Seattle painter Rachel Maxi's beguiling 'diary of the mundane' salutes the humble Dumpster

Who can love a Dumpster?

Rachel Maxi, for one.

The Seattle painter's show at G. Gibson Gallery includes a small contingent of them: "Big White Rusty," "Anacortes Dumpster," "Ritz Dumpster." And if you go to G. Gibson's website, you can find still more.

Maxi sees her work as "a diary of the mundane." Along with Dumpsters her subject matter includes trucks, alleyways, highway scenery and, in a curious change of pace, peonies.

Even her flowers can have something vaguely industrial about them, though. In "Peonies II," the brightly lit bouquet is set against a sticky-looking tar-black backdrop and the flowers are housed in a plain glass jar that has the word CAUTION stenciled in red.

Still, the Dumpsters have her heart.

"I love the bright colors, the distressed and rusty metal," she writes in her artist's statement.

It may be stretching it to call these oils on panel beautiful. But in Maxi's hands, they have a seductively warm visual appeal.

Most are placed against back-alley or parking-lot backgrounds. But in "Ritz Dumpster," the container seems to float at an angle on a featureless white backdrop, while its contents — a teetering bookcase, a sliding stack of cardboard, a discarded Ritz cracker box — perform a sort of balancing act.

The glory of the show is in G. Gibson's window: the huge "Big White Rusty" with its dark archipelagos of rust where the paint has flaked off and its "sculptures" of cardboard crate poking out of it, soon to be gone with the next recycling collection.

Also worth a look at G. Gibson: Lori Nix's "Unnatural History," a record of the bizarre dioramas the artist builds in her Brooklyn apartment, photographs, then dismantles. This series whimsically depicts sharks, dodos, rocks and other curiosities.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com