Three shows at Elizabeth Leach Gallery:
Amanda Wojick’s Cliffs and Waterfalls, Claire Cowie’s Village, Kristan Kennedy’s Valentine Field; 417 NW 9th, through Feb. 26
The day after Valentine’s Day, a few discarded valentines had blown through the schoolyard by my house. I found them piled up against a chain-link fence like a tiny red and pink snowdrift. It made me think of the three shows up at Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Though each of the three Northwest artists–Claire Cowie, Amanda Wojick and Kristan Kennedy–use differing materials and styles, their work, for me at least, will be forever linked to decaying valentines.
The first things you notice in the space are Wojick’s mixed-media sculptures. Band-Aids, linoleum chips and other materials cover Styrofoam structures, creating colorful landscapes that look a little like psychedelic birthday cakes plucked from someone’s dream world. Wojick’s works on paper combine drawing and the artist’s apparent fascination with Band-Aids, resulting in a visual feast of common objects and doodle lines that somehow add up to unforgettable beauty.
A soft other-worldliness runs throughout the gallery. Claire Cowie’s show, Village, uses watercolors and sculptures, to explore a land populated by tree boughs ripe with color, where clusters of cottages lay off in the distance and gnome-like creatures ride horses and wear pointy hats. Sparse and delicate–dainty even–there is a creepy element to Cowie’s Village that may not be intentional, but I like it.
The title of Kristan Kennedy’s show, Valentine Field, is not a premonition of my schoolyard experience, but the name of a real football field that Kennedy found in a tiny town here in Oregon. The title alludes to memory and a sense of place, two themes that tether Kennedy’s abstract mark-making to a sublime world of almost-perceptible landscapes. What were started as “drawings for drawings’ sake” took on a hidden architecture, becoming imagined spaces with their own laws of gravity, space, and time. Many of the works defy a sense of scale, simultaneously suggesting the monumental terrain of another planet and a microscopic close-up of the neural pathways in your brain.