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GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

“This Is Gallery”
Lawrimore Project
Through Sept. 30

The Lawrimore Project opened its large, multimedia gallery in June, and judging by “This Is Gallery,” the group show that introduces its roster of artists, owner Scott Lawrimore has a three-pronged mission: To create a consistent commercial venue for conceptually based work in Seattle; to present Seattle contemporary artists with their national and international counterparts; and to imbue it all with Duchampian mischief: The bathroom mirror, for example, has a moustache carved into it, so that everyone becomes a latter-day, altered Mona Lisa.

The photography, video, sculpture, installation and few lone paintings of “This Is Gallery” have no theme, just a shared, crackling energy.

Arizona artist Liz Cohen’s video, Bikini Car Wash (2002), features the trim, tanned artist herself, proposed believably (and, for the viewer, uncomfortably) as a sexual commodity.

New Yorker Alex Bag’s 1950s-throwback drag video, Harriet Craig (1998), is wisely stationed near Cindy Sherman’s coy Lucille Ball.

While these videos are fine, the exhibition’s photography and sculpture make the most indelible impressions.

Seattle photographer Anne Mathern’s repulsively slack-jawed young woman in a formal dining room links to nightmarish photographs by Chicago’s Sabrina Raaf of women altering their bodies in sterile, private environments.

New Yorker Charles LaBelle turns reversed images of seedy California motels at night into what look like light boxes with bullet holes. Viennese artist Erwin Wurm’s photograph of a man in mid-air is a document of one of Wurm’s improvisatory “one-minute sculptures.”

On the other side of the sculptural divide from Wurm are the labor-intensive semi-abstractions of Seattle’s Cris Bruch, which look simple at first but unfold under prolonged viewing, as if the labor that went into them is working in reverse.

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“Junctions: Selected Drawings from Contemporary Artists and Modern Masters”
James Harris Gallery
Through Aug. 25

This sweeping, decadent array of more than 50 small works, presented in association with Jill Newhouse, a private New York gallery specializing in European drawings and watercolors, encompasses finished drawings, sketchbook pages and studies in paint, all under the heading “drawings.”

With a well-presented conceit, governed by the immediacy and delicacy of the mediums, the show brings together the likes of Bonnard, Matisse, Cezanne and Corot with such West Coast contemporary artists as Roy McMakin, Marcelino Goncalves, Mary Ann Peters, Patrick Holderfield, Claire Cowie and Jeffry Mitchell.

In addition to the purely pleasurable nature of some of the offerings (Manet’s Two Almonds and Rodolphe Bresdin’s Mother and Time are pure charm), perceptive groupings draw out some surprising similarities between these 19th-century and 21st-century artists.

As the gallery puts it, “with mark and gesture—the traditional hallmarks of drawing—being at the center of this show, the difference between an artist’s drawing from 100 years ago and a contemporary work often disappears. The personalized mark of the artist and its powerful form of expression overwhelms any variation that might result because of historical context.”

For example, Délacroix’s muted watercolor The Sea and Cliffs Near Dieppe (1851) is a lightly brushed-on seascape, with crescent shapes sweetly forming the dapples on the sea’s surface. In Cowie’s watercolors, the rudimentary figures and landforms balance between adorable and melancholy. While the contemporary painter and the heroic Frenchman would seem to have nothing in common, Cowie’s Dwamish (with Island) (2004) actually feels right at home next to Délacroix’s The Sea and Cliffs—which prompts a reconsideration of both artists.

Still, the contrasts between the centuries are telling, too, in that they point to societal and technological changes as well as stylistic differences. Portraits of faces by Keith Tilford are swarms of ink marks suspended on white paper—as though the subjects have been atomized.