Hadley + Maxwell arrive at the door with a customized kit, like magi schooled in marketing. In the kit are home-decor solutions designed to correspond to the homeowner's answers on a quiz. The quiz veers from the absurd to the profound, including: Which objects in your home do you love and hate? If you could own any three artworks, what would they be? Has your house been broken into? Which rooms can we work in? Who do you idolize? Even: "Circle one. Frank Gehry is: a) a pervert. b) a romantic. c) misguided and confused. d) a genius. e) other (please specify)."

Here is where art gets personal, comes over for a visit. Yet this is professional, because the homeowners having the alterations done are art producers: curators, gallery directors, dealers, other artists. When the installations are complete, the artists do not do the documenting themselves. Instead, drawing a line between design and distribution, Hadley + Maxwell summon architectural photographer Sven Boecker to shoot the modified rooms as if for a lifestyle mag. His glossy photos are the "final" products in "The Décor Project," a bitingly smart experiment by what sounds like the high-concept design firm of Hadley + Maxwell.

Their real names are Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens, of Vancouver, B.C., and their Howard House show is the couple's first American solo outing. What they've created is neither studio nor public art. It is made in a hothouse of cultural commerce, where they can raise big, juicy questions about what artists do, and with and for whom.

On one level, the photographs are beautified receipts of exchange between people making art and people showing it. In a few of the seven situations in "The Décor Project," the subjects were the direct gatekeepers for dissemination of the photographs, running galleries where they'd be shown or editing journals where they'd be published. Every subject, except the one in Seattle, Frye Art Museum curator Robin Held, represents a venue where the artists have displayed work. (Billy Howard declined to be a subject.) There is more than a hint here of the implication that art arrives at its public by an incestuous commingling of artist and producer.

But this work is not an institutional critique. In a way that is far from unpleasant, the premise leaves the viewer outnumbered and out in the cold. Instead of the warm monogamy implied in a direct relationship between artist and viewer, this is triangulated voyeurism. It is impossible not to be curious about the transactions these images represent. The artists make no attempt to hide the details, providing the subjects' quiz responses in a binder. But the glamorized documents for sale on the wall deliciously defer exactly what has transpired, and give the feeling that some transaction continues. According to project rules, each home was immediately restored to its original state, but one is left to wonder about the imprint the project left, both on the relationship between the home and the homeowner, and the artists and their subjects. The images themselves, displayed in a prominent gallery, remain in the life cycle of artistic production and presentation. The way they are received could change the conditions of each relationship.

They also twist the notion of gallerists representing artists; here, artists represent gallerists and curators. In question is the nature of representation, a timely subject for the pluralistic contemporary curator Held, who left the Henry Art Gallery pledging to expand the representational focus of the Frye. In Held's apartment, Howes and Stephens arranged matching desk scenes pushed against each other to look as though one is real and one is a reflection. But close inspection reveals that the mirror conceit is false; there is no original and copy.

Each photograph betrays and obscures something of the participants, and of the process of gaining access to each other. In the case of Risa Horowitz, access was overtly limited. The Winnipeg gallery director was reticent about participating, confining the artists to her dining room. So Howes and Stephens, in a tone of almost mocking circumspection, covered all the room's objects in a protective blanket of white foam-core. In tribute to On Kawara (Horowitz expressed affection for repetitious minimalism), the artists painted the date on the wall, then the time of the sunrise. Each of the 17 resulting photographs represents the look of the room hourly until sunset. The interloping colors are vivid; the room is shy and unyielding.

Conversely, the artists seem almost conspiratorial with Jonathan Middleton, the curator of Vancouver's Western Front. In the middle of one of his rooms, they built a helix of stacked books and CDs, a neat, sculptural locked vault of intellectual information. In Middleton's bedroom are the piles of what has been displaced during the redecoration, giving the shoot an air of backstage authenticity. But in the gallery, maps of the objects referring to each photograph offer a conspicuously empty form of familiarity, like a catalog. Neither seeing nor naming the stuff is knowing it, or its owner.

