The illusion of space in a painting can be a source of tension between an image and its surface. And the manner in which an artist formally flattens, deepens or manipulates that space determines (and sometimes confuses) the dynamic between viewer and image. Sculpture, of course, presents a different dynamic, co-opting our own unwieldy physical presence. Before we interact with art in this way, we are often affected by the sleek minimal space of a gallery, with its neutral wall colors and distressed concrete flooring. A gallery, like a painting, presents its own illusion. This is the space Gallery 40 manipulates, teasing out some assumptions and contradictions about the value of venue.
Gallery 40, built and curated by photographer Todd Jannausch, is literally forty square feet of wall space on a modular aluminum frame with a twelve volt lighting system, which exhibited the art, music, and even writing of over twenty artists at various art walks and events around Seattle this summer. Installed on the sidewalk amid a gauntlet of galleries during Pioneer Square’s First Thursday, it almost blends in, almost looks official. Upon reading the self-effacing description of the project’s concept in very small type, that “the space has legitimacy because of the artwork in it, and not that the artwork has legitimacy because of the space it is in,” one realizes that Gallery 40 is not an extension of the other galleries, but a foil. It is a gallery stripped down to just art on a wall, if only because art cannot hang in the air.
Despite its outsider pose, Gallery 40 pulls the conceptual stunt: the quality of the work legitimates the space, consistently. Case in point is Serrah Russell’s show “Time Proof,” drawn-on vintage photographs in chintzy gold frames, expansive despite minimal alterations. At first glance we see a nostalgic rendition of the nuclear family living room wall, complete with 1970’s era print wallpaper. But something is off; the responsive geometric shapes Russell has sacrilegiously drafted onto the landscapes or lawn party photos reveal an emotional geometry and gives the scenes an eerie telepathic quality. Or perhaps occluded telepathy, as in magnetic attraction, a candid photo of a middle-aged man and a prim hostess concentrating on some food-wrapping task. The space between the two is filled with an impossible gem-like shape drawn in permanent marker, giving form to an evident complex of human emotion, frustrated communication, and commitment. Although the situation has evaporated, the evidence, the “proof,” exists, and Russell is attempting to access, interpret, maybe even alter.
If Russell is reaching into the past, the photos are reaching into the future. As objects, they span the historical gap, bringing along their own assumptions and dated complications. Some of the stilted robotic titles, such as magnetic attraction, levitation, and waiting for transport, allude to the language of sci-fi entertainment, its naïve and fantastic notions of the future. The contemplative under-image of waiting for transport depicts a half-packed suitcase on a generic and unmade hotel bed, tenderly lit. A black curtain in the background reads as a void, symbolic of the unknown and the limbo of change. Shot through with three horizontal gold lines, the image becomes frantic, omnidirectional, fuzzy, as in obscured by bands of static before the television cuts out.
The landscape photos are different; the drawn lines seem to re-imagine space rather than time. In golden rule, a Durer-like grid has been drawn over a weedy tidal landscape and sky. In behind and before, an alternate highway takes a different trajectory than the one photographed. These have the feel of process pieces, analyses of composition, plans for a second shot impossible to take. Proofs in the sense of a planned layout. One becomes productively lost in the conceptual time-warp of “Time Proof,” and Russell’s formal simplicity shows a confident restraint.
If Gallery 40 had obeyed its original proposal of five shows over five months, Russell might not have been included. Fortunately the concept erupted, acting like a pressure release valve for artists whose Seattle venue options have shrunk considerably in the last few years. All told, including two more shows in September, Gallery 40 will have been installed 17 times by Jannausch, who developed the concept and constructed the wall as a way to “start the conversation” between artists, to show the work outside of the restraints or expectations of galleries.
