LA Weekly
Northwesterners Exhibition Page
November 27, 1998
Fresh Paint Art Advisors Culver City, CA
Northwesterners: "Pick of the Week" in the LA Weekly
"Jaunty almost-non-objective painting would seem to be a prevailing approach in the art of the Pacific Northwest, to judge from the selection of painters, sculptors and draughtspeople brought down I-5 for our delectation. "Northwesterners" provides a rare look a some very impressive talents, capable of bridging the gap between abstraction and representation with wit and dexterity. Mary Ann Peters, for example, loses odd vegetation in vast washes of nondescript yet beautiful pigment, while Drake Deknatel camouflages a figure in an elaborate and gorgeous mesh of lines, painterly gestures and sly hints of other "real" things. Quotidian objects hold greater sway in Gary Nisbet's work, but only as rendered in a similarly complex skein of paint and collage. Gail Grinnell, Susan Dory and the late David Green conflate even further the pictoral image with the immediacy of material, while Alfred Harris, Robin Wassong, and Erinn Kennedy paint stylized and structured imagery whose vivacity is entirely invested in paint. Also showing are Mark Rediske, Tom Anderson and Jonelle Johnson, all dealing less obliquely with the recognizable image, and Julie Speidel, the one sculptor of the Rain Belt Bunch."
— Peter Frank