Personality Types

Imagine your face on the wall of the Museum of Metropolitan Art, flaws like blemishes and nose hairs exposed for the world to view up close. If you were a friend or fellow artist of Monroe-born painter and photographer Chuck Close, you might have been immortalized in such a way. Known for his hyperrealistic portraiture, Close has taken larger-than-life personalities like Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman, and Philip Glass and enlarged their rather ordinary faces in various ways—artist Lucas Samaras, for example, stares intently from a grid of rainbow-blotched “pixels” that are only visible close up. A master printmaker for going on 30 years, Close’s visual tricks are different for nearly every portrait. “A Couple of Ways of Doing Something” at Tacoma Art Museum includes 15 daguerreotypes (when an image is exposed onto a mirror-polished surface of silver, creating a shimmering, finely detailed representation) of some of the aforementioned luminaries and a self-portrait, accompanying an Aperture book of the same name. Each daguerreotype is a base which Close uses to create other works, including tapestries and photogravures. And in the book and exhibit, each one is paired with verse by poetry-slam innovator Bob Holman, a celebrated New York School poet since the 1980s. Gallery tour: 6:30 p.m. Thurs., March 20. Artist lecture and book signing with Close: 2 p.m. Sun., May 11. Show continues through June 15.
Wed., March 12, 2008