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SEATTLE

WEEKLY

in the News

Columnist

Geov Parrish

is a regular

guest on

Mind Over

Matters on

KEXP-FM

(903)

Saturdays at

830 am and

provides news

commentary

on KBCS-FM

(913) Fridays

at 430 pm

Catch writers

Steve

Wiecking Tim

Appelo and

ARTS

March 30 - April 5 2005

Picking Up the Thread

Howard House ties together the best new conceptual art from Vienna

by Elise Richman

Franz Wests Mercury

(Howard House Contemporary Art)

Theres a German expression to lose the red thread which means losing

ones train of thought In its current show Howard House has found that

thread Julie Ryan a curator artist and writer organized The Red

Thread Glimpses of International Art in Vienna a two-part exhibition

featuring artists working and living at least part time in Austrias capital

Part one of the show is at Howard House the second half is currently on

display at the Educational Alliance Gallery in New York

Vienna has become a magnet for artists from all over the world including

the 15 individuals and artist teams that are part of The Red Thread

Excellent artist residency programs a low cost of living and living art

legends like Franz West are just a few of the reasons

An artistic collaboration with West took Ryan from New York to Vienna

She knows Billy Howard who runs Howard House from the University of

Washingtons School of Art And so the figurative string was strung

connecting the East and West coasts with artists from across the Atlantic

This is a complex exhibit whose emotional tenor ranges from cool

detachment to an almost urgent earnestness Unlike the formal richly

historical city that connects them artists in The Red Thread favor informal

approaches to art making use disposable materials and comment on

contemporary cultural themes

West has two formidable sculptures at Howard House The front room of the

gallery features Mercury (pictured) an ungainly behemoth composed of a

patchwork of fused metal Like many of Wests sculptures Mercury is

meant as an interactive structure that viewers can climb and sit on Bulbous

Gavin

Borchert

discussing

theater film

and music

regularly on

classical

KING-FM

(981)

Mark Fiore

Cartoons

Every

Thursday

nodules extend from its horizontal base and the seams of the dark maroon

metal look like scars rendering it at once vaguely obscene and absurdly

playful

Sisyphus the other West sculpture on display is a bulky conglomeration of

bits and wads of paper propped in the back room on a makeshift plinth (base

block) Though its as solid as the boulder its title references its surface is

like oozing skin partly coated with poured murky paint partly cloaked in

small clumps of newspaper detritus

The strenuous act of making each of these sculptures is eminently apparent

and central to the content of Wests work West considers creation a

symbolic act As you might expect he likens the artistic process to the plight

of Sisyphus the mythological figure who eternally rolled a boulder up a hill

only to have it come crashing back down For West art involves a

Sisyphean search for what he calls the absolute through the seemingly

senseless accumulation of materials However unlike Sisyphus futile quest

Wests process can lead to epiphany making sense of the senseless

Similarly Viennese artist Elisabeth Penkers art serves a facilitative

function easing the act of translation Penker uses Haida iconography in her

multimedia work because it provides potent visual symbols that

communicate single words and whole sentences simultaneously Her prints

at Howard House feature fragments of icons floating in the papers white

space They are spare visually arresting characters that employ an

iconographic language as encoded symbols of communication

Also featured in The Red Thread is Donald Baechler an internationally

known American painter who spends extended periods of time in Vienna

Baechler equalizes his imagery by painting it all in the same style For him

the source of an image doesnt matter whether its a drawing by Picasso or

graffiti on a bathroom wall What matters is the newfound context his

paintings provide

Victory by Default is part of Baechlers Skull series In this piece a painted

skull gapes from the dirty yet sensuous confines of a large canvas Terry

cloth and wrinkled rags provide literal texture and reference the world

outside the paintings boundaries Splatterings of color around the skull like

the self-conscious marks of Jasper Johns seem to express the language of

paintingmdashhue and gestural strokesmdashin a factual rather than illusional

manner

Another American painter Lisa Ruyter lives half-time in Vienna where she

runs an influential gallery She works from photographs projected onto

large-scale canvases tracing the contours of the projected imagery with

consistent black outlines In a way that seems arbitrary she paints the shapes

formed by her contour lines in flat designer colors Man of Means based on

a photo of fashion photographers looks like a scrambled color-by-numbers

painting I cant do justice to the unusually rich assortment of conceptual art

in The Red Thread Youll just have to see it for yourself Thomas

Baumans thrashing triangular foil blanket Walter Seidls slide show of

staged snapshots Markus Schinwalds photograph of a contortionist and the

other thoughtful works connected by The Red Thread

The Red Thread Glimpses of International Art in Vienna runs through

April 30 at Howard House 604 Second Ave 206- 256-6399 1030 amndash5

pm TuesndashSat Free