Chas Bowie scores a knockout

Chas Bowie’s review of Jeffry Mitchell and Roy McMakin’s collaboration in Portland:

“Joy and Reffry,” on view at Pulliam Gallery, sounds at first like a curatorial sendup of “The Odd Couple” recast with two of Seattle’s most highly regarded artists.

Playing the role of neat freak Felix Ungar in our contemporary incarnation is master craftsman Roy McMakin
–artist, furniture designer and architect, whose impeccable sense of
formal restraint and subtle humor have led to international success in
both the art and design communities. McMakin’s free-spirited foil in
“Joy and Reffry” –his Oscar Madison, if you will –is genre-twisting
ceramic artist Jeffry Mitchell,
whose showy, neo-Rococo sculptures of pachyderm romance and
irrepressible curlicues would seem stylistically antithetical to the
deadpan austerity of McMakin’s furniture-art.

McMakin and Mitchell’s first collaboration,
however, finds the unlikely duo’s well-honed voices layered in a rich
harmony, with “Joy and Reffry” humming a lovesick tune about long-lost
objects, invented memories, mournful absences and tactile pleasures. (more)

I read it with interest and mounting dismay. To my knowledge, this show attracted only one other review to date – mine. Bowie’s reached a deeper level and did it with ease. His Oscar and Felix conceit is on target. I comfort myself with the idea that having one day in Portland, I reviewed the show at the opening, always tricky. But McMakin and Mitchell are Seattle artists. I wasn’t seeing their work for the first time. Maybe I’m posting too many images and not enough text.

Speaking of good reviews, there’s also Douglas Britt’s in the Houston Chronicle, titled, Houston can take cues from Seattle exhibit:

The Seattle Art Museum’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78, which closed on Labor Day, was the kind of ambitious show that deserved to spend the next couple years on tour. Maybe in a better economic climate it would have. But other museums — perhaps daunted by the cost of shipping major works borrowed from more than 70 lenders around the world — passed. They missed a chance to present that rarest of birds: a crowd-pleasing survey of some of art history’s most difficult material for audiences to understand, let alone appreciate and enjoy. (more)