There's the added layer of interest here that art decorates homes, and that these gleaming photographs would make lovely additions to the living room. Yet the secret knowledge they flaunt suggests it would be about as possible to own them as to take over someone else's memories. The high finish of the photographs does the opposite of make them complete. They tantalize instead of satisfying. Where is the art? Lorna Brown, the Vancouver curator and director of Artspeak, told Howes and Stephens that she wished she owned Manet's portrait of Berthe Morisot with a fan. So they made it for her, staging a re-creation in a mirror with a live model and capturing that on film. That Morisot portrait exists nowhere but in the photograph; does it exist?

"The Décor Project" cleverly provokes desire for an unreachable real thing, but it also is a series of simple tests of power and vulnerability that vary according to the participants. Some cases give the distinct feeling that not only the audience, but the artists, are seeking. Their work with Linda Dornan and John Asimakos, artists who are members of a New Brunswick gallery, is the result of both sides taking risks in trusting each other. Dornan has been sole caretaker of Asimakos, who suffers with dementia, for a decade. She granted Howes and Stephens entry into Asimakos's former studio, now a storage area, where they tied nearly everything together in a dense web of string that fills the room, blocking entry. This is the artists' most direct gesture. It is not a formal exploration. It is a gift that concretely honors the disease. If the studio is a measure of Asimakos's mental activity, everything is present, but nothing is accessible.

In elevating the before-after narrative of the home makeover to a quest about understanding and representation, Howes and Stephens have created a body of work haunted by negative space. The trick in these alluring nets of absence and presence is figuring out which is which.

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Last Sunday America learned that Johnny Carson — the former host of NBC’s The Tonight Show who for thirty years reigned as the undisputed king of late night television — had died at the age of 79.

For days, cable and broadcast news programs were inundated with washed-up and forgotten Hollywood celebrities; Mickey Rooney, Phyllis Diller, Rich Little, and David Brenner all clamored for a rare moment on national TV. I felt like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard watching Gloria Swanson play cards with Buster Keaton and other “waxworks” from the silent film era.

Since Carson went into seclusion twelve years ago, becoming a recluse within the confines of his Malibu compound, the world has changed in dramatic ways. His unique role in our popular culture, however, remains unfilled.

One of the compliments frequently bestowed upon Carson is that he was, above all else, a good listener. While this may sound to some like a veiled insult — a kind of absence of qualities — it lies at the core of Carson’s greatness. His quick sense of humor, ability to interview anyone regardless of their background or accomplishments, and his legendary ear for and appreciation of young comic talent, all stem from this attribute.

Even when making jokes at their expense, Carson always exhibited a graciousness and deference towards his guests that revealed a self-confidence rarely seen in public life.

The centerpiece of Carson’s Tonight Show was his monologue, an eight-minute routine at the opening of each show that dealt humorously — and at times poignantly — with events of the day. During thirty calamitous years of its history, America turned to Carson’s monologue as it attempted to sort out Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the scandals of the Reagan years. It is difficult to imagine anyone in our current era, entertainer or politician, who would be capable of distilling the mood of the nation so succinctly each night as it pauses briefly before going to bed.

In an era before intense partisan politics, Carson always came off as wise, impartial, trustworthy, and suspicious of authority. An indigenous Midwestern clarity seemed to have collided with the dubious cultures of show business and Southern California, resulting in a deep-seated sense of the absurd.

During my pre-teen years, it was this dubious culture that kept me up at night to watch the Tonight Show. Carson presided over the mysterious and alluring world that was adulthood; Manhattans, cigarette smoke, bad suits, comb-overs, and — strangest of all — sexual double-entendres. I remember sitting in front of the television in my pajamas trying my best to decipher the strange, foreign language spoken by the likes of Dean Martin, Buddy Hackett, or Charles Nelson Reilly.

Like Johnny Carson himself, those days are gone forever.

