Gretchen Bennett – the light that shines on everybody

During a residency last year in Reykjavik, Icleand, Gretchen
Bennett noticed that, as in Seattle, people in Reykjavik tend to hang
onto their holiday lights way past the occasion. Till sluggish, dazed spring approaches, colored light strings hang in doorways and along the edges of the windows.

Walking
home one night, she saw smashed beer bottles in the street, pieces of glass
held together by the adhesive of the label beneath them. Reflected party lights turned them into jewels. The stars she could see were
not in the sky but under her feet.

Night, Sleep, Death and the Stars, 2010 glass plastic bag

“No ideas but in things,” wrote William Carlos Williams, early in the 20th century. Early in the 21st, the idea continues to have resonance.

Bennett is interested in decay and repetition as an affirmative position – an eroded X marks her spot. Like many in her generation, she offers an open-ended approach to materials instead of a specific style, in her case especially materials that have kicked around the edges of urban cultures, such as fake wood grain and skateboard decals. Her drawings in colored pencil are based on images that are past their technical prime and have been reproduced nearly to death, frayed and blurred instead of specific.

The Dull Flame of Desire, 2010, prisma color pencil on paper 22 x 30.5 inches

Ghost Dog 2010 prisma color pencil on paper 26 x 26 inches

Her current exhibit at Howard House takes its titled, Community World Theater, from a movie theater in Tacoma, Washington, that served as a pivotal site for dozens of punk concerts in 1987 to 1988. An earlier series of drawings treated Kurt Cobain as a kind of J.M.W. Turner weather-event – atmosphere overtaking concrete form.

In Iceland in a semi-permanent gray dark, she began to think of a culture whose recesses could be staged. In the dark, stage light is the sun. A generous use of it includes all the ordinarily lost moments. It can celebrate not just a performance but the moments after, when even a lost soul who may have fallen into an empty drum set gets up again and stumbles toward the folds of stage drapery, looking for an exit.

The Dull Flame of Desire 2010 felted panels, prismacolor pencils on paper, installation, dimensions variable

Her question is not, what is new? It’s what can be stitched together and born again.

See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered. (more)

Through Jan. 30.