Mountain Fresh

courtesy of Crawl Space

Details

504 E. Denny Way, #1, www.crawlspacegallery.com, 201-2441. Sat.–Sun. Free. Ends Dec. 21.

Related Content

• The Fussy Eye: Hands Off the Bricks!
  August 3, 2011
• Bumbershoot Visual Arts Preview, Part V (Update)
  September 5, 2010
• Visual Arts: YouTube Diffusion
  January 27, 2010
• Bumbershoot Saturday: Picks and Notes Featuring Neko Case, Wheedle's Groove, the Decemberists, and More
  September 1, 2010
• I Saw This: Sticker Stuck
  April 22, 2009

More About

• Matt Browning
• Justin Colt Beckman
• Gretchen Bennett

At Crawl Space hangs a quietly exacting piece crafted from aluminum beer cans. Two-tone blue mountains have been cut out and epoxied one to the next to create repeating ranges of identical mountains. This is a work by Matt Browning entitled Portrait of the Outdoors, though one can't help but be reminded of Gretchen Bennett's similarly mountainous works, as well as Justin Colt Beckman's beery video at the most recent TAM Biennial. Browning's portrait uses a shorthand mountain: a clean design, part of an ad campaign. Not a natural thing, but of a piece with Browning's previous works, which all point to, or poke fun at, issues of masculinity. (Sculptures at a recent solo show at Crawl Space employed skis, the innards of baseballs, and what looked like the top of a high-schooler's desk; there was also a single long line of these aluminum mountains.) This 10-inch-by-15-inch landscape, a rectangle of straight-edged mountain ranges, might be composed of a braggart's empties. Or maybe this is that macho guy's view of nature: beer as a window, or an excuse, for getting outside. But this piece has been so carefully cut and pasted together, with so much delicate handiwork, that the hyper-masculine image is undone. Browning is, and is not, one of those guys. This view is both too beautiful and too false to be a straight portrait. And it is precisely this nexus that makes the work interesting. It asks more of you than you might expect.