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With global warming, oil spills, rain forest clearcuts and endangered species sliding to oblivion, artists are less likely to paint vigor into landscapes and soft shadows in dark green, forest depths.
Instead, they conjure with the question: what to make of a diminished thing? Recently featured in a retrospective at the Tacoma Art Museum, Michael Brophy responds to the current situation by painting tree stumps. His intentions are no doubt laudable, but what matters in art are not feelings but the form feelings take. His paintings look like dim echoes of Anselm Kiefer's corrosively scorched earths.
Three Seattle galleries host a diverse range of artists who bring more to the topic.
First, Howard House, curated by Gary Owen, the already-missed Howard House associate director who took a job at Skkema Jenkins Gallery in New York.
Painter Alexander Kantarovsky seeds his subject matter with the hallucinated aura of celluloid. In his post-"Bladerunner" world, the artificial and natural fuse into silky shades of sci-fi nightmares. His woods are memories distorted by video-game culture. Nothing about his work implies mourning. If this is what we're reduced to, he wants to enjoy it.
Kim Dorland paints fierce and awkward portraits of primitive encounters in the woods. His neon trees are thick pick-up sticks, overwhelmed by their shadows. In Chiara Minchio's paintings, the human ego has eaten the earth. His heads look like Francesco Clemente's on acid. Gone are Clemente's silky expanses. In their place is aggressive static. The thugs that roughed up Dan Rather on the street in New York, asking him, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" could be models for the Dorland sensibility.
Owen's terrific "Paper Trails" expands through the back gallery into space normally used for storage, or maybe for eating lunch.
Cat Clifford creates her own kind of drawing, furrowing the paper for bird flight and the motion of waves. She's amazing. So is Victoria Haven, whose mylar cutout lighting bolt casts colored shadows, and Dan Webb, who cuts conversations into the air.
Born in Manila, Michael Arcega works only in manila folders. Some gimmicks work. Not this one. His lifelike Spanish colonial armor brings nothing to the subject. Nancy Rubins' large sheet of paper covered in pencil scribble is a wonderful mess, a pseudo-industrial metal sheet too wrecked to use.
Franz West contributed a collage of misty paint and decal shamrocks. It's nice, but if it weren't from this honored vet, would we care?
Then there's Andy Warhol's silkscreen of a Jersey cow. Chuck Close said he remembers when Andy became an answer on daytime TV. That's fame. Dead for decades, Andy owns the art world, which makes this cow art royalty.
Through June 2. Howard House, 604 Second Ave. Hours: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.
At James Harris, Claire Cowie examines the idea that the world rests on turtles.
In her view, the turtles are tired. In a drawing titled "Lost," one hangs in space, the bricks of its shell unraveling, its gold claws clutching at nothing. Her work is both dainty and tough-minded. Her animals seize the ground and yet leak in place, as if on the verge of dissolving.
Nor does she stop at turtles. A large rhino carved in foam and covered in acrylic paint and water color commands the floor. It's its own free-standing world, or our world cast in the shape of a single, exhausted animal. Creamy whites rimmed in pastels drip across its hills and dales. On its back, China's Great Wall is an archeological dig in a free-fall ice age. Titled "About Strange Lands," this is Cowie's strongest show in years.
Through June 17. James Harris Gallery, 309 Third Ave. S. Hours: Wednesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.
At Platform Gallery, Patte Loper is also in top form. Now living in New York and teaching in Boston, Loper couldn't get a gallery when she lived in Seattle. She tried and got nowhere, an in-your-face disgrace for the Seattle scene, not as smart as it thinks it is.
She paints glossy stage sets from magazines and movies with real-looking animals in them. On her version of the set from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," a deer pauses on the spaceship runway and looks at us. The mountain in the rear looms into the sky with dark gravity.
Amid the artifice of their surroundings, animals delicately pick their way, as if they had somewhere to go. Her line is deft and her color subdued, with occasional bursts of inexplicable radiance.
Through June 17. Platform Gallery, 113 Third Ave. S. Hours: Thursdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m.
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