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Empty rooms (so poignant, so silently ripe) are big in contemporary photography, but empty bookcases?
Isaac Layman might have the empty bookcase field to himself, especially because he fills his with the equivalent of paper whiteout.
Layman is part of "Façade" at Soil, a choice group show from Seattle's best-known, long-running art collective. Members sometimes agree to gallery representation but rarely forsake their Soil roots. Like photographer Chris Engman, now with Greg Kucera, Soil loyalists continue to curate and appear in Soil shows.
Engman's "Façade" explores the art truthiness of art photography. Manipulating the photographic record isn't new. Josef Stalin employed masters. They airbrushed into obscurity any high-ranking officials whom the monster in charge deemed ripe for a bullet in the brain.
What's new in the digital age is the ease of manipulation. Hence the show's title, alluding to fictional surfaces created in the cause of visual impact.
Everything crucial about Anne Mathern's seemingly simple shot of a crying young woman was made, not found. "Crying" is about the tone of the figure, blond and pink, reverberating in a pink-and-blue field. She's an over-the-top girlie-girl in touch with her prepackaged feelings. Mathern's figures are way beyond sincerity, and past irony. They're posers frozen in their roles, emblems of feelings detached from the complication of a real response, stripped down and blown up, like emotional parade floats.
In the back of his mind, Claude Zervas was thinking about Robert Rauschenberg's flat cardboard constructions. In "Box 41," Rauschenberg's cardboard is restored to wood and invested with a silky, almost surreal shine.
Todd Simeone started great a few years ago and is now stone-cold, massively brilliant. His landscape is a record cover, and his flash is the sun. The manufactured landscape is of interest to top artists (Cameron Martin, Roy McMakin) but Simeone's take is innovative and effective.
There are no weak links in this show, which includes Thom Heileson, Shawn Landis, Tim Roda, Adam Satushek, Ross Sawyers, Amir Zaki and Jenny Zwick. If Soil were always as good, art galleries would be shamed into doing better.
Samuel Beckett called words a stain on silence, but for certain visual artists, words are absolutely lovely, and these artists extend back to medieval painters who filled their skies with biblical injunctions. Platform Gallery offers a look at a few new and materially inventive uses of a text.
Highlights: Nicola Vruwink crochets sad legends, mostly with cassette tape. I love the one in pink and yellow yarn: "We/Are/All/Bro/ken." Wayne White (art director, "Pee-wee's Playhouse") paints slogans in colors not found in nature. John Jenkins blurs Dick Cheney's image to a jowly pink cloud sporting his dead-wrong prediction about the current American war, which, as we all know, continues.
William Powhida gives a contemporary spin to his splendidly old-fashioned, fool-the-eye technique, in this case a note to himself, the corner of the faux note flapping: "Reminder: You're nothing but a lower middle class art teacher $36,000 in debt, pushing 30. Everything you make better be f---ing brilliant." It is.
Marc Dombrosky finds notes on the street and embroiders the message fragments. I've seen quite a few, and they continue to wow me.
Whiting Tennis likes to move around, from Seattle to New York and back again. In 2002, he had a stellar exhibit at Seattle's Grover/Thurston Gallery, in which he assigned himself the task of uncovering the roots of Colonial American painting.
In Tennis' even more ambitious exhibit at Greg Kucera, the artist imagines a handyman sunk in a crazed solitude, the kind of guy William Carlos Williams had in mind when he wrote, "The pure products of America go crazy."
In the main gallery is a construction impersonating a camper van titled "Bovine." It's shabby chic without the chic. What Tennis pulled off with elan four years ago is a tougher sell this time. He has a capacious mind, but the sculptures and paintings that illustrate his theme neither stand on their own nor build toward the larger idea.
Self-sufficient exceptions include "Bird House Head" and "Sea Foam Silhouette." The paintings effectively mimic other artists (Philip Guston, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Charles Burchfield), but the reason for the imitation isn't clear. Artists such as Jason Rhoades, Martin Kippenberger and Thomas Hirschhorn set a high standard for crowded-to-the-rafters installations, which, when they fail, fail big. Tennis' exhibit is a failure, but it's a failure with a pulse. Odds are good that next time out, he'll score.
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