Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go
Kiefer, Your Golden Hair, Margarete (Dein goldenes
Haar, Margarethe), 1981
Nan Goldin, Sunset Like Hair, 2003
Susana Raab, Hot Dorothies, 2009
Gala Bent, French Braided, 2007-2009
Nayland Blake, Gorge, performance restaged in 1998.
Lauren Grossman, Behold, 2003 via Howard House
Jennifer Zwick, Hanging, 2007
Alice Wheeler, Self-Portrait as Wicked Witch of the West, 2002
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.
Shimomura paints racist incidents from the racist’s point of
view. The Asian male posing for the camera is a buck-toothed lizard. His yellow hand wraps the slender ankle of an all-American girl. Anyone looking at his paintings is seeing through the eyes of a white person who fears and loathes all others.
Not me, you might say, and you might be right. But you are the one looking.
Shimomura’s cold, flat style — a blend of Pop and Japanese
ukiyo-e — gets inside his hot subject to give it a deadpan edge.
His paintings in his exhibit titled Yellow Terror: Always a Foreigner at the Wing Luke Museum are windows to a demented world.
(Yellow Terror, 2008, acrylic/canvas, 60 x 72 inches. That’s Shimomura low in the center, making slant eyes.)
Every year the MacArthur Awards embrace the individual efforts of the
country’s artists, scientists, economists and (still employed)
reporters, reminding them that whether they are in or out of the
mainstream, their excellence counts.
This year, three of the seven in the arts are visual: Mark Bradford for collage painting, Rackstraw Downes for oil painting, Camille Utterback for video.
That leaves Heather McHugh, who is a poet; Deborah Eisenberg, a short story writer; Edwidge Danticat, a novelist; and James Longley, a documentary filmmaker.
I can’t speak to awards in anything but the arts, aside from saying
that mathematician L. Mahadevan enthralled me in his interview on NPR. In the arts, however, there are no dancers, choreographers, musicians; nobody working in the recently reinvigorated public art realm.
With the exception of McHugh, there’s nobody fusing forms to produce hyrid realities, and nobody whose efforts shape the moment and suggest the future. McHugh is the Attila the Hun of poetry. She sweeps down from the hills to claim all lowlands for verse. She claims all speech, turning it into a wisecracking sound stream, both precise and wide open.
Aside from her, the list has an elegaic feel. Eisenberg’s stories are exquisite minuets. Danticat is a 21-century Proust, animating her past. Longley’s films have a magisterial detachment, as if they cover not the Iraq War but the Trojan one. I love Downes’ paintings. If I were on the committee, I might easily pick him, but again, his work looks backward.
The two remaining artists are mistakes. Bradford might still make a major contribution, but he’s not there yet. What does he offer that Kurt Schwitters didn’t long ago? Utterback has larger problems. Her work is labored and gee-whiz, look-at-my-special-effects.
From her Web site, describing Come to Pieces from 2001:
Imagine seeing yourself from four different angles at once.
Picasso imagined that in 1907, far more powerfully. If I want to see myself from different angles in real time, I try on clothes in a dressing room.
A few exhibits I almost missed, and one I still have…
Michael Howard at Francine Seders through Sunday. His acrylics are paintings under construction of houses under construction. Earlier versions were more elusive in subject matter, featuring houses that could go either way, being built or torn down. Present ones look abandoned. Nobody’s working on them, but there they are.
His watercolors are very Fairfield Porter but with a twist or two, such as the tree in the image below, which seems to be suffering from some tree plague instead of serving as surface for melting snow. The partially melted snow on tree and house has gone on strike and refuses to melt further. It will be there forever, as long as the image adheres to the paper.
Upstairs, Gail Grinnell shares a gallery with her son, Samuel Wildman. He made a giant red skull in wax and plaster that had to be cracked in half to get out of the studio. On the way upstairs at Seders, it broke again. Francine thought he’d have to repair it and wondered if he had time, but he liked the pieces and left them on the floor, where they now resemble a broken heart. A shot of the whole head below, which did not turn out to be the finished product.
Turns them into parched plains, with lettering running in dry gullies.
Alison Keogh is at Francine Seders Gallery through Sept. 27.
Cosmetic change has a bad rap, but not Tirana, Albania, a blighted city revived by the application of squares of color to crumbling buildings, celebrated by Anri Sala in “Dammi i Colori” (Give Me the Colors), from 2003.
Two public projects tapping the same vein are among the most successful in Seattle’s recent history: Dan Corson‘s Wave Rave Cave under a freeway off-ramp on Alaskan Way in Belltown, and Sheila Klein‘s Roosevennavelt: Columnseum, 10 acres of wasteland under the 1-5 freeway on Roosevelt near 65th St.
Corson’s site is a strip between two chain-link fences. To overcome the impact of those barriers, he created wave-like mounds in concrete and covered them in gravel. During the day, their oddity is charming. They look as if a construction crew longing for the sea took license with company equipment during the lunch hour.
At night, those waves become psychedelic stalagmites.
Klein treated freeway pillars as dresser’s dummies. Vertical lines are so slimming.
Space is always the issue at Suyama Space,
the Seattle art center thinly disguised as an architect’s waiting room.
Big, raw and barn-like, it overpowers artists who fail to take its
personality and proportions into account. Failures are rare, because Beth Sellars is in charge of the lineup.
Thanks to the global consciousness of her curatorial vision and to
architect George Suyama, who runs his firm around the gallery he
donates to the public, Suyama Space has become one of the top art
venues in the region.
The price is right (free admission), but the hours (Monday-Friday) are
tough for anybody with a standard-issue job. Even though weekends are
out, the lengths of the exhibits are a saving grace. Most run for three
months. Few people lack a spare lunch hour during that wide a time
frame.
Currently on view, Dan Corson‘s Grotesque Arabesque is a thrill.
Instead of a room, it’s a electric light cave, a Northern lights spectacle that hangs in the air and glowers from the ground, reflected in a pond. With indigo skylights and a 25-foot wide mirror to multiple the distortions, the bent, electroluminescent strips appear to be drawn in the air.
Through Dec. 18. Free admission
When Douglas Britt, art critic for the Houston Chronicle, was in Seattle last month, he made videos of Target Practice at the Seattle Art Museum and Jason Hirata and Sol Hasemi at the Dirty Shed, which is, truth in advertising, a dirty shed behind Betsey Brock and Eric Fredericksen‘s house.
Good picks, Douglas. My Dirty Shed story here. Jen Graves here.
Some artists need to live by water.
Others need community.
There are artists who don’t care where they live…
As long as they can work there.
Seattle’s Jay Steensma died in 1994 of a heart attack at age 52. Although manic-depressive, he was on medication to control it for his final seven years and his career blossomed, if such a career can blossom. Part of his problem was volume, volume, volume. If we are lucky, some curator is going to dig through his crazy, slapdash excess to find a stellar core of solitude and weather.
He painted small figures on barren gray plains, abandoned houses, ravaged trees. His grays are creamy, his whites begrimed and his blacks full of shadows. When used, bright color is a a shock value.
Paintings at Seattle artREsource.
[Read more…] about Jay Steensma – I can feel the heat closing in
an ArtsJournal blog
