
ex-wife’s exotic name—grew up in Indianola on the Kitsap
Peninsula, but they have never showed in Seattle before. If they were
overlooked before, now they risk being overexposed. They’re currently
showing in no less than four prestigious spots: at the
commercial gallery Howard House, in a group show at the private
collection space Western Bridge, and on the third and fourth
floors at Seattle Art Museum, in two distinct exhibitions. Where is the
mayor? We need the keys to the city!

The ascension of Elar begins probably in early 2007, when writer
Matthew Stadler recommends them to Western Bridge director Eric
Fredericksen, who recommends them to SAM curator Michael Darling, who
gets one of their works for the museum’s permanent collection and who
sits on the Betty Bowen Award committee, which selects Tuazon as its
2007 winner. The commercial galleries jump, and Howard House lands the
deal. Everyone is so excited that they mount all their shows at
once.

I’ve never heard of such a confluence of events in this city for an
artist just out of the gate. Why them and why now?

Before getting to that, let’s consider what’s on view. Exterior
gallery windows covered in diagonal stripes of “solar” black acrylic
paint. Homemade tattoo guns powered by parts from a Walkman and a toy
fire truck. A small, sad-looking found note calling for broad “citizen
action.” A wall of handblown glass “bricks” shaped like liquor bottles.
A mean-looking ax honed to a supersharp edge. A length of charred wood.
A column made of stacked brown beer bottles the artists say will
support 17,000 pounds without breaking. Photographs of geodesic domes
in Poulsbo and Indianola, folded so that the photograph has a faceted
surface similar to the one pictured. A rhomba icosa dodecahedron, a
polyhedron that has 32 faces and 60 edges and looks like a trippy
crystal, set on a tinted-glass table that looks like the cocaine has
been brushed off it in a hurry. A mirrored structural truss meant to
double as a solar cooker. A grainy Super 8 of a teenaged Tuazon
tattooing his own neck with the number of frames he counted on a Super
8 film roll (1,380). The alternative alphabet of a libertarian-hippie
group started in Oregon that preached total detachment from society,
whose slogan was “Appear normal,
or don’t appear.”

Are you getting the idea? Their art is eco-macho. It taps into that
old and apparently endlessly rich metaphor of the Northwest as a place
rooted in the interpenetration between the urban and the rural, a place
that’s both somehow ahead of the mainstream and off the grid. The idea
has been cultivated by Northwest artists and writers from time
immemorial. Just to name a few recent examples: Charlie Krafft, with
his Mystic Sons of Morris Graves crew and his weapon ceramics (Krafft
was also the “mayor” of Fishtown, the 1970s artist colony in abandoned
fishing shacks on the banks of the Skagit River, which Hansen and
Tuazon feature in one of their folded photographs); Gretchen Bennett,
with her Native American blankets, street stickers in the form of Mount
Rainier, and colored-pencil adaptations of Kurt Cobain on YouTube (not
to mention the Aberdeen native himself); Claude Zervas, with his Eva
Hesse–like Northwest rivers and passages made in thin, white
cold-cathode fluorescents with their dangling wires; Susan Robb, with
her both hopeful and dark insistence on humans as animals. This is the
current Northwest School. Hansen and Tuazon are a good addition to it,
but they are no better than these artists, four shows or not. (They
also just happen to benefit from champions who, like them, have
backgrounds in and are fascinated by architecture.)

That does not mean that their work is an act. As much as it is
grounded in the land, feminist, and performance art of the decade in
which they were born (the ’70s) as well as in the atomized assemblage
of currently fashionable sculpture, it hits fresh notes, too, and it
represents a clearly authentic and quite personal relationship between
the artists and the landscape of this region. What Krafft has—a
curmudgeonly sense of the real—so do Hansen and Tuazon.

Their installation at SAM, a cleverly improvised “shelter,”
establishes them again as urban mountain men. The installation refers
to a rudimentary shelter they actually built in the snowy woods on a
remote island north of Kodiak, Alaska. Provided as documentary evidence
(and functioning also as a
double-dog-dare-you tourist brochure)
is a modest little (nonfolded) photograph of the bare-bones shelter in
Alaska. The implication is that you can go there and visit, and at the
same time the rickety appearance and ridiculously remote location seem
inherently poised to question the
sanity of anyone making the
trip.

Elar presents something between portraiture of social detachment and
fantasy for aspiring outsiders. By leaving their works messy with duct
tape, epoxy, and other evidence of boyish making, they bring together
the separate traditions of the architect/designer and the builder.
(They also show up at places, like their artist’s talk, with literal
dirt on their hands, bringing the material to the immaterial.)

Their best works are both worldly and innocent, like Fortune
Teller, a cheaply constructed tabletop diorama that contains at
its center a hidden glass egg visible only in glowing reflections along
the back of the box. It’s good for nothing but a vision, like the
failed architectural projects the artists love, which provide a view
forward if not a way.

jgraves@thestranger.com