Clusters: a fitting word for feelings and observances mustered at For The Soul, an exhibition at Common Ground Gallery, presented by Geheim Gallery in Bellingham, WA and Lion and Lamb Art: both projects steered by Jackson O’Rourke, the latter in collaboration with Rachel Lambert.

All images courtesy of the author. Yale Wolf.

First I have to address the elephant in the room, or rather the excavated-looking, rusty, full-size auto body frame, with a neon-adorned interior, sprouting wild flowers and moss, in the center of said room. Yale Wolf’s Neon Car has taken on a new look since exhibiting at Railspur about a year ago. Last year, the trunk was full of daisies. This year, he collaborated with a local florist whom I had the chance to meet in the gallery; introduced to me as Bridgette. A more elaborate and intentional execution of this floral endeavor successfully places the car in its own landscape. In a cavernous gallery where work could easily end up clinging to just the outskirts, Wolf’s to-scale rusted car frame makes a satisfying centerpiece.

Beyond Wolf’s stationary sculpture, however, I’m immediately drawn to a painting featuring a symbol I can’t get off my mind. As I approached it, a beam of light refracted off the aluminum can of seltzer water from which I was taking a drink. It cast a perfect halo above Disposition, a work by Benjamin Ewing. At it’s almost center, a four-point sparkle emits a shimmer of light within a rectangular canvas embedded in a black and gridded panel; it mirrored almost perfectly the ray bouncing off my beverage. It has a sleek modern design and nice craft that is quickly attractive and familiar.

I move on. Mark Russell Jones’s paintings follow as I begin on the natural circular path to navigate through this space. I wrote into my Remarkable tablet, which accompanies me at all art-related attendances, “dusty, aurora borealis-looking paintings crossed with the sentiment of a Mark Rothko. They are somber.” I also note the artist was born in 1969, I think because it made it make sense why his paintings looked they way they did, and because it indicates some diversity of generations brought together in this room. Continually careful auras begin to reveal themselves. Cynthia Camlin’s soft and busy drawings are far perkier. Dandelion-like white pencil marks drift from numerous center-points, across an iron gall ink-laden piece of paper, with a sensitivity to something unknown and unseen. Having recently written about ecology in ten midwestern artists’ works, seeing the attention to ecology through Camlin’s work feels meant to be.

Micha Ofstedahl’s work is an unassuming early favorite of mine, if only because it surprised me. It’s an otherwise bland landscape that the artist manipulated through the application of a mysterious, orb-like web, which perfectly blends into the colors of the landscape through highly controlled strokes of a skinny brush. This painting is definitely fucking with me; later I hear a similar sentiment towards it from another on-looker.

With my back to Ofstedahl’s work, I am now looking across Wolf’s neon car, facing similarly rippling paintings by LA based painter Elly Minagawa; tendrils of the wildflowers and grasses touch the bottoms of the work in this viewing frame. There are two paintings that share an aesthetic that notoriously gainstraction on social media, using an airbrush tool favored by a younger generation of artists, hatching dreams onto canvases in a brushless rendering. Random images are piecemealed together to build a surreal, non-linear narrative. One in particular is confrontational and makes me a bit nervous, a target perfectly centered over shadowed, bent over bodies with their heads in their hands or on their knees. The target in the center of the canvas has the characteristic of Ewing’s diamond shaped twinkle, but the intensity of a nightmare. From the target to the neon car to the matrix landscape in a golden frame, to the diamond in a wooden night sky, a thread of life is pulled to unravel what I can best describe as a simulation.

I can make a full swoop of sight from various parts of the gallery and see how one work aligns with another, creating a web of connections, yet I had already assessed that there was too much work in here to create an exhibition that seeks a meaning deeper than a showcase similar to what can be witnessed at the Art Fair itself; in a cramped cubicle. Having visited Common Ground many times, that is always the nature of their sprawling group shows. The web of artists in Seattle is quite sprawling, and the salon-style shows are a great way to get it all in one place. In coordination with the Seattle Art Fair, I can see the opportunity and draw to put as many eggs as possible in the basket with For The Soul.

