Top 11 exhibits in Seattle & one in Tacoma

1. Michael Darling’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-79 at the Seattle Art Museum. From my review in Modern Painters:

“Target Practice” focused on artists who saw painting as a closed world and attempted to pry it open. With single and multiple works by 40 talents from Europe, Japan, North America, and South America, it engaged what remains a fresh chaos of ragged representation and stands as the best contemporary-art survey in the museum’s history.

2. The Old Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art, curated by Toby Kamps for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, had its last stop at the Frye Art Museum and continues through Jan. 3. From my reviews on this blog:

Also
terrific in this show are Jeremy Blake’s cloudy mixtures of memory,
guilt and loss; Matthew Day Jackson’s post-Rauschenberg book of
photographic imagery trailing across a wall like a diagrammed sentence,
and Brad Kahlhamer’s rush of signs and symbols hurtling across the
paper like a river intent on a flood.

3. Roger Shimomura at the Wing Luke Museum. From my review:

Dapper white boys and comely white girls enjoyed themselves in the
comic-strip version of college life until the late ’60s generation
popped the bubble. In Frat Rats, Roger Shimomura painted the
prelapsarian experience but added another icon dear to the hearts of
the greatest generation: Racism.

4. Dan Webb, Jeffry Mitchell, Claude Zervas and Joseph Park in From Whence the Rainbow Came at Ambach & Rice. From my review, Seattle’s gang of four:

What is constructed, found and constructed again is the theme of From Whence The Rainbow Came at Ambach & Rice, featuring four of the Northwest’s top artists: Claude Zervas, Joseph Park, Dan Webb and Jeffry Mitchell. It’s the best group show in a Seattle gallery in years, proposed and shaped by the artists themselves.

5. Heide Hinrichs and Debra Baxter at Howard House  (also, Hinrichs at the Seattle Art Museum)

Baxter:

Her sculptures are the dead end of romance. If jukeboxes played visual art, Baxter could turn Jerry Lee Lewis inside out: You broke my will, what a thrill.

Hinrichs:

Fuse Eva Hesse with Richard Tuttle and you’ve in Heide Hinrichs
territory. She has Hesse’s love of the ungainly protuberance and the
heavy edit of Tuttle’s subtlety. In my mother’s darker moments, she
liked to say, “I wish they’d drop the bomb so we could go underground.”
Hinrichs is an artist of the solitary’s apocalypse. Those who stagger
back into the light after losing everything would be lucky to find her
sculptures on the floor, the flayed skin of soccer ball bladders hung
on a wire or deflated inner tubes curled as if smoked in a fire.

6. SuttonBeresCuller at Lawrimore Project. From my SBC review, Blowing in a Blocked Wind:

Every fan whirs away, generating nothing. It’s not easy being the joker
in the pack, the sane man in King Lear’s court, the forward momentum
surrounded by inertia. Even artists who play it straight are surrounded
by what opposes them, be they those rarities encased in success or the
more common breed, hearing the echo of their actions bounce off the
walls of empty rooms.

7. Karen Ganz at Howard House. From my review, The Cult of the Loser:

In the mythology of American success stories, a go-getter rarely turns
into a goofball. Anybody who is up and at ’em can count on cashing in
stock options in the not-too-distant future, which is why American
comic strips celebrate the cult of the loser.

8. Grant Barnhart, Beg For It at Ambach & Rice. From my review:

Although there are narratives here in an Eric Fischl
vein, Barnhart isn’t interested in creating a common thread.  Fischl
would never put such a range of paintings together in one show. He hits
a theme and explores it. Barnhart’s disregard for connectives
approaches Martin Kippenberger’s.
Barnhart believes in the vibrational field of a painting, and the idea
that vibrations on the same frequency tend to fuse. His do. Beg For It at Ambach & Rice is a force field.

9. Akio Takamori at James Harris Gallery: From my review, At home in the wide world:

Akio Takamori’s figures are nearly always lost in thought, caught in
that moment when the body pauses and the mind drifts freely across its
mental sky. Born and raised in Japan, he pays his country of origin the
honor of taking it lightly. Bold and loose, his figures include
Japanese spirit babies with oversize heads, priests, warriors, peasants
and royalty with the folds of their gowns flapping and more recently,
figures drawn from the larger world.

10. Alice Wheeler, Women Are Beautiful at Greg Kucera Gallery. From my review:

There’s an upbeat, irrepressible refusal to
judge in her work, a determination not to call anybody a freak, unless
as a compliment, and an inability to accept a depressing scene as a
downer. She’s the kind of person who’d read The Metamorphosis and think it’s a comedy.

11. Parenthesis at Western Bridge. From my review:

Breath is proof that the father lives, at
least for the duration of the video. The proof that matters is the
evidence of love. (Neil) Goldberg conceived this piece after his mother’s
death and while his father, now dead, was failing. By participating,
his father reassured him. The video is the father wordlessly proving
that he’ll be there, even after he’s gone, in every breath his son
takes. Look, he’s saying. It’s easy, and it will never end.

One from Tacoma:

Eli Hansen and his friend, the chemist and botanist Joe Piecuch, took the top spot at the now defunct Helm Gallery. From my review:

They treated Tacoma like a science experiment, taking core samples of
the place distilled into gruesome forms of theoretically drinkable
beverages.
In all manner of glass test tubes (blown by Hansen), they mixed an
alcohol base with Western red cedar, brick fragments from Ted Bundy’s
childhood home and soil from Port Madison; coyote blood, beard hair,
beeswax and butterfly wings; blackberries, club moss from the Hoh rain
forest and hydrogen cyanide; soil from Lewis and Clark’s Cape
Disappointment camp site, concrete from the Boeing plant in Everett
flavored with hobo urine, and brick chips from Francis Farmer’s
childhood home with paint flecks from Curt Cobain’s final abode on Lake
Washington