Rudolph's prints cast the Northwest in a mythic light

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Theater/Fine Arts

Rudolph's prints cast the Northwest in a mythic light

Friday, May 21, 1999

By REGINA HACKETT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER ART CRITIC

Glenn Rudolph's version of the Northwest is like Ken Kesey's in "Sometimes A Great Notion" -- a large and seductive myth that turns the ground under your feet into a compelling fiction.

Who wouldn't want to live here? In Rudolph's large, silver-gelatin prints, dark light falls with generous and healing discretion over unkempt back yards, fleshy, ill-clad humans, empty railroad tracks and dense, fog-shrouded forests.

A suite of recent photos are on view at the Linda Hodges Gallery, all in his most dreamy and elegiac mode. People are missing, an absence that somehow seems permanent, giving nature a chance to repair itself.

There's a golf course seen through a thicket that is rehabilitating itself into a meadow. A sofa disintegrates in the wild, honeycombed with holes, wobbly on its feet and loose on its springs. Sofas don't sway in the wind, but this one does, lovely in its ruin.

In another print, light flashes along abandoned rail tracks and is gone. What's left is the feathery, easy elegance of gray as it darkens at the edge of a tunnel and unravels into light along a horizon line.

What Lee Friedlander did for watching TV alone in a cheap motel at 3 in the morning, Rudolph has done for the old idea of Northwest soul. He captured it, stripped it of clichés and gave it new life at the end of the century.

ART REVIEWS
Glenn Rudolph. Linda Hodges Gallery, 410 Occidental Ave. S. Through May 29. Hours: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sundays, 1-5 p.m. 206-624-3034.
Jon Haddock. Howard House, 2017 Second Ave. Through May 30. Hours: Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. 206-256-6399.
Jeffry Mitchell. Domestic Furniture, 1422 34th Ave. Through May 28. Hours: Thursdays-Fridays, noon-6 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. 206-323-0198.

Jon Haddock at Howard House doesn't have to leave home to find subjects for his photos. He finds homemade sex scenes on the Internet and before printing them eliminates the people, pixel by pixel. What's left is empty rooms with a faintly tawdry air -- cheap furniture with indentations in the cushions.

The results are oddly affecting, as if ghosts engaging in carnal acts left traces to tantalize us.

Haddock also makes tiny, creepy stage sets with toy people on them, each famous to anyone following the crime news in the last decade.

Chris Burden uses toy replicas for a similar effect. With a dry and understated precision, both Haddock and Burden make sinister fun of well-known horrors.

Jeffry Mitchell is a great and slippery talent, sliding easily into whatever form he choses. At Roy McMakin's Madrona studio known as Domestic Furniture, Mitchell is showing the range of his recent production: ceramic and cast plastic, watercolor and ink, paint and monotype.

His drawings are a version of paradise lost. Babar and Curious George play starring roles, silky figures slipping with fluent and anti-gravitational grace across the screen of his projected daydreams.

There are ceramic and cast plastic versions of Chinese Fu dogs, baring their teeth in fierce and demented joy.

A series of six drawings place figures in the center of their life stories, told in the titles of the books that surround them, each book floating like a hair or feather on cloudy mixtures of memory.

Mitchell is one of two 1999 Neddy Artist Fellowship winners. He won in painting, and Doug Keyes won in photography. The Neddy was established in 1996 by the Behnke Foundation to honor the memory of painter Robert (Ned) Behnke, who died of AIDS in 1989.

A reception for the artists will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. June 3 at the Seafirst Gallery, 701 Fifth Ave. Zipper, a seven-member group of soloists from the Seattle Men's Choir, will perform. Free admission. An exhibit featuring Mitchell and Keyes will run at the gallery through June 18. It will include the other Neddy nominees: Jaq Chartier, Denzil Hurley, Maxine Martell, Richard Lewis and Robert Lyons.