New art, familiar themes

Rock Hushka might have intended to draw a portrait of the Northwest with his choice of works in Tacoma Art Museum’s 10th Northwest Biennial, but the effect of what you see in the gallery is a portrait of life in general, drawn with an uncompromising eye to its inherent sadnesses. Repression, injustice; human invasion of wilderness; memory loss, suffering, old age, death – they’re all expressed through an intriguing variety of new and interdisciplinary media.

The new media part is deliberate. Hushka, TAM’s senior curator, worked with Vancouver, B.C., curator Renato Rodrigues da Silva to assemble work by 30 artists (or artist teams) working in video, performance, sound and mixed media as well as the usual photography, painting and sculpture. Not only were more artists selected this year than in previous years, the museum also expanded the geographical boundaries: the Northwest now includes art from Alaska and British Columbia as well as Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.

The result is, at first, distracting. This exhibit jumps off the walls with sound, flickering images, dangling installations and startling imagery. But sort patiently through the multimedia jangle and you find a cohesive show that speaks very eloquently of both the original idea – what is Northwest identity? – and the hard facts of life that artists demand that we notice.

If you start walking around the gallery to the right, the first of those facts is old age and death. Among a swath of newcomers, Susie Lee shines like the beacon she is with two of her iconic video portraits of nursing-home residents. The elderly are given a delicate dignity, Lee hypercontrasting the white of a shawl or bandage with the waiting blackness behind them. It’s deeper than sympathy: it’s a wordless understanding, an honoring.

Then there’s the loss of memory and dreams. Kirk Lybecker, a Tacoma native who lives in Portland, gives an intensely chromatic focus to his photorealistic acrylics. In “Every Dream as Misdirection,” his tidy brush paints an abandoned gas station under an ironically blue sky, but the subtle smudgings shift your photo-perception into an uncertain, dream-like state. TJ Norris does a similar thing with a camera. In his series of upwardly-angled shots, his unexplained, uninhabited signs are marked against a white sky like alien abstractions, a memory transformed into meaninglessness.

In her mixed-media boards of pale blue paint, old photographs and pencil-scrawled thoughts, Tacoma artist Juliette Ricci also explores ideas of lost dreams with somewhat less clarity, though she’s visually compelling and worth watching. More coherent is the wordless narrative spun by Matt McCormick in “The Great Northwest,” a video recreation of a 1958 road trip he discovered in an old scrapbook. Enormous still photographs of sweeping, misty coasts contrast with the deserted small towns on the screen and the enthusiastic, faded history.

Political injustice is explored by Dana Claxton, enlarging photographs of old federal documents suppressing Native American history. Gray & Paulsen have a similar concept photographing textbook margin scrawls, which seems pretentious. Henry Tsang takes on the conflict between a growing wine industry and Okanagan Valley natives with a video/photograph/installation work that is hard to focus on, while for Ariana Jacobs, conversation becomes art: She invites viewers to sit with her under a flag-decorated canopy and engage seriously with someone of completely opposing political views. It’s an interesting idea, but hard to gauge without participants.

Society is fractured still further by the three fantastic installations by Flicker Art Collaboratory: a decal grabbing you on the front door, an installation dangling overhead in the lobby, and an animated projection flickering in the gallery, each a mosaic of skin-toned fragments, eyes, noses.

Of course, being the Northwest, there’s a lot of nature, most of it degraded by humans. Jeremy Mangan, a Fife local, is represented not just by his iconic “Trojan Horse,” showing his uncommon mastery of painterly texture and shadow, but “Tent City,” where a circle of preschool-colored tents completely ignores the magnificent mountain behind them. Cynthia Camlin’s wall of watercolored screenprints of a retreating glacier is gorgeous, singing a lament for the gradual disappearance of the lush blue-green glacier, fading like a set of slowly dying lungs.

Then there’s the simple tragedy of being human. Sean Johnson’s “Family Portrait” suspends a worn yellow sofa unbelievably from the wall with industrial-strength Scotch tape, highlighting the sheer fragility and risk of relationship. Matika Wilbur’s photo-portraits of contemporary Native Americans are loaded with emotion. Reza Michael Savafi’s sit-on-my-family-rug-and-watch-my-beach-video doesn’t convey much, but Paul Pauper’s old-school arcade game plays a slideshow of homeless folks’ placards in a gripping juxtaposition. (Bring a quarter to play the slides; it’ll benefit domestic violence victims.)

The highlight of the Biennial is the jumble of burned furniture in the inner courtyard. An homage to a home destroyed by fire, Allison Hyde’s “Mourning the Ephemeral” combines the surreal (chairs, tables and piano improbably stacked on the stone curves of the “Wave”) with the heartbreakingly real: the dark brown, fire-gutted fragments of someone’s life. It’s a beautiful summing up of what art can do in exactly the right place – in this case, a not-so-traditional museum.

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568 rosemary.ponnekanti@thenewstribune.com blog.thenewstribune.com/arts

10th Northwest Biennial

Where: Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma

When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays-Sundays, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. third Thursdays, through May 20

Admission: $10/$8/free for those 5 and younger, and 5-8 p.m. third Thursdays, also free all day Jan. 29 for the Northwest Native Community Celebration

Information: 253-272-4258, tacomaartmuseum.org