Continuing through June 2, 2013
Thoughtfully conceived, elegantly installed, Off the Plain" brings together 17 artists working in photography and mixed media. The title is a play on words, with “plain” alluding both to the plains of the Great Northwest (the show’s geographic inspiration) and the flat plane of the classically presented photograph. What sorts of things would happen, curator TJ Norris poses, if Northwest-based artists lifted the medium out of the confines of rectangular two-dimensionality? The artists responded to this question with a gamut of conceptual and material approaches.
Brooks Dierdorff’s "Organizing Principles" sandwiches a photographic print between two slabs of solidified ballistics gel. A bullet lies embedded within the gel, its trajectory visible as a trail of exhaust. The print, a close-up of animal hair, turns "Organizing Principles" into a fetishized, PETA-ready recording of an unknown creature’s death at the rifle-wielding hands of an unseen hunter. Although the photograph plays second fiddle compositionally to the piece’s sculptural structure, it’s literally the work’s coup de grâce. Bea Nettles, who is based in Urbana, Illinois, and is the exhibition’s only participating non-Northwesterner, contributes a limited-edition handmade book called "Place." With its content based on gravestones in cemeteries around the country — and its elaborate case marked with the four directions of the compass — it functions as a memento mori. Our collective idea of home — be it Northwest, Southwest, Southeast, Northeast, or Midwest — is stripped down to a poignant, if chilling, essence.
