Regina Hackett

In the distant past, the wide sweep of desert and dark sky enfolded travelers in what is now part of Western New Mexico. Little has changed in that small corner of the world, except the 400 stainless steel poles inserted into the ground in a mile-wide grid: Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field.

Indoors at Lawrimore Project, Tivon Rice‘s installation, A Macrocosmic Zero, offers a claustrophobic version of De Maria’s exhilarating vista. Instead of poles sunk into the ground, there are tubes hanging from the ceiling in a circular maze. Inside it, viewers see themselves in some kind of motion drag, being processed into the blurred center of the experience and heading toward oblivion.

There’s still awe, but it’s heavily laced with apprehension – the implication of a disaster covered by a televised feed, with a motorized panning tripod stabilizing robotic feedback. Nobody comes to the experience fresh or leaves unsullied. Rice agrees with what Francis Bacon said about the mediated image:

I think one’s sense of appearance is assaulted all the time by photography and by film. So that, when one looks at something, one’s not only looking at it directly but one’s also looking at it through the assault that has already been made on one by photography and film.

A series of videos in a portrait gallery offer a series of faces that lose their grip on their molecule structure.

One screen located outside the gallery features the artist. Rice
permanently burned his own image into the screen, where it hovers,
ghostlike, after the video is turned off.

Through March 27.

When giving a gift that can keep on giving, why leave anything to chance? (image via)

Some art objects arrive in public with elaborate titles and some with none at all (untitled), their makers fearing titles will be held against the work or unnecessarily narrow the frame of its references. For every title that makes the piece and sends it like a surface to air missile into the stratosphere, there are plenty that limp along, poisoning the goods.

The non sequitur is an infrequently used but fertile stratagem. I thought of it while reading about Bookseller magazine’s prize for the oddest title of the year, via Diane Mapes.

Calling an individual piece the Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter would guarantee it a second look. Other potential winners in the name-that-artwork game include Collectible Spoons of
the Third Reich, Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous
Robots, and, my personal favorite, Reusing Old Graves.

If Anne Siems had called her painting Reusing Old Graves instead of Velvet Forest, I would have begun to look in a better frame of mind. (At Grover/Thurston Gallery)

By turning their slurs into art.

Jane Hammond:

Patrick Lakey:

SuttonBeresCuller: They sandblasted every word of a patronizing, crap review onto Mexican beach pebbles.

Ries Niemi uses a phrase from a withering essay as a tag to his signature:

Bad Ideas, Bad Imagination, and Bad Motives

The three bads also appear on Niemi’s Web site under the headline, the critics are raving about Niemi. Other samples:

“Dad is a Fool.” -Torque Niemi

“Lounge Lizard gone Country Boy…”
-Regina Hackett

“You’re not that funny.” -Sheila Klein

The oldest goal of sculpture is to be soul-catcher, not to mirror a surface but to find a pulse and praise it. Dan Webb finds that pulse on the surface. To the detritus of the world he brings his monumental ambition. A weed, a fly, a party favor; a prepackaged meal on a dinner tray, a person climbing the corporate ladder, a kid sharing a secret under a blanket, an anonymous set of armor banished to storage: What we no longer value or never valued, he redeems in the powerful mirror of his material abilities.

The depth of his work comes from its translations. A dandelion wilted and past its prime in the back yard is an annoyance, a reminder that there’s work to do or the yard in question is beyond work and past care. Let weeds flourish till the plot falls into other hands or is left to its own devices, eating a hole in the human hunger for order.

Webb’s weed rises to glory from a block of wood, fire burnt at its bottom with a pale, perfect tap root touching the floor. I saw this piece unfinished in the studio, as Webb was chiseling under the leaf rising on the left. “Stop,” I said, as I’d say to someone about to run out into traffic. I feared for the life of the thing.

Webb’s carving has a show-off quality. It’s a high wire act with no net, performed in front of an audience that is no longer sure such dazzling feats are worth watching. Isn’t excessive skill a trap for the unimaginative? When cameras can count every hair on your head, what is the point of verisimilitude?

WOODYLION, 2009
Carved Redwood
32 x 14 x 11 inches

The surface of the world is the world. Skill is a trap when it is excessive to the thing expressed. Webb lives in the precision he brings to bear on what is battered. It’s his signature. He’s breathing inside his homage to whatever is begotten without pleasure, born without care, and dies alone.

Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe:

“Sir I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

Into that vast indifference, Webb asserts a form of recyling that he raises to the level of the  alchemical. His sculptures would mean nothing without the skill of his rendering. He didn’t attach the tap root to the bottom of the wood block and glue the carved weed to its top. Through the oldest process of sculptural subtraction, he found a spent weed inside a stump and let it out.


STONE FLY (FOR PETRUS), 2010
Carved gray marble
8.5 x 19 x 11 inches (Petrus is a mid-15th century painter famed for his ability to fool the eye, in this case, with a fly painted at the edge of his painting’s frame.)

DOUBLE KNOT, 2010
Carved gray marble
15 x 8 x 12 inches

SUCKED IN, 2010
Carved limestone
4 x 24.5 x 16 inches

Webb’s Stones and Flowers is at the Greg Kucera Gallery through March 27.

