For over
three decades, Weldon Butler has inhabited the peripheries of Seattle’s art world, producing a distinctive body
of drawings, paintings, collage, and mixed media assemblage that possess an appealing verve and self-assurance. Regardless of his process or
materials, Butler’s
primary concern has always been the intrinsic energy of the created object. Mindful
of these aims, artist and writer Molly Norris has curated a retrospective of
his work at the Kirkland
Arts Center,
on view through May 3rd.
Butler has made a career of playing the
rigid line against loose, improvised jumps, giving his work bounce and a sense
of surprise. In Pinball (2001), swirling
fluid fields of intense blue and red dance within the geometric confines of an
arched triangle. The same tension is present in works such as Five and Woodcut #1 (2002), where flowing washes of bright color abruptly
bump against the straight edges. Some works on paper, such as Ratio Grid (1994) and Barcode (2001), emphasize order and
precision; in others – Barge (1999),
for example – the media is allowed to bleed into forms of its own. Butler can also fuse
these contrasting dynamics into a single unified shape, as he does in the
elegant, Matisse-like screen print Benjamin
(1994).
There is a
sense of pleasure that surfaces in the above mentioned works (most of which are
the result of one type of print-making process or another) that can also found
in his collages. When manifest in these accumulations and arrangements of
discarded objects, however, it takes on an additional sense of irony. Butler makes use of the
sounds and suggestions of the words on the miscellaneous packaging he recycles,
just as he exploits their textures and colors. In Tootsie Roll (2005) and Ruffles
(2005), the familiar names and logos of these famous snack products cheerfully defy
the torn, crumpled, and flattened state of their wrappers, still announcing the
bargains they afforded. In 22 (2005),
translucent, layered dress patterns matter-of-factly declare the presence of a
woman’s curves and contours with descriptive terms like “Bodice Back” and
“Right Fly” while mapping them out methodically. This counterpoint between
movement and structure is also present in the METRO bus transfers and newspaper
NYSE tables that frequently appear in these works.
On rare
occasions, Butler
interjects a hint of politics in his work, as he does in Flat Flag (2007). Here a photocopied image of a waving American
flag lies frozen on a piece of foamcore, its patriotic colors reduced to a grainy black
and white.
Norris
has wisely chosen to include excerpts of Butler’s
handwritten journals in the exhibition. These plastic-covered, duct tape-sealed
ruminations on the practice of art-making are eloquent, moving expositions on
the loneliness and perseverance that comes with the territory. They draw our
attention to the hidden minor keys that lay just beneath Butler’s bold, melodic surfaces.