As I am beginning to draw connections between works in For The Soul, there is one glaring element of obstruction that is hard to get past. Between every three to four works are large placards that share the artists’ bios and artist statements, plus a photo of the work already on display, stacked atop each other on the wall. It feels redundant and adds to the congestion of the space. Plus, the placards are popping off the wall as the tack holding them up expands in the room, warming from the sun and the bodies taking up place. Having been in this gallery many times before, attending group shows that are sometimes hung salon-style to work with the very rectangular layout and create a web-like scene, this does quite the opposite. I have witnessed multiple sculptures that would hang or stand in the space, and the projector screen on the back wall would be utilized; here, that screen is just an obstruction. While Wolf’s car splices the rectilinearity of the room, it forces people to move in just one direction or the other like skaters at a roller-rink. For The Soul coincides with Seattle Art Fair, advertising itself as an alternate and more sincere way to experience intimate works, expressed by Common Ground’s promotional material. However, the show fell short of achieving such sincerity, feeling it was more about the roster of artists rather than the cohesiveness of a show that truly shows innovative work; it just doesn’t quite fit together. It needs more space to breathe.

Amongst the batch of artists whose work was new to me, I was certainly happy to also see some familiar works like Anthony White’s QUICK FIX. I assumed that his PLA spun painting was the origin of the name of the exhibition, looking at carrots dangling on a stick behind the text “Chicken Soup,” in the same font used on the cover of the book series, Chicken Soup for the Soul. Then I found Gage Hamilton’s painting of a to-scale backyard-type fence in a 30’’ x 30’’ frame. For the Soul, it is titled. In my Remarkable, I jotted down, “found the ‘soul.”

Nancy Mintz is another familiar name. Her work, The Bricks of Vashon, is a conglomeration of orange rocks stuck to the wall in a rectangular shape, perfectly centered between the neighboring works. The perfect containment perhaps is how the work is to be viewed, yet I feel desperate to break this perfect linear way of seeing in space and scatter the rocks across a wider swath of the wall like rocks in space, or on a shoreline. Everything is perfectly at gallery standard height, creating a horizon line of work. It leaves behind a clinical feeling I know is supposed to be professional and polished, yet is a bit stuffy. I am not suggesting hanging the work Salon-style, but less work on the walls, or no placards, would leave more space for work like Joe Rudko’s drawing and John Clement’s sculptures, so they are not smashed towards the back of the gallery, adjacent a dimly lit corridor that heads to the back of the space.

There are also a few pieces more than necessary, in my opinion. The tightness of the paintings are not being held up in works like Brandon Vosika’s cutesy trompe l'oeil illustrative painting, The Hand I Do Not Control, or Jessica Brilli’s highly designed painting, which is nice to look at but lacks a mysteriousness even Vosika’s prodds at a little. Everyone wants to show an Anthony White, and the work Quick Fix is extremely clever for the nature and title of the show. However, its contrast to the delicate Sheila Kline weavings (and the clunky placard and thermostat right between the two) leave a lot to desire. I understand the placement of the two close to each other with their textural qualities, yet White’s work stands out so starkly it wasn’t as successful to receive. I think back to his exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum after White received the Neddy Award. There was a similar painting, where just one subject occupies a panel, as opposed to the plethora of symbols typical to his larger works, of just an Energizer Bunny. It was hung probably six feet higher than the standard gallery height, so you had to physically look up to it like some kind of god. Considering the carrots are even dangling on a string in QUICK FIX, it truly seems like a missed opportunity to hang the work high up, taunting the viewers.

Missed opportunities and wonky design choices aside, the show is successful in showing cool work, yet they made the space more challenging than it really is. I expected something different from this space, truthfully. The sterility of many of the Seattle Art Fair booths I have seen over the years (having attended on and off for the past 7 years) is happening in this room. There is more life and soul in spaces like Common Ground. The work chosen certainly has it. The space…they are lucky they could fit Wolf’s car in there. It is very worth it feeling the energy of many of this work together and finding your own throughlines, so I look forward to seeing how it is responded to over the course of the fair.

Searching For The Soul

Scenes From Home