The work is also literally out-of-doors, allowing art and environment to interact in unexpected ways (luckily no work has been rained on). Lauren Klenow’s August show in Georgetown nicely paralleled this merging of experience and landscape; her delicate sculptures of wax, clay, paper, feathers, and found wood and stone existed humbly among the plangent half-life of south Seattle industry, the sky and moon, as if they held some ancient secret. Klenow’s best pieces evoke surreal transformative landscapes. Galileo, small and unobtrusive, contains worlds. On the plane of a tan brick, several beads of clay capped in wax are scattered near a larger lump of clay partially enveloped in wax. Around the brick, an orbital white line of wax transforms the scene into a microcosm of the universe with Galilean moons resting serenely. On a different scale the piece resembles a desert landscape dominated by an ancient monolith. The brick’s faint traces bring to mind the Nazca geoglyphs, their universal mystery. In looking at this piece I feel like a clumsy giant leaning over a smaller world, which the science of Galileo has privileged my imagination to do.
I like the immediate recognition of A Little Plot of Land, which employs another impossible perspective. Made from a post of laminate wood, moss and a wedge of white clay, the piece is a cross section of the Earth’s crust. Again Klenow distorts scale, turning moss into forest and clay into sky. The wood seems to reach all the way into the core of the Earth. This piece is convincing in its particularly American yearning for the independence and self-reliance that a “plot of land” represents, and provides a sort of mystical rendering of the familiar Earth-slice drawings found in geology books. In no way do these pieces attempt to impress with technical mastery, yet the attentiveness Klenow pays to the inherent properties of her materials lends incredible harmony and sustaining visual interest to her work.
Gallery 40’s limited size fits particularly well with conceptual nuggets like the shows of Klenow and Russell, but only allowed for a sampling of Kimberly Trowbridge’s work, shown outside of Vermillion on Capitol Hill in September. “Lovers in the Bower,” a series of three highly structured paintings with central figures, is from an enormous body of work in progress called “Arcadia,” which carries the ponderous themes of fleeting life and pleasure amidst an ever-present and inevitable death. Impending death is certainly evident in Lovers in the Bower II, in which a faceless couple fall into each other, oblivious to the darkness surrounding them. Particularly disturbing is the oubliette or grave-like hole that the couple is either emerging from or descending into. The rigid geometry of the landscape oddly complicates the rotund shapes of the lovers. Likewise, in Lovers in the Bower III, the highly abstract figures seem more in combat than love, embodying the struggle between abstraction and figuration I feel while looking at this piece. In the end it provides both, if in volatile combination.
Trowbridge always seems to highlight the historical and thematic aspects of her work, but it is much more productive to get your nose close to the canvas and explore small passages of her complex and sensual brushstrokes, where the real theme is—process. The dialogue between color and shape, and the underlying history of form carefully preserved in patches of luminous oranges, yellows and greens despite successive layers of paint, is the true evidence of passing time in these paintings. I find that I have favorite “parts,” like the upper left quarter of Lovers in the Bower I, with its incredible misty depth between the trees. Here is a complex play of color, where the intense yellows of lambent sunlight that seem to be closest are actually the first layer of paint. And the neutral background colors are placed on top, in a Modern play of space.
Like the sensual bliss of Kimberly Trowbridge’s figures, Gallery 40 is an ephemeral thing. After the last show Jannausch claims he’s going to cut up the wall. There never was any plan to create a viable mobile gallery, which would negate its conceptual purpose. The idea was to reevaluate the standard modes of displaying art by adopting the concept of public sculpture, and perhaps to prod future artist collaborations. Jannausch told me he had “wanted to see where the cracks were” in Seattle’s art scene. He apparently found a tightly woven net of artists willing to collaborate and galleries freely offering up their sidewalks to more art.
Gallery 40 will be installed this Thursday the 23rd in front of Vermillion gallery and wine bar, exhibiting Amanda Manitach’s perverse “This Little Pig Went to Market.” The final bash and all-artist installation is Saturday the 25th at NEPO House on Beacon Hill.
www.Gallery40.com
