Fertile minds grow amazing landscapes in the wondrous 'Boys and Flowers'

Hairless bears in creamy slips consort in Jeffry Mitchell's "Sweet Pea" installation at Western Bridge.

Mitchell thinks of the piece as his life story, a three-part harmony with the suggestion of a soundtrack. The personal part of the story he hides behind a screen. From the front, it looks like cake frosting.

Remember when comparing art to frosting was an insult? That was long ago and far away, and Mitchell's part of an international group of artists who have allowed us to reconsider the formerly denigrated category of sweet thing.

Speaking of groups, the production of this screen took one. Mitchell drew the scenes, and fellow Seattle artists contributed their tech savvy to transform them into a three-dimensional, free-standing object. Claude Zervas popped the drawings into his computer to fashion reliefs, and Leo Saul Berk used his router to create a plastic mold into which paper pulp could be pushed.

The result is a paper screen with the solidity of wood and the appearance of spun sugar. Its front features Mitchell's tribute to "Alphabet Street" by Prince, letters embraced by birds and bunnies: "A, B, C, D, E, F, I Love You." It's an alphabet of love letters, each light-footed as it lifts into the air.

The screen's backside is covered in a silkscreen nod to William Morris' Victorian wallpaper reproduced by the Bee Gees' for the cover of their album "Main Course."

At the opening, somehow I found myself explaining the piece to Mitchell's preteen nephew and niece. Having Mitchell as an uncle provides certain cultural advantages. When asked if they knew who the Bee Gees were, both nodded, and the boy said, with confidence, "Saturday Night Fever."

The screen stands in front of Mitchell's ceramic version of a Chinese tomb sculpture in the shape of a contemporary bathhouse, specifically, a soon-to-be-closed Seattle institution, Club Zodiac. Inside, bearlike men embrace or stand idly by, in Donald Barthelme's phrase, "staring at their futures, which are behind them."

I love everything about "The Tomb of Club Z," its generosity and grace, its fluid conjunctions of feeling and form, its fusion of history and fleeting moment.

Also breathtaking is Paul Morrison's "mesophtye," a continuous black horizon line painted across the walls of the largest Western Bridge gallery and seeded with blackened stumps, weeds, trees, shrubs and ferns. In Morrison's hands, botanical illustrations acquire the weird weight of science fiction.

He employs scale shifts that rival those of Northern Renaissance painters. Theirs favored the spiritual over the physical; his deliver a world rotting top to bottom in high style.

Kirsten Stoltmann's video, "Boys and Flowers," gives the exhibit its title. In 2000, she built a skate ramp in her studio and invited teenage boys to use it. With a lovely soundtrack by Joan of Arc, "Boys and Flowers" presents blooming young men who make the difficult look easy, over and over.

Scott McFarland used Photoshop to equate gardening and photography, presenting his conflation in one panoramic moment, shadows hung and lights planted where he wanted. His photos look ordinary until closely examined, and then they are miracles.

In the back video room is a four-screen projection by Kutlug Ataman, each screen featuring an English woman named Veronica Read who has given her life to flowers. Her absorption is, in turn, absorbing, the creepiness of it all apparent afterward, once out of her company.

Other key artists include Stephen Vitiello, Amir Zaki, Jerry Garcia and Glenn Rudolph. If there's a better exhibit in town featuring art of the moment, I haven't seen it.

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