Art that speaks for itself, and some that needs a little help

Some art you just get instantly. Even if there isn't a simple story or a realistic image, it immediately communicates metaphors or meanings. That's the case with Ben Butler's "All things long to persist in their being," the latest knockout site-specific installation at Suyama Space.

Butler has used unfinished wood beams to construct a series of post-and-lintel gateways that diminish in size (or increase, depending on your point of view) in a spiraling nautilus shape across the gallery floor. Straight away, you feel the need to walk around the installation, or enter into the tallest end (over 10 feet high), or crouch down to look at the smallest (about 1 inch high). The experience creates a flood of harmonious contradictions: architecture/nature, inside/outside, positive forms/negative space, big/small, playfulness/danger, welcome/denial and on and on.

Butler's forms and his play on scale conjure associations with math, infinity, nature and Asian and Western architecture, without really stating anything definitive about anything. The work's title is from a line in a Jorge Luis Borges essay that meditates on the dual, but essential, nature of things. Borges wrote: "... all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger." Butler's art perpetually insists on being both open-ended and knowable.

In an artist's statement, Butler writes: "All things, under close enough observation, will reveal the complete stories of their making. My objects simply reveal themselves much more readily than most, and therefore hope to teach us something about looking."

On the other hand, some art is hard to understand right away. A lot of the works in the current Western Bridge exhibition "Into Black" might leave you, well, in the dark, if you weren't clued in to some of the concepts driving them. The eight pieces in Jason Dodge's "Into Black" (yes, the exhibition took its title from Dodge) look like eight pieces of glossy, overexposed, gray photographic paper. And they are. Frankly, there's not a whole lot of visual interest there, and you'd be hard-pressed to decipher any imagery or narrative just by looking.

But, referring to your handy gallery guide (an essential Western Bridge handout, since they don't use wall labels), you see that there's more to this art than meets the eye. Dodge asked eight friends, in different parts of the world, to simultaneously expose these sheets to the sun during the sunrise of the vernal equinox of 2006. Knowing this, you sense these sheets in the hands of these individuals, in specific locations in Kenya or China or Minnesota; you sense the moments of exposure to the light. The gray blankness is suddenly filled with narrative possibilities.

It drives some people crazy to have to read an artist's statement or gallery guide to "get" a given work of art; personally, I don't mind how an artist conveys his or her thoughts — through the work alone, or through the work with supporting materials — so long as those thoughts are engaging.

Exhibition review


"All things long to persist in their being" installation by Ben Butler, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, through Dec. 8, Suyama Space, 2324 Second Ave., Seattle (206-256-0809 or www.suyamapetersondeguchi.com).

"Into Black" group exhibition, noon-6 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, through Dec. 16, Western Bridge Gallery, 3412 Fourth Ave. S., Seattle (206-838-7444 or www.westernbridge.org).

Also in the Western Bridge exhibition, "Um ... ," by the artistic duo Hadley + Maxwell (Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens), is probably meant to be profound — with its allusions to the philosophical relationship between object and image — but it's also just kind of fun. A lightbulb hangs from the ceiling, and a projector projects an image of a lightbulb onto the actual lightbulb. But the glass bulb refracts the projected image, so you're left looking at a real lightbulb, the shadow on the wall from the real lightbulb and the rainbow burst of refracted light from the projected image. What might this say about the "truth" of representations?

Some of the strongest work in the show takes account of how we perceive light and darkness through actual time and space.

Euan Macdonald's video "In the Shadow's Path" and Neil Goldberg's video "Three or Four Steps through a Shadow" dreamily insist on tracking changes in light. While Macdonald focuses on a darkening New Zealand landscape and Goldberg captures New York City pedestrians walking through dappled sunlight, both use a slow, beautifully shot style that keeps you hovering between keen observation and abstract contemplation of such issues as human interaction with time and place.

As with all of Western Bridge's shows, the art is taken from the collection of Bill and Ruth True. With "Into Black," most of the works are new acquisitions that show a strong blend of conceptual and visual concerns. A few remain dull even after discovering the impulses behind them, but the majority snap with intellectual spark.