Thursday, March 30, 2006

"Boys & Flowers" Exhibition at Western Bridge Gallery : Mar 30 - Aug 12

PAUL MORRISON


Western Bridge Gallery Site

Kutlug Ataman: The Four Seasons of Veronica Read
Scott McFarland: Photographs
Jeffry Mitchell: New Installation
Paul Morrison: Mesophyte
Kirsten Stoltmann: Boys and Flowers
Universal Nonlinear Design: Make Believe
Stephen Vitiello: Hea - Sound Installation

Works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Morris Graves, Jim Lockwood, Robert Mapplethorpe, Roy McMakin, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Glenn Rudolph, Michael Velliquette, Paul Wonner, Amir Zaki.

Titled after a video by Kirsten Stoltmann, Boys and Flowers features new commissions from Paul Morrison, Jeffry Mitchell, and Universal Nonlinear Design, a four-channel video installation by Kutlug Ataman, a sound installation by Stephen Vitiello, and a variety of botanical masculinity in photography and works on paper from the collection.

Covering all four walls of our large gallery, Morrison's mesophyte mixes naturalistic and cartoonish floral and landscape imagery. Stumps, firs, pulled weeds, garden flowers, set out of perspective with a continuous horizon line, create a thrillingly artificial world of nature.

Jeffry Mitchell's new installation juxtaposes a handmade Japanese byobu screen of molded paper with a vitrine containing ceramics in the vein of Chinese funerary sculpture—though this particular tomb is for a soon-to-be closed Seattle bathhouse, Club Zodiac.

Seattle architecture firm Universal Nonlinear Design presents a proposal to raise a section Seattle's Denny Park to its original height before the Regrade, some 60 feet above its current elevation. An architectural model is shown with work referring to the movie Parallax View and the work of Carl Andre and Michael Heizer.

Kutlug Ataman's Four Seasons of Veronica Read, a four-channel projected video installation, obsesses over an obsessive collector, an English woman who maintains nearly a thousand Amaryllis bulbs in her small London flat despite being seriously allergic to them.