Seattle: SAM’s Masterpieces, Bugs on Display

Photo courtesy Howard House

Jim Rittimann, "Paradise Insect / Symbiotic Relationship #103, #103a, #103b" (2007). On view at the Howard House

Photo courtesy James Harris Gallery

Amir Zaki, “Untitled” (2007). On view at the James Harris Gallery

Damien Hirst Mark Rothko Constantin Brancusi Gerhard Richter Francis Bacon Donald Judd The Appendix: Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Pipilotti Rist, and Paul H-O German Parliament to Return Nazi-Looted Portrait

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Ballard Fetherston Gallery
“Elizabeth Jameson: Nurses and Queens”
Through June 2

In 1999, Seattle artist Elizabeth Jameson made herself a dress with 40-foot-long sleeves and walked it through the streets of Vienna, where she was doing a residency. To her surprise, people did not glare; they were in awe. They parted to make way for her. She was a queen. All of her work since then has incorporated fashion, theatricality, and a slightly scary sense of precarious situations. Now, in her first solo show since 2002, the fear becomes specific. It’s about war.

Jameson’s drawings in charcoal and pastel, her fabric sculptures, and her large installation made from Styrofoam coated in white fondant icing are loosely based on historical costumes for military field nurses and queens during a time of war. A series of tiny dresses and hats and crowns hand-sewn from the drab, beat-up, stained skin of a used fur coat are transformed into battlefield-scarred uniforms for grim-looking dolls—there is a nurse specializing in lost limbs or last rites, a queen bejeweled with the stars given to families whose loved ones are killed in action. There are no doctors or warriors here; it is too late for acts of heroism.

The thick charcoal lines on the drawings give them the appearance of inky cartoon cels. Each character, set on white paper against no background at all, is a type defined by her clothing and her impenetrable gas mask, which renders her faceless. One depicts an infant nurse in a gas mask, modeled after Velazquez’s infanta in Las Meninas.

Jameson’s large installation is somehow both military and bridal, a portrait of a queen in a gas mask surrounded by layer cakes, all covered under the blanket of fondant icing. No skeletal structures are visible in this new work (unlike some of Jameson’s earlier work that involved corseting and panniers), and there are no faces. Everyone here is hiding out.

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James Harris Gallery
“Amir Zaki: At What Point Is the Wax No Longer Wax?”
Through June 2

The question of this show’s title refers to a meditation by Descartes, which rephrased for the purposes of photography asks: How far can anything be manipulated and still be real?

L.A. artist Amir Zaki takes stark, black-and-white photographs of trees and stumps set against jet-black backgrounds that look as if they were shot at night. Or perhaps the backdrops were digitally inserted? The trees themselves are odd, somehow off. One is so lanky it looks like the product of an extreme graft. Others look normal, but are set in locations that seem unlikely. The most pathetic image, nearly existential, is of an amputated stump planted against a sidewalk. It is seen, again, against a background so flat and dark that the setting might in fact be a studio.

Zaki has left every one of the 11 photographs in the show untitled, and in his published artist’s statement, he doesn’t explain the process, except to make clear that he is neither a purist nor a shameless manipulator. Each image is its own construction of “the natural,” and a good guess is that each one has its own artifice, whether at the level of the tree itself, or in the making of the photograph, or simply by being forced to acknowledge the ever-present possibility of falsehood.

This is almost painfully well-trod territory in photography, going back to the very roots of the medium as a documentary form—the heresy of manipulation sprung up long before Photoshop and genetic engineering. But what makes Zaki’s portraits so vital is their genuine fence sitting. The casual, undistressing way they blur fiction is a testament to the virtuality and half-light of contemporary global life.