In response to a post about Dale and Leslie Chihuly giving Artist Trust $150,000 for two $25,000 grants to Washington State artists in any discipline annually for three years, Juan Alonso observed:

I know whenever I say anything regarding auctions I get a lot of folks who misunderstand my point. To be clear, I am a huge fan of Artist Trust, in fact, I am currently trying to create a scholarship fund for one of their programs, so do don’t get your undies in a bunch about this. It’s just an opinion.

So here goes: When I was on the PONCHO art acquisition committee, one of my suggestions was that all the proceeds from the visual art auction go to visual art organizations and that the other disciplines should do their own “donating for fundraisers” but my idea did not fly. As a visual artist, I would love to afford to go to the opera and the ballet and the symphony and I do want them all to thrive but I have little access to any of them. Any ballet dancer, opera singer of symphony musician can go to any gallery and some museums (at least on certain days) for free yet I don’t see any of these organizations (Ballet, Opera, Symphony, etc), individually or collectively, doing anything to benefit the visual arts.

The boundaries between disciplines are porous, and artists work freely across them. The essential thing about artists is that they are artists. Artist Trust embraces and supports all equally. But visual artists are most likely to create a product that can be sold. For that reason, they are the ones who support all others through the Artist Trust auction.

Hence, Alonso’s excellent point. It’s worth noting, however, that Leslie Chihuly is head of the Seattle Symphony’s board of directors. She is more likely to favor an all disciplines approach. A cynical version of the Golden Rule (S/he who makes the gold makes the rules) isn’t always true.

More Gardiner: (Thurberesque image from facebook)

It’s the male version of Louise Bourgeois’ femme masion, from 1947, who “shows herself at the very moment she thinks she’s hiding.” (via)

There’s also the far more elaborate piece by Janine Antoni, One Another, from 2008.

From his Seattle Subtext:

She remembers the exact moment she figured out subtraction, sitting on the small ledge dividing the backyard into lawn and concrete, staring at the paper in her hand and the numbers on it, thinking of subtraction as another kind of addition and both as ways of counting.

Berger, Mathematics #57, 1976

In Seattle, it’s a problem. First, they write about art in their own publication, refusing to let critics interested in participating do so. Second, they’re curating their own shows. What do they think critics and curators are, chopped liver? (Prince Charles is also beset by upstarts, story here. When will it all end?)

Latest outrage: Parallel Universe, curated by artists Francisco Guerrero and Joseph Park at Grey Gallery.

It’s the best group show in the city. The idea came from a deep familiarity with artists’ studios. Guerrero and Park started thinking about what they saw in studio corners, work that represents paths not taken that still could be: ideas abandoned, on hold or too recent to represent anything other than a stray idea.

Claude Zervas shows these lights at the James Harris Gallery. At Grey are lights not found at James Harris, gleaming out of the eye sockets of chainsaw bears.

Jeffry Mitchell‘s touch is a miracle of deft. When he draws, he draws silks in the air. Not this time.

Joseph Park is not a black velvet painter, except when he is.

What is this twerpy little piece by the ever-elegant Leo Saul Berk, something like a diseased mouth and something like a doughnut? Titled Cloud Flower, it’s nothing like a cloud. More like a drain with tea leaves matted around its rim.

Dan Webb is not a cartoonist.

Claire Cowie finishes what she starts.

Dawn Cerny does not do abstract art.

I don’t know Josepf Vascovitz‘s work well enough to know what is and is not his pervue, but these drawings are splendid, with a golden yet mucky glow. (I love the reader, reading water, and Adam with Eve, bulky as the first couple must have been, so recently associated with apes.)

Also scoring in Parallel Universe: Gretchen Bennett, Eric Elliott, Harrell Fletcher, Francisco Guerrero, Alfred Harris, Victoria Haven, Jenny Heishman, Nicholas Nyland, Lead Pencil Studio and Joey Veltkamp.
Through April 2.

Gallery Hours: 4pm – 2am everyday, by appointment and by chance.

In 1969, when the National Guard occupied Berkeley, California, I was living in an apartment just north of campus. Every 20 minutes helicopters would pass overhead, like heavy-metal clockwork. Looking at Zack
Schrock‘s photo brought that time back.

Living under helicopter rotation is not good for the nervous system. I moved. What about those who can’t move, who grow up in American neighborhoods that are under regular overhead  surveillance?

The anti-war movement in the 1960s gave participants (and bystanders, trying to get out of the way) an experience impoverished people of color continue to endure as a matter of course – the chance to be under served and over policed.

From Paul Beatty’s 1997 novel, The White Boy Shuffle:

I turned onto Whitworth Avenue and suddenly found myself engulfed in a blinding waterfall of light. Instinctively, my hands shot above my head as I waited for the standard drill–“Face down on the ground, hands behind your head, ankles crossed. Move!” But no instructions were forthcoming. I waited a minute or two and looked for a police cruiser; nothing. No beat cops, only the helicopter hovering overhead and me standing in a fifty-foot circle of light, becoming more appreciative of the moon.

Beatty’s novel inspired Kori Newkirk‘s mural in Freestyle. Made of black pomade applied to a white wall, Newkirk’s rendition of the species ghetto bird smelled like hair product. Its title, All Over, links it to Jackson Pollock, even though the latter’s fields fail to suggest a similar soundtrack.

After 9/11, of course, the entire country became suspicious of what might come from the sky.

Euan Macdonald, “Untitled, (three falling pianos), 2006, triptych, gouache on paper, 101×76 each (Image via)

Macdonald’s A Little Ramble is at Western Bridge through April 17.