The Men Who Knew Too Much

On the surface—in fact, especially on the surface—two
young Seattle artists, Adam Satushek and Eric Elliott, have nothing in
common. Satushek makes big, bright, smooth, ultraclear photographs.
Elliott makes thick little gray oil paintings. But it’s even truer in
art than in life that looks aren’t everything. These artworks
think similarly, in sculptural terms, about the relationship
between innards and skin.

Satushek’s photographs picture simple and familiar subjects, often
trees and houses (before or after they’ve been inhabited). In them, the
time is clearly now—the unreality of real estate has been
dramatically revealed, the natural environment tensely beckons and
reproaches, and everything has the feel of a rickety facade. A row of
identical new houses—two of the three marked by signs that say
“This Home Is Occupied”—is the embodiment of emptiness. A sea of
parked boats in a gravel lot sits along Interstate 5, where cars pass
by in whirring waves. The cute, abandoned home on concrete blocks on
this odd property is in the style of a Cape Cod vacation home. Its
picture windows face the freeway. A vast gray sky hangs overhead. The
photograph is called Yard.

Satushek, showing at Gallery4Culture and SOIL, makes poetic but
sobering images by layering several photographs to create a final
scene. Contemporary photography is full of shooters who do this,
including megastars like Andreas Gursky, who uses extreme detail to
heighten the spectacle in massive, sparkling photographs of commerce,
architecture, and, most recently, car racing. But Gursky is creating
scenes that exist only in his photographs. Satushek is literalizing his
subjects, not fictionalizing them, a tactic that goes hand in hand with
his subtly eye-opening social critique. Satushek takes photos as much
as makes them: He shoots each area inside the frame at close range,
giving the viewer maximum details—details that, startlingly, add
up to the scene that is, rather than the scene that is seen. The
edges don’t fuzz. Distant objects are in high definition. Tiny rocks
and wildflowers pop forward as if you were right there, bending over
them. You notice at first only that the images seem slightly off. They
seem digital, which makes you think they’re untrue. But it’s the
opposite. The images are impossibly true.

Such literalizing is an impulse from minimalism, the “aesthetic high
adventure,” as Peter Schjeldahl calls it, of the 1960s, which remains
the most influential radical idea of the 20th century. Schjeldahl
describes minimalism in Platonic terms, as “the difference between the
idea of something and the thing itself.” Minimalist art—early on
called literalist art—is concerned entirely with the thing
itself. The artworks are what they are; they are not false
representations of other things. In Satushek’s refreshing photographs,
false representations are revealed, gently, as the backbone of American
life. He turns the art idea of concretism—that artworks can be
things in themselves, rather than abstractions of other
things—into an ethic: to see things as they really are. (Another
fascinating young conceptual photographer in Seattle, Isaac Layman, is
also a concretist, of a less social and more philosophical stripe. He
has a show opening Thursday, July 17, at Lawrimore Project.)

Elliott doesn’t paint out in the world but inside his studio. Using
thick, thick gray paint, he essentially coats the rarefied zone of art
in concrete. It looks like an empty place, a tautological
place—one that exists only to be depicted. It has a table,
stools, a Brita-filter pitcher, cans of paint, a sink, and the kind of
common potted plants you’d find at Home Depot. In the clearest of the
paintings, the studio is aestheticized, turned into a special place hit
serendipitously with light. An entire history of lovingly solipsistic,
art-for-art’s-sake studio still lifes comes to mind. But the six
paintings at James Harris Gallery depict the studio and its plants as
if under various lenses, or plastered with varying thicknesses of
concrete. In one painting, it is nearly impossible to distinguish the
objects from the ground. In all the paintings, gray overcomes all other
colors and sensations.

Is everything lifelike in these scenes smothered to death, or does
everything take on more substance? A little of both. Elliott’s
postminimalistic constructions can’t help but bring to mind Jasper
Johns, the master of gray and of concretism. There is always something
documentary about gray.

jgraves@thestranger.com