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Telling stories is one of the oldest functions of painting, and it remains one of the reasons many people paint. Unlike artists of the past, however, who painted tales (like those of the Bible) that their audience already knew, contemporary art features narratives that are often subjective and self-referential. Artists as different as Edward Munch and Marc Chagall have used narrative art to explore the world of their own memories, experience and desires, and their pioneering work has inspired many artists who followed.

The Seattle scene includes a number of strong artists in this modern narrative vein, including Gaylen Hansen, Fay Jones, and James Martin — this last artist also on view this month with his trademark madcap scenarios at Foster-White.

Like these other painters, Joe Max Emminger has evolved a distinctive, non-literal style, one which involves repeat appearances by a small troupe of characters. Like Hansen and Martin, Emminger frequently includes an alter ego, in his case a mustachioed gentlemen with a black fedora. Also shared with his colleagues is a certain floating, free-associative quality, like that of a dream.

What sets Emminger apart, and gives his images a particular punch, is the extreme elegance and simplicity of his pictorial language. Recalling the late work of Matisse (clearly a major influence) Emminger relies on a black, calligraphic outline and bold colors to animate his ultra-spare scenarios. The modest-sized works, painted in acrylic on paper, are filled in with flat, solid color, most frequently a vivid red and/or blue. His human and animal characters have a deceptively primitive, cartoon-like quality: heads are seen either straight on or in profile; bodies are always front-facing. Settings are also kept to a minimum — a stick-figure tree here, an unadorned horizon line there.

In many of the scenes, the artist is accompanied on a high-spirited, outdoor excursion by his wife and dog. Pictures of the couple without their canine companion seem to focus on various aspects of their relationship, while pictures of each of them alone depicts their solitary interaction with the natural or spiritual world. The mood is generally upbeat but not sentimental, with the occasional hint of the tragic or ominous. And not a single one of these pictures offers an easy or obvious interpretation, straightforward as they seem to be.

There is clearly something gone awry, for example, in the picture with the ironic title Beautiful Summer. The painting portrays the artist and his wife comfortably seated inside the highly elongated body of a giant, striding bird. The bright red Joe Max Emminger figure wears a black hat and carries what looks like the branch of a tree; his bright red spouse wears a summer hat and a string of pearls. Glowing in a ultramarine sky is a white, midsummer sun (or moon?), while below a coat rack tree holds a full load of ripe red pears. The fly in the ointment of this dry season idyll is a mysterious figure: curled up, colored grey-violet and either lying upon or within the ground with his eyes closed, letting the clawed feet of the energetic bird literally walk upon him, separated from the rest of the scene in his own panel of dark green.

Whoever the prone figure is, his appearance strongly suggests that he is both part of the ongoing life of the main characters — and yet unable to share it. The artist seems to be alluding to the way that someone absent and unseen can still be a living, if unconscious presence in our everyday life. The understated treatment of the subject seems especially pointed.

Presence and absence also seems to be the theme of another husband-and-wife image, fittingly entitled Memory. Here another idyllic moment, a couple kissing while exchanging gifts, is complicated by the inclusion of a disembodied male head, floating in front of or inside the figure of the woman. Is this figure meant to be the future, or the past? A child yet to be conceived, or a loved one lost?

Aside from it’s ultimately inscrutable narrative, a picture like Memory is highly satisfying on a formal level. The looming figures of the husband and wife are like mirror images of each other, each with giant heads and tiny, delicate hands and feet — but the man is almost leg, the woman almost all body. Their transparent, pointed profile noses overlap to make a perfect triangle, with an extended outline that echoes the shape of the man’s hat and collar. Each figure has an associated celestial body — he a shimmering white sun, she a golden moon. And the woman is filled in with the same red-orange shade as the surrounding earth, while the man is colored with the rich blue of a summer sky.

Compared to his paintings of even ten years ago, the current work of Joe Max Emminger uses a much more limited range of imagery and approaches. The palette has been simplified, the pictorial strategy narrowed down. For some artists, the taking on of new challenges and a varying of the mix can be energizing. But in the case of Emminger, now working at what seems to be the top of his form, less seems to be more. Trying to suggest a world of feeling and experience with such simple strokes has made him stronger as both a painter, and a teller of compelling tales.

