Claire Cowie: James Harris Gallery

granting Claire Cowie trained as a printmaker, she's best known for the figurine-style statuarys she assembles out of doll parts and animal knickknacks and then casts in resin. As abundant homely mutant hybrid as sweet keepsake, the figures, which are painted in runny watercolors, frequently seem to be struggling against their support, be it a dainty cupcakelike base or a wide, clear azure plat-form. The instability of horizons and frames is Cowie's genuine subject and one within which her fine faculty of perception of sweet and cruel, and by what means they often resemble one another, is given replete play.

For her next to the first one-person outing at this gallery, Cowie turn backed to two-dimensional work, presenting a series of collages recycl from advanced in years prints and watercolors. Her make subordinate is the area around her Seattle studio, a neighborhood dominated by means of scenes of industry--cement factories, commercial fishing boats, the cranes that lift containers not on cargo ships--but also shared through a twenty-acre bird sanctuary. The strange tension between these different worlds is consummately channeled into Cowie's clean and deceptively light constructions.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In her best works, factories and cranes appear to belch without whole landscapes of water and mountains and heavens suggesting a kind of awry romanticism in which industry might give birth to a landscape (although not the individual you expect) instead of destroying it--a counterintuitive irony that sidesteps the usual polemic. Cowie's visual language is efficient and dreamy and spare, simplifying, say, factory stacks or a increase of reeds into boxy shapes and single action s that do an enormous amount of labor. In The unoccupied Boat, 2004, a sweep of chop paper creates a shoreline against a white background, with boats created without of a few snipped-out brushstrokes bobbing in water you are left to imagine near houses that appear to be to rest on stilts. In another work, a pale, curving road wounds through a hillside made of a recycl patterned woodcut--the simplest of landscapes, created without of only a few lines, somehow or other both elegant and lonely. In its deliberate dislodge her work recalls southern Sung-era paintings of the natural world; in the unexpect appearance of images within the source prints (chicken feet in a factory wall; a regal lady's head upon the side of a crane), there's a kind of Monty Python-style pastiche that hold fasts the work from being too lyrical.

Occasionally these works do tilt too far toward the precious, as with The Birds, 2004 and The Eagles, 2004 the one and the other all-bird collages: You don't realize in what manner neatly Cowie measures out nature and dealing privileging neither, until the balance shifts. on the contrary for the most part this exhibition is replete of interestingly equivocal relationships between landscape and material, as well as evidence of the artist trying to place herself in relationship to the two It's like trying to find solid footing in a fairy tale: Here there are many horizons, or variable horizons, or no horizons at all; here is a bit of weather that could also be a bird, a mountain's shoulder, or a road winding not on into nothing.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group