ArtInfo’s Seattle correspondent takes us on a tour of the most interesting gallery and museum shows now on view in the city.

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 Cohens 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 Bags 1950s-throwback drag video, Harriet Craig (1998), is wisely stationed near Cindy Shermans coy Lucille Ball.

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

Seattle photographer Anne Matherns 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 Wurms 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 (Manets Two Almonds and Rodolphe Bresdins 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, Délacroixs 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 Cowies 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 Cliffswhich 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.

And Geoffrey Chadsey blends the appearances of politicians and his own father with images taken from Google searches using the word “gay.” The precision of Chadsey’s pencil lines in making the shirtless man in Welterweight (2002) only exaggerates the imprecision of this depicted character—the strange, composite, 21st-century monstrosity of him.

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“New Sculpture Survey”
Howard House Gallery
Through Aug. 26

Jenny Heishmans sculptures feel not quite real, like thought bubbles, full of potential and interiority. Psssst is two loosely formed bunnies made so that it looks like the artist has laid a sheet of glass over bunny forms. Their bodies flow together the way they would if they sat under the same blanket. One sits erect with pink ears raised, the other crouches down. They’re balanced atop an iceberg of carved white Styrofoam, which places them in a landscape, but their clear surfaces make them look half-disappeared, still on their way from imaginary to real, or the other way around.

Heishman, who is based in Seattle, is one of the eight artists in the wide-ranging “New Sculpture Survey.” Also from Seattle are Diem Chau, who gamely carves bright Crayolas into tiny figures; Ben Chickadel, who has hung cut-paper constructions so they sag with gravity; Sean M. Johnson, who adapts the principles of large geometric abstraction, a la Mark Di Suvero, into a cross between personal allegory and still-life; and Jason Wood, whose self-portraits made of pencils and pick-up sticks are an over-determined nod to the floor agglomerations of Tara Donovan.

The show represents the sprawling diversity of contemporary sculpture, from the cartoon violence of Jon Haddocks (from Tempe, Ariz.) polymer clay mice and decapitated suicide bomber to L.A.-based Michael O’Malleys abstract wall assemblages, which resemble the craggy bio-network of a nervous system.

It’s all a little bewildering, but individual moments last. One of the best is Chickadel’s Craftsman Home (2006), a bit of real estate meticulously cut out of paper and hung, left to settle like every home does over time.

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MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS

“Spectatorship & Desire: Lust, Loss and Love”
Frye Art Museum
Through March 4, 2007

What does it mean to love a painting, and just what is the painting one loves? Those were the questions the small Frye Art Museum asked at the start of its series of exhibitions named “Spectatorship & Desire.”

For the first installment, “Lust,” the museum rehung, salon-style, its founding collection of mostly late-19th-century German and Austrian paintings, packing the walls in a visually rich puzzle. The design was based on photographs from the home of the original collectors, meatpacking mogul Charles Frye and his wife, Emma.

Then, for the “Loss” portion of the show, the museum removed the seven paintings thought to be most popular, leaving holes in the puzzle.

In their place, curators left notebooks inviting guests to write about the missing paintings, including Alexander Max Koesters Moulting Ducks (ca. 1900), a misty portrait of a flock of ducks in a flurry of soft white feathers that’s often cited first on the favorite’s list; William-Adolphe Bouguereaus The Shepherdess (1881); Adolf Schreyers Horses Fleeing from Flames (19th century, date unknown); and Franz von Stucks Sin (circa 1906).

Some visitors expressed notions of ownership of “their” paintings, citing a relationship to past Frye experiences (often from childhood) as the source of their love for a specific work of art. Others missed their favorites, but in their absence selected new ones, appreciating an opportunity to focus on Frye collection paintings they had previously overlooked.

For the final installment of the exhibition, “Love,” visitors got their ducks back. The seven favorites now have a gallery all to themselves. Instead of explanatory wall labels are comments from the visitor notebooks—that conjure a collective set of experiences ranging from the analytical to the sentimental. The goal with this approach, the museum says, is “to explore the idea that the painting one loves is as much a construction of memory and desire as it is a response to the direct encounter between the viewer and the art object.”

A visitor named Jerry, for example, wrote: “The ducks! I came here just to see ‘my’ ducks. When I see them I can leave feeling that at least something isn’t changing. Please bring them back. They bespeak a joy and innocence and stability that we need in our lives. And the blue of the Alpine Lake ... oh please do bring it back. I found myself inclined to try to decide on other ‘favorites,’ but with a hollow feeling in my heart.”

This museum once prided itself on its anachronism (it opened in 1952 but never showed abstraction, Pop or conceptual art, mostly sticking to neo-Classical painting). But this series, created by chief curator Robin Held, represents an awakening. Since Held arrived in 2004, the Frye has branched into video, photography and installation art, and “Spectatorship & Desire” proves the Frye’s intention to generate fresh experiences even with time-worn art.