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Last fall, I saw a photo of one of Axel Lieber's sculptures in his exhibition Release, now at the Henry Art Gallery, and I became very excited. I'm drawn to intricate works, and the photo I saw showed a large tangle of shapes and lines hanging in space, and I thought: "but how can I explain my excitement?" In the photo I saw a ball of energy, with pieces flying out in all directions: a window here, a pipe there. Was a home exploding? I decided that the photograph took too much away from the immediacy of seeing the hanging tangle up close and I felt sure that when I was in its presence all would be revealed. As soon as I saw Lieber's two large sculptures suspended from the ceiling of the Henry's East Gallery I felt my stomach tighten. I liked them, I was drawn to them, but I still had trouble explaining why.

Cottage and Bakery, the two sculptures that make up Release, hang about a foot off the floor. They are constructed of everyday items: plywood, hardware, and plastic tubing. Both structures expand outward like explosions, but on closer inspection, they look more like atoms. The walls of the buildings form the center of the structures, while windows, pipes, and fixtures radiate outward. These buildings have been quite deliberately turned inside out. Cottage and Bakery rotate gently in space, revealing their insides, which now splay outward from the building's walls. The exhibit's press Release indicates that Lieber enlarged the parts for the buildings found in a model train kit and set about rearranging them in different ways. The pieces are bolted together with everyday hardware that brings to mind the old Meccano children's toy.

Cottage and Bakery explore the secrecy of buildings and the curiosity that passersby have with what's inside them. Cottage displays items from the building's inner life jutting out from its walls: a bed frame here, a stove there. The sculptures play with the complexity that buildings hide behind their walls. If we could view Cottage and Bakery as normal buildings, their outside walls would hide their secrets. I felt a voyeuristic pleasure in seeing the contents of these buildings revealed from Lieber's turning the buildings inside out. The items from inside the structure are thrust outward toward the viewer, but the violence of their confused positions is tempered by the way the entire structure gently moves in space.

Group Dynamic, the other piece in the exhibition, occupies its own room behind Release in the East Gallery. Lieber constructed Group Dynamic for the exhibition at the Henry. It consists of a series of planes created by stretched material, notably suspenders and rubber bands that divide the room into rectangular sections: some reaching the floor, some hanging overhead. In the center of the room stands the most solid part of the installation: a geometric tower constructed of cheap particle board furniture. Walking in and around the spaces that make up Group Dynamic gives the impression that the planes created by the rubber bands mark solid, if transparent, partitions that intersect each other. Passing through one of these barriers produces the momentary sensation that one might trip over them or fall through them. It's a strange sensation to have material as flimsy as a rubber band create the illusion of solidity, and that may be what Lieber is driving at. The barriers that inhibit movement in and around Group Dynamic are imagined, while the most solid structure in the piece appears flimsy by comparison.

My encounter with Lieber's sculptures left me thinking about the different ways we divide up space. Walking through the planes of rubber bands in Group Dynamic reminded me of childhood encounters with lines painted on the floor accompanied by "authorized persons only beyond this point" signs or the ever-frustrating "you must be this tall for this ride" sign. Nothing prevented me from breaching these barriers, yet they seemed very real, and there was a thrill in putting just one foot beyond the painted line to see what happened. Lieber's barriers function the same way: nothing prevents the viewer from crossing in between the spaces Lieber creates, but he may briefly pause wondering what is going to happen. Standing in front of one of these planes made me feel the desire to step over even before I moved. I felt the potential energy needed to trespass in the calm moment before the boarder is breached. The viewer is invited to walk through the work, but in so doing he gets the feeling that he is disrupting it. Perhaps some viewers felt nothing of this and strode confidently through the gallery. For those of us who are brought up short by walls that inhibit our curiosity and signs demanding our obedience, we feel a thrill of being able to walk through the barriers in Lieber's work.

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