Some of the region's best artists stand out in 'Heads (dis)Embodied'

By REGINA HACKETT
P-I ART CRITIC

Country singer Tom T. Hall believes that the story of your life is in your face. Increasingly, visual artists agree with him. The bust is back, not that it ever went away. But of late there's a noticeable rise of interest in using the shape of a skull to explore mortality, desire, fear and beauty.

A face that keeps its own company without the solace of a body reminds a contemporary audience of awful things happening on Earth. As curated by the ever-astute Jim McDonald, "Heads (dis)Embodied" offers some of the best artists in the region the chance to step up and stand out within a connective thread of fear and dread.

Nearly all have a strong craft base and pride themselves on being good with their hands. The range of their work is wide, and the results finely honed.

Sherry Markovitz: The audience looks down on her bust titled "Looking Up." It's a doll's head that might have tumbled off its neck, like a scoop of ice cream dropped from the cone.

Covered in pearl whites for skin with a pink undertone and champagne-gold beaded hair in a 1940s cut, the doll is looking for a conventional life to curl up into. Her eyes are good-girl blanks, but her beaded skin in swirling patterns suggests Maori tattoos. Even though she's ice cream that is soon to be a puddle, she wants to pass for normal.

Remember, you must die.

Dan Webb: He carves wood as if it were clay and crafts heads whose best days are behind them. The two here ("Squeeze" and "Stretch") could be floats for a long-gone parade. Left behind in the cleanup, they're still functional, but as air leaks out, features fold in on themselves. Like the figures in James Ensor's paintings, Webb's faces are masks that cannot be removed. Long ago they grew in flesh in order to conceal and distort its character.



	Dan Webb's "Squeeze" looks like a float for a long-gone parade.

Akio Takamori: He built a porcelain pot in the shape of his head and painted on his own features in peach and pale brown glazes. Like Markovitz and Webb, Takamori is a craft master who takes himself lightly. He's a little teapot, short and stout, but there is no way anyone will ever pour him out.

Paul Marioni: Made of glass, "Ghost" looks like silk, as if a breeze could ripple across the surface. Marioni works a vein of bump-in-the-night carnival into an otherwise serious endeavor.

Boo!

Lauren Grossman: Marioni can't scare her. Her "Bereaved" is a large ceramic face covered in sheets of lead. Suffering gave it a fetal look, with eyes swollen shut and lips in a blubbery seam. In other hands, this could be corny. Instead, the piece offers an inescapable chill.

Grossman can do anything in clay. She could have been a major figure in the medium were she willing to limit herself to its subculture. Instead, she brings her fierce and relentless heat to whatever medium appeals to her at the moment. Always improvising, she doesn't look back, and none of her shows resemble each other.

Claire Cowie: "Thinking Monkey" is a thumb-size piece of intensity, with a monkey-shaped thought growing out of a man's skull like a tumor. Made of urethane resin and covered in watercolor and varnish, the monkey can't contain its contrary impulses.

Claudia Fitch: Her "Ancestor" in cast and painted polyester resin fuses Blondie from the comic strips with an Art Deco painted in a polka-dot pattern. Claiming as sources everything from modernist architecture and deco design to hair salons, fashion-forward clothing, Hollywood swimming pools and comic books, Fitch makes art from art into art.

Scott Fife: He carves his busts in cardboard, paints the anatomical particulars and hot glues the results into three-dimensional solids. The lost history of the West, usually remembered as boy's play, acquires tragic weight in his hands.

Against all odds, the Kirkland Arts Center has become the scrappy alternative gallery space that otherwise doesn't exist in Seattle. There's almost no money for curators, and the space is a problem. With brick walls and wooden pillars that divide the downstairs gallery and a cramped afterthought of additional room upstairs, nobody should look forward to showing there, and yet everybody does.

Here's what it has going for it: a willingness to host a wide variety of projects, an obvious appreciation for the artists and curators willing to work there and a determination to deepen and extend the region's awareness of itself and how it fits into the national scene. There are museums with real budgets that are less ambitious.

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