Seattle-based painter, Grant Barnhart, recently shifted the focus of his paintings to directly confront certain iconic American imagery such as cowboys, football players, cheerleaders, and showgirls in an attempt to build a vocabulary that is positioned neatly between satire and homage. In a time where it is increasingly easy to portray American life and culture in a generally pessimistic light, Barnhart takes on the challenge of providing commentary that is much more insightful, investigating the nuances and recent history of our culture to provide the viewer with several avenues to explore the work. However, these avenues are not always glorifying. Barnhart explains that often the characters in his work, “represent romanticized notions of American masculinity, symbolic agents of conquest and glory… subverting these figures of strength, by depicting them in states of defeat, confusion, and humiliation.”

These new painting were recently exhibited along-side select sculptures at OKOK Gallery in Seattle for the show Remember Me When. That exhibition received reviews from the Seattle Times, The Stranger and the Seattle PI.

On view until January 4th is LUCKY NUMBER SEVEN, the 2008 Biennial at SITE in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Curated by Lance Fung, the previous director of the Holly Solomon Gallery and current owner of The Lance Fung Gallery, SITE’s current exhibition brings a diverse and global roster of 25 artists from 16 counties, creating 18 different projects. The exhibition layout and architecture was designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, of the internationally renowned architectural firm, Williams and Tsien. The artists selected for the Biennial were asked to develop on-site projects in response to the site specific architectural design. All of the art work on view is temporary and attempts to defy the notion of art as commodity, providing the artists with an opportunity to push their conceptual practice.

Artist Drew Daly activates and draws attention to common domestic objects by meticulously altering the item’s surface quality and form. Daly is interested in fragmenting the familiar ready-made object to stimulate memory, recognition and consideration of the mundane. The artist also uses trace materials from the altered ready-made objects, collecting and reconstructing the residue of erosion, and tracing an object’s relation to the space around it. These trace materials act as a means of documenting the object in different states. Daly received his M.F.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle (2004) and completed his undergraduate art degree from Alfred University in New York. Since his graduation, Daly has had solo exhibitions with the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle and the Texas State University in San Macros, Texas. In 2001, Daly was a resident artist with the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, and has been featured in an article in the Seattle weekly The Stranger.

Just two weeks before the opening of her first museum survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, Tara Donovan is named a 2008 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant. Selected for her creativity, originality, and potential to make important contributions in the future, the new Fellows work across a broad spectrum of endeavors. The Foundation cited Donovan’s “dazzling body of work that will enrich the fields of contemporary sculpture and installation art for years to come.” Tara Donovan was born 1969 in New York City.

The ICA presents the first major museum survey of the American sculptor. Tara Donovan gathers 16 works from the past decade and displays a new installation commissioned by the ICA. The exhibition examines her distinctive sculptural process, exploring how a single action applied to a single material countless times can transcend our expectations. Donovan transforms large quantities of mass-produced items, drinking straws, toothpicks, and buttons, into stunning works of phenomenal impact. Layered, piled, or clustered with an almost viral repetition, these products assume forms that both evoke natural systems and seem to defy the laws of nature.

Spilling across half a dozen rooms at the ICA, her works are so straightforwardly beautiful. It includes rolls of adding machine paper piled on the floor, styrofoam cups suspended from the ceiling, and enough plastic drinking straws to cover a wall. This exhibition changes our perception of things seemingly familiar. Donovan revels the unrealized sculptural potential of pins, cups and plates. She understands how to use simple consumer products to generate complex results that speak to form, light, space and perception. The installations illustrate her sensitivity to materials, their innate properties, and potential to create evocative visual experiences.

Donovan’s work is about creating a system, using a structure and then repeating in incremental units that can expand from the finite to the seemingly infinite. From a distance, her work’s rhythm reminds one of the cohesion of cells and particles or even the geographic patterns of landscapes or clouds. She responds to their given form, texture and surface allowing them to accumulate in a set of given boundaries.

Her works invite you to approach the familiar with a new curiosity.

In the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, a paper is folded lengthwise into sections. The first player begins the drawing, extending the lines of the image just beyond the fold in the paper. The second player continues where the first left off, and so on until the paper is filled. The final result is akin to Frankenstein’s monster, a creation defined by the sum of its parts: a true collaboration.

NAIL, a collective comprised of California College of the Arts (CCA) curatorial practice students, took inspiration from this model during the conception of the exhibition, Out of Order, at PLAySPACE Gallery in San Francisco. In response to only the artwork directly preceding, each member of NAIL invited one artist to contribute a specific piece to the exhibition. Like the Surrealist drawing, the result of this curatorial game was brought to light once all of the artworks had been selected. Out of Order refers to the new ordering that became visible during “the great reveal.” In addition to the literal reconfiguration, the title also reflects ideas of disjointedness, fracture, and impropriety that appear in the artworks. Included were Bay Area emerging artists among others more established, like Sun Ra, showing in a variety of mediums. Conversations, both thematic and formal, arose among the thirteen discretely-selected works. Splintered landscapes, unearthly vistas, unconventional humor, obsessive craft, and creative collaboration converge in PLAySPACE Gallery. The feature was collaboratively written by Katie Morgan and Arden Sherman.

Hopped up on a large dose of genetically modified corn products, artist Jon Brumit has created a bomb shelter-meets laboratory in the project room at Steven Wolf Gallery in San Francisco. Appropriately titled, Monsanto’s Workshop after the biotech company Monsanto, which specializes in chemically hybridizing seeds for agricultural use, Brumit pokes fun at serious issues through his mixed media installations. Plastic grocery bags are recombined into a parade-float-balloon-like corncob-esque sculptures that, with the help of a fan, appear to be breathing and moving as if they are alive. The trash to treasure modus operandi which Brumit employs speaks of environmental disasters and human complicity. Brumit’s interest in sound art is seen in all his work, and in Monsanto’s Workshop he has displayed a radio transmitter that has been altered with corn residue and appears to be dysfunctional, broadcasting fuzzy post-apocalyptic noises. The whole project room looks as if a natural disaster has occurred and the occupant was taken from the scene or had to flee in a mad dash. A workshop table is covered with plastic corn cobs, nine-volt batteries, hot glue guns, light bulbs, and old coffee cups resembling a mad scientist’s desk covered with dollar store inventory.

Brumit is an artist who does not fit inside any box, constantly changing his works, installations, and projects. They remain on the border of humor, social activity, community, and faux pas. Brumit has exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe, with radio programs being broadcast all over the world. He has shown at Chelsea Art Museum, deYoung Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and presented Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR) at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Brumit received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and currently lives and works in Chicago.

Loren Schwerd‘s Mourning Portraits provide humanized descriptions of the blight that persists in the years after Hurricane Katrina. Working from her photographs taken in efforts to digest these remnants of life, she rebuilds crumbling artifacts as scrupulous and loving memorials to her community. Out of human hair extensions, discarded near St. Claude Beauty Supply in New Orleans, she depicts her encounter with absent victims. Inspired by the tradition of 18th and 19th century memento mori hair jewelry, she participates in a sentimental activity to honor the deceased. These expressive and elegant constructions allow the viewer an extended gaze into this dark topic, beyond its sheer mass that obscures individual identities.

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