Since Western Bridge opened five years ago, singular visions of the soggy have served as exhibition mainstays. Its current exhibit, Underwater, is a salon-style greatest hits. The new shares space with work in play from earlier efforts, such as 19 Rainstorms and River Styx, both from 2005; Insubstantial Pageant Faded from 2007, and You Complete Me from 2008.
It rains in Seattle. Why has no other exhibition space made note of the city’s interest in the subject?
As part of You Complete Me, Jeppe Hein‘s 20-inch square Ice Cube
melted around the clock a few feet north of the front door, watering the plants and
staying out of everybody’s way. Taken inside, however, the cube takes
advantage of being in the wrong. Ordinarily, art doesn’t leak on a
gallery floor.
Ice Cube
is Minimalism in a confessional mode, spilling everything it knows.
Every day it opts to change formal rigor into an inconsequential mess.
Outdoors, Ice Cube was an ice cube. Indoors, it’s a metaphor.
As it disappears, even optimists find themselves thinking of what else
is melting and what else is rising in its wake.
Underwater not
only confronts the real world, it offers a chance for change in both senses of the word. Paul
Ramirez Jonas‘ Well is open and ready for business. Drop coins into its
cup, and the job of well-wishing is well done.
Mark Shetabi‘s oil/panel painting, November
from 2005, is a historic narrative impersonating a random moment. After the second Bush/Cheney victory, we were well and
truly underwater.
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