April 21, 2009

INDIAN GIFTS

By Jen Graves

[...]

At the Helm Gallery in Tacoma, another show of a group of artists—Gretchen Bennett, Jenny Heishman, Heide Hinrichs, and Matthew Offenbacher, working so closely together, even sharing materials, that they are loath to call theirs a group show—leans on ancient bedrock. This time, though, ideas of nativeness are called upon in the generational sense, to represent every past from which the artists are alienated and with which they long to reunite in order to move forward into a new (possibly impossible) independence. “We are the second peoples. We inhabit a landscape of iteration, reverb, elision, and generational noise,” their statement reads. Second Peoples, the title of the show, refers to the universal dilemma of “being born into a world that already exists,” as artist Corin Hewitt put it to me recently. (Hewitt has an exquisitely tender show of photographs at Seattle Art Museum now.)

Blowing past referentiality into a new future integrated with the past—this is what David Foster Wallace meant when he urged his generation to drive beyond ultimately despair-inducing irony. The idea is to do more than appropriate, to use but not use up, to keep the gift moving. Offenbacher plays a piece of carpet padding against an abstract painting. The padding hangs on the wall, like a piece of art; the painting sits on the floor, like a scrap of something. They share the same color scheme and mosaic appearance, which pleasantly undermines them both. While the abstract painting comes down to earth, the mass-produced padding seems to achieve the spiritual: They laugh at (and with) each other. (Bonus: The colors in the painting seem to hover on the surface because Offenbacher's canvas is not canvas but fabric treated with Stainguard—i.e., the painting treats its own paint like a stain it doesn’t want.) Across the room, Heishman sets a piece of tinfoil on fire by decorating it with mirrored stickers and hanging it perpendicular to a piece of fabric the blazing colors of a sunset. Maybe the best evidence of an updated sublime is the undying desire for it. At the very least, artists are banding together to work on this knot of riddles for you.