In conversations and published reports about Seattle’s art scene last
year, the word “departures” would frequently follow the ones “Howard House” as some of the artists long represented by the 10 year-old gallery left to show their work
elsewhere. This year, however, the word can be better used to describe the output
of those artists who stayed behind. Ken Kelly’s fluid and eloquent
matrices of pink, red, and black squares, on view in January and February, resembled
no paintings he had shown before. This March, it was Gretchen Bennett’s turn with
Hello, which runs through April 12th.
Abandoning her recent landscapes of sharply-cut contact paper or found
stickers, she has turned to drawing screen grabs of dead pop icon Kurt Cobain
taken from clips downloaded on YouTube.
Bennett has long been known for her ability to evoke a sense
of place with unorthodox materials and seemingly incongruous imagery. Through
abstraction or figure, she has revealed the presence of forces that remain largely
outside our field of vision. In these soft-edged, lightly rendered Prismacolor
pencil drawings, the late Mr. Cobain embodies a complex array of properties,
conditions, and circumstances that have profound significance for her and for many
of the rest of us.
Bennett grew up in Camas, WA, lived in Seattle in the late 80s
and early 90s, attended graduate school at Rutgers, moved to Brooklyn, then
returned to Seattle. These works can be read as allegorical fragments of her own
life trajectory and those of countless others who came of age alongside Cobain.
They are snapshots of moments in time long past but still vivid in our
collective memory. The temporal distance of the actual and vicarious experience
they allude to manifests itself physically and symbolically through the sequentially
removed processes of filming, digitalized electronic transmission, screen projection, and Bennett’s
drawing, all of which work to both veil and illuminate real historic events.
As portraits of Cobain go, they are about as far from
Charles Peterson’s gritty, black-and-white photos as one could imagine. They do
not convey a sense of sweaty, nightclub-like darkness but rather an
overexposed, almost Blakean luminosity. Bennett resists the impulse to depict
her subject in any quasi-religious fashion, however, which may have been harder
than it appears. (Whether performing on stage or in a drugged-out state of
repose, Cobain frequently found himself photographed in Christ-like poses.) Nor
does her work possess the cloying, hagiographic quality of Elizabeth Peyton’s
rock star paintings.
In her talk at the gallery last month, Bennett discussed the
small town Northwest origins she shared with Cobain and suggested the young Aberdeen man possessed a sensibility
akin to the Northwest mystics. While there may be little resemblance between
Bennett’s faded, rainbow-spectrum drawings and the paintings of Tobey, Graves,
or Anderson,
they can be said to share a certain tone and mood.
Bennett’s most stunning accomplishment, however, may be the
bestowing of new life and deeper significance to an overly-familiar subject. She
has created a series of works that have the power to affect even those like me,
who have little romantic fascination with Cobain, his music, or his times. Hello is less about Cobain than it is
about the ways in which memories of past events and abandoned places can
continue to occupy us.
In the center gallery, Bennett has curated an intelligent
show of works in various media by artists from both coasts which runs
concurrently with her exhibit. Entitled Supernature,
it features Saul Chernick, Matthew Day Jackson, Andrew Guenther, Alexander
Kantarovsky, Robert de Saint Phalle, Suzanne Walters, and Aaron Williams.
