Tomorrow’s the last day to see Buddy Bunting’s High Living at Crawl Space, including his 32-foot pen and watercolor wash drawing of the Two Rivers Prison in Oregon. (Show here, his Web site here.)
Jen Graves, from a review titled, Making Art While Nervous: Buddy Bunting’s Plein Air Prisons:
Buddy Bunting stakes out prisons. He parks by the sides of their roads to sketch, photograph, and videotape them in a hurry, before he gets caught.
Nobody is supposed to look too closely at a prison. Bunting does it in part because prisons are what he knows. Growing up in a Maryland area where a prison moved in and provided plenty of jobs, Bunting’s regular friends were prison guards as well as prisoners. He knows the in and the out, so he stands at the border and makes art.
(Her review here, with images.)
Most of the drawings in the current show derive from the Southwest. Solid objects are dematerializing in the heat and so are ideas, such as justice and a workable economy.
(Click to enlarge.)
I’ve seen and greatly admired Bunting’s work over the years. This show is the show. I must have been in a coma to have forgotten to see it till its final weekend.
Considering how large a role prisons play in the U.S., they rarely make an appearance in art.
Bunting’s not the only artist in Seattle with a bead on them. Mike Simi was raised in a small Michigan town near near a large one. His dad, his uncle and his brother are prison guards. He happened to go to high school with nine of the 40 registered sex offenders in his area. No one in his family finds that fact remarkable.
Below, Simi’s from series of throw pillows titled, Sex Offenders From My Home Town, ongoing.
(Click to enlarge.)
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