'But Seriously, Folks,' there's just something funny about this show
Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, December 20, 2007
Pete and Repeat are sitting on a fence. Pete falls off. Who's left?
-- Joke in Bruce Nauman's video "Clown Torture"
Nothing is as stale as an old joke. Funny one day and intolerable the next, jokes rely on surprise. Take it away, and a joke wheezes to its finish line, spraying the audience with bad breath and spittle.
And that's why contemporary artists like them. Tired jokes painted onto Richard Prince's canvases or repeated by Bruce Nauman with the insistence of a dental drill are not meant to entertain. That's the state of humor in art's dominant paradigm, but it doesn't describe the art in "But Seriously, Folks" at the Francine Seders Gallery. With Seders, Seattle artist Barbara Noah organized the exhibit to survey Northwest artists whose work is funny without being frightening.
She's out to prove that lighthearted is not the same as shallow. It certainly isn't for her, even though she has always been attracted to the corny for its own sake. Instead of exploiting its flaws, she exalts its possibilities, with, for instance, real satellite photos colored to a high shine. In their foregrounds, they feature a balloon dog circling the Earth or a hat (no place to hang it) in its own orbit.
The cheese stands alone. Happily for Noah, she has company.
Erik Geschke's "Touch (Ghost)" suggests a sad sack so timid he's afraid to bore you with the sight of his body. His dead-white hands emerge from a white shirt and hang on the wall, having nowhere else to go.
The team of Dawn Cherny and Alice Tippit work in a relay system, one starting a drawing and the other finishing it, each the final word on her own production. This non-collaborative collaboration makes for wonderfully awkward moments in watercolor and graphite. One painted an elegant tree, wearing green leaves like a luxurious fur muff. Proud of itself, the tree ignores its shadow, which is blackened, bare-limbed and sinking into a pool of jealous regrets.
This could be the last time to see Joseph Park's silky drawings of elephants in human roles at a gallery, as he has moved on. His fine fluid line is alive, both in pencil and the small oil paintings, such as "Moran," a cinematic view of the artist's crypt, with vines creasing its surface.
Made of bras, lace, foam, fabric and various attachments, Jennifer McNeely's sculptures are nests of forlorn desire. They are shy, burrowing creatures, inadvertently naked and making the best of their reduced circumstances.
Stephen McClelland paints rigorous blobs. He cushions his spinning tops and figurative fragments in webs of color strokes. The nests function as trampolines for his abstracted shapes, which threaten to bounce out of the frame.
Kathryn Glowen turns cloth fragments and what look like dust bunnies into celestial maps. Are they funny? No, but they're sweet.
The same can't be said of Robert Mirenzi's collages. His is the darkest humor in the show, with party trick hands that can't pull apart and compasses guaranteed to lead you astray. I love "Auto Pilot," a series of found-paper birds in a perch in a box. Turn the dial and they smash their beaks into the ground, falling for the dial trick every time.