ANTIQUE ROW
Our fifth stop was Antique Row. Our intent was to visit The Helm, but we also stumbled upon the Lark Gallery in the bowels of Sanford & Son Antiques.
(1) Family Portraits: Current and Future Works at the Lark Gallery.
(2) The sign outside The Helm Gallery.
Left to right: (3) View from the sidewalk, looking at the left side of the gallery; (4) View from the sidewalk, looking at D.W. Burnam's Roads in the Hollow.
We went into Sanford & Son Antiques to view the strange toys of Mondo Bizarro. Along our way through the labyrinth that is Sanford & Son, we discovered the Lark Gallery among the middle level shops. The pieces in Family Portraits: Current and Future Works consisted of mostly square pieces of cloth with ragged edges that had old photos printed upon them and captions added via typewriter. I found the various pieces to be rather clever.
The disparate works in The Helm's Free for All were hit or miss. Some pieces felt like the artists just didn't care or don't have any real talent. I won't discuss those. My favorite piece was Roads in the Hollow by D.W. Burnam. It was twenty-five ink and graphite drawings on small pieces of ragboard. The pictures were collected into six or seven related sets (depending on how the viewer groups them) that depicted liminal zones—places currently absent of people that would be great places to skateboard or wander. Most of the individual small drawings also had a sound depicted in a style familiar from comic books.
The child's favorite work was Stabbed Treat by Michael Simi. It was a giant Rice Krispies treat (perhaps four feet in width and height, and almost one foot thick) hung on the wall and stabbed with a hundred or so colored plastic knives.
Another piece by Michael Simi that caught my attention was his Sex Offenders From My Home Town. It was six square white pillows with the photographed faces of purported sex offenders printed on them. The effect was disturbing because an object that represents comfort and security and home was defiled by the presence of the photographs of these six men and what they represent.
Two large framed archival inkjet prints—one of two hands of two different individuals and the other of the foreheads and crowns of two men in the bottom of the images "framing"—by Fire Retard Ants (Fred Muran and Michael Simi) also made the child and I laugh. Their absurdity made us both ponder stories to explain what we were viewing.
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HILLTOP
Our final stop was at Fulcrum on Martin Luther King Jr. Way. It was the highlight of our entire series of Tacoma gallery visits.
(5) Fulcrum Gallery as viewed from across the street.
Left to right: (6) Acrylic paintings by Julia Ricketts; (7) one of Julia's canvasses, I believe Meditation IV.
The exhibition at Fulcrum was the highlight of our art excursion. Julia Ricketts: Excerpts and Variants presented us with various acrylic on canvas paintings by Julia Ricketts. Most were 24" x 24" inches in size, although two were 36" x 36". Each canvas consisted of a visual field that had been divided up by rectilinear boxes that were well-defined by very bold lines. Many of the canvasses were bisected by a vertical line that was not as well defined as the lines that defined the boxes, but were just as assertive. The boxes were then painted in various colors that didn't honor the lines that defined them, bleeding over, into, and across their boundaries, but just slightly. The colors were bold and simple.
I found all of them intriguing, especially A Page from Summer, Green Chord I, Green Chord II, and Excerpt in Orange I.
There were also a few mixed media works in the back room, although I found them to be less powerful than the acrylic paintings.
The person in the gallery during our visit also let us peek into the far back room at the "set" for the performance piece/multimedia installation The Road to Heaven. The child really liked the tile square with drain set into a larger linoleum square set into a larger square of grass that sat in the center of the room.
Fulcrum is one of those galleries that we will definitely be visiting again and again.
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[Artwalk 1 - Theater District]
[Artwalk 2 - Convention Center/Central Downtown]
[Artwalk 3 - University of Washington, Tacoma]
[Artwalk 4 - Museum District]
1 comment:
I've only been to the Lark Gallery once, but I felt like it was a wonderful little (well-hidden) treasure. Looks like the exhibit you saw was an interesting one. :)
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