Untitled photograph by Josephine McCullough is one of a suite of eight featuring the same scale house on stilts.

No one work of art can “say it all,” but the poster image for Landscape and Identity tells the story that led Jason Lanegan to once again gather a group of artists whose works address some concern they share with him. Unlike curators who start from a notion and try to find art that expresses it, Lanegan watches what his friends, students and colleagues are doing, what moves them to make their art, what has recently animated them, and gives it a name. A firm foundation is important in life, supporting both a sense of place, of home, and an identity. So his “Firm Foundation” starts with what gallery director James Walton calls a “granny cart,” a wire basket on wheels that can hold shopping, laundry, or anything that needs gathering. Lanegan fills his cart with handmade blankets—quilts and knits—which might be essentials for filling in his idea of a homestead. He tops these with one of his domestic reliquaries: a detailed—yet in this case generic—scale model of a house that contains, in what might be the locale of a garden or reflecting pool, some objects that recall the type of persons who would have lived there. These possessions thus end up in possession of the identities of the unknown occupants.

Lanegan includes two more of these reliquaries in Landscape and Identity. “Relics of a Dream IX: Puget Sound Beachcombing” recalls his youth in the Northwest via a cutout silhouette of another house, one that contains a collaged view of cliffs and mountains that surround a seascape, with pools of seawater on the beach that blend into parts of a map. The silhouette is flat, but opens like a window into the natural setting, which then becomes flat again in the map, in which a real window opens into a collection of actual flotsam found on the real beach. Like it, “Memory/Mirage” also hangs on the wall, but presents so many transitions between reality and art that it beggars description.

What may be the closest work to Lanegan’s in concept is Racheal LeSueur’s “Irregular Foundation,” in which a relief-modeled figure of a tree exposes the way its roots have grown around the fragmentary ruins of long-lost buildings. Or there’s Josephine McCullough’s untitled suite of eight photographs of what appears to be a scale model of a beach shack, which model is also included in the show. For the photos, McCullough has placed the immaculately sculpted structure in several suitable locations. Built on pilings, reached by a ladder and sporting a number of signs of independent living, the shack offers a dream image of self-sufficiency such as many artistic children create for themselves and then carry throughout their lives. Some will even attain it, whether in reality or through their art.

On the other end of the spectrum, the feelings that animate these art works find more abstract expression in Brian Jensen’s “Coming Home II,” a stoneware ellipse that evokes both a nomadic tent and a futuristic dwelling. Somewhat different in the sentiments it bespeaks, perhaps, Mikey Silva’s “As Within, So Without” represents a human-like figure that might have relatives in Fantasy literature or films, and who raises its hand in what looks like a familiar greeting even as it seems to scowl a warning. We may well ask if anything is truly universal beyond the familiar walls of home. Extending the ambiguity, Shirin Abedinirad’s “Dilemma” consists of a simple enough object—a flight of stairs coming up from, or going down into, the ground, the mirrored surfaces of which create shadows and reflections on and of the surroundings that may confuse viewers and leave their senses ultimately uncertain which is which.   

Shirin Abedinirad, “Dilemma”

As art enters the 21st century, an exhibition about landscape and identity really should include the larger view, and Shalah Kay provides a couple of suitable examples in porcelain with celadon. “The Great Gyarados” presents a seascape with a great wave borrowed from Pokemon, while “Tor ii gate Ghost” adds the dimension of the spirit world to the mix. These subjects come from and belong to places and media that have transformed popular storytelling in the West, and demonstrate how both landscape and identity can make changes without losing themselves in the journey.

We like to think of landscape and identity as durable, if not exactly permanent entities. One artist who emphasizes their brevity, and fragility even, is Presley Brady, who titles her sculpture “Pareidolia,” after the unevenly understood phenomenon whereby human senses tend to seek for, and perhaps unfortunately find, meaning in patterns of noise. Anyone who’s ever thought the three holes in the common electrical outlet look like a face has encountered pareidolia. Brady has created a more complex, startlingly convincing example from assorted wood scraps, tree bark, and various lengths of vines. The crouching figure demonstrates the power of pareidolia, in that, instead of vanishing once it’s recognized that it isn’t real, remains and even grows stronger over time. We can only hope that this and other attributes of art tell us as much about ourselves as we continue to seek out opportunities to explore our visual universe.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.