April 15, 2009

How does an artist awaken their creative self when it appears to lie before them in an advanced state of dormancy? Musician and performance/visual artist Wynne Greenwood seeks to explore this predicament in her work Sister Taking Nap, which she performs with her silent collaborator Gina Young at On the Boards through Sunday, April 19. A piece with little movement, a few hard to discern sculptures, a video monitor turned on and off, some recorded sounds and a series of spoken phrases repeated again and again in the darkness, Sister is ostensibly about a woman’s visit to a once-vital and poetic sister who has retreated from life and is suspended in a comatose mode of existence within her dismal home. But for all intents and purposes, this brief (40 minute) work is a dramatization of an internal dialogue in which the artist’s desire struggles to awaken the artist’s inspiration.

Despite Greenwood’s ability to establish some appropriate tonal variances, Sisters never develops enough compositional traction for anything beyond the obvious nature of the allegory to emerge from the stage. Without the requisite internal tension, the whole thing feels slack, tepid and a bit forced. Her intentions may be lofty, but the work’s ambitions too modest. Greenwood seems oblivious both to the long history of the performance art genre and the more brilliant, recent practitioners who have built their own oeuvre upon it. How many times have we seen works like this, chuckled half-heartedly at moments, and left the theater with a shrug?

Greenwood’s corresponding visual art exhibition, Sweated, is on view at Seattle University’s Hedreen Gallery through June 27. Her layers of window-length curtains, as seen from my car driving down 12th Avenue, look quite lovely on a sunny weekday morning.