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Works on Paper

By Nate Lippens

Some of the most vital work making its way into Seattle's newly christened East Edge galleries has come from the rigorous standards and daring of independent curators such as Fionn Meade as well as marginalized venues such as Crawl Space.

Michael Sweney at Davidson Contemporary put together the recent show Works on Paper as a continuation and exploration of this trend in a more traditional setting. In featuring five artists without gallery affiliations in a remarkably cohesive show, Sweeny demonstrates that this work can in fact stand up well in a commercial space—perhaps surprisingly well.

In demonstrating the progression of this trend, it's interesting to contrast the work and artists included in Sweney's Works on Paper to that of Release & Capture, a show curated by Meade in the spring of 2005 for the Kirkland Arts Center. Of particular note, Mary Simspon, Marc Dombrosky, and Dawn Cerny, all present in the Works on Paper lineup, also appeared in Release & Capture.

For example, Simpson's etchings in Release & Capture featured men and Victorian houses arranged on expanses of white paper, with context removed and people and place disconnected, whereas in her triptych at Davidson, Simspon's sly perspective shift continues, but the figures and locations mingle into the scenes. Her addition of color—a pink to reddish hue—highlights an area of each new piece without sacrificing nuance and mystery to any easy narrative impulse. In addition, Depression-era imagery has been exchanged for the Civil War, giving the mournful, burnished scenes a jagged relevance.

In another vein, of the four who appear in both shows, Dawn Cerny is certainly one of the more prolific contributors to the newly developing East Edge scene. In addition to her participation in Works on Paper, in recent months she also hung a solo show at Gallery 4Culture and was featured in a collaborative show at SOIL.

For the Davidson show, Cerny continues with themes of royalty, governance, and history. Typical is "Ecclesiaste 1:14," a watercolor on graphite portrait of George Washington. The devil is in the details here: dark dollar signs in the upper left-hand corner hover like musical notes or locusts about to descend. The new work is clever, but it lacks the indirection and beauty of her earlier work at Release & Capture, which featured her tiny wall drawing of a prison and swept outward, extending across the wall through a pair of framed prints and turning into busy and beautiful bird cutouts pinned to the wall. It was a stunning piece.

Kristen Ramirez and Tim Cross both experiment with their styles in the show at Davidson (which is often an inviting platform provided by group shows).

Ramirez is known for her sprawling "maximalist" installations with overlapping imagery, often painted directly on the wall. Here she separates her work into individually framed pieces in two series with mixed results. "Sweetened Sprawl #1-4" is a divided urban landscape that doesn't crackle with the energy her work usually commands. The watercolors, such as "Let Your Hair Down and Kick Off Your Drawers" and "Doggone My Good Luck Soul," are more of a piece with her previous work and succeed more as a series than individually. The balance would seem to be between her overlapping instincts and their overly pristine cousins.

"Sweetened Sprawl #2"
© Kristen Ramirez (2006)
Image Courtesy Davidson Contemporary

Somewhat similarly, Cross's abstracted landscapes with ink and watercolor stand out but don't resonate. The bright disturbance of each piece has a near dayglo shock which is undermined by the design elements of the ink drawing. Like Ramirez, Cross is best when his work is more unruly. Here they both settle instead for a design-driven look that is digestible rather than filling.

Marc Dombrosky's work is perhaps the best served by the formalism of a commercial gallery space, and the fear that it would lose something in the translation to framing proved to be groundless. Previously his ephemeral paperworks have been shown almost as-is, stumbled upon, crumpled up—thrown away. Dombrosky is a scavenger of private sentiment. He finds and collects paper detritus such as notes, letters, and to-do lists, and turns them into art with a gesture of sweetness that transcends readymades by embroidering the lettering. It's a subtle transformation that personalizes the publicly posted private communications and creates a yearning and homey dialogue.

Not that they are precious.

Most are funny-odd to funny ha-ha and some are flat-out hilarious. "Dear Kayla" (triptych) isn't three separate works, but one note torn into three pieces. "Pretty Purple Petals" reads like New York school poetry or even heavily distilled art criticism:

"its really pretty
i like it its looks pretty
realistic."