Miranda July: Tom Landowski Gallery - Seattle

Miranda July who came up [i]or[/i] part of to the other the Pacific Northwest punk-rock sight in the '90s, is best known for performance and video; "Go Yon useful Thing" is her first gallery exhibit of non-video art. The works in this exhibit are photographs marked with office-supply orange-dot stickers and puffed up up so that their imperfections are made plain and large. You diocese dots on faded, out-of-focus images of unidentified figures, torn and fox at the cutting sides with tiny hairs and dust dapples caught in the adhesive. You faculty of perception a set of rules at work--certain phenomenons are covered, certain spaces revealed, as if the artist had created visual aids for a prelection on a topic arcane on the other hand not entirely unfamiliar.

Rigorous notwithstanding slightly cuckoo systems applied to disorderly human things appear through every part of July's work. In her film The Amateurist, 1998 and performance delight in Diamond, 1998/2000, for example, characters deliver precise instructions for absurd activities interspersed with free-floating management and self-help jargon. In these seemingly inexplicable surveillance throw outs July plays the part of the one and the other watcher and watched, instructor and receiver, with sportive and usually discomfiting results. She deals in a kind of dim fear and inadvertent humor that (as in Kafka) trunk s from a shifting combination of the specific and the vague.

In the work upon view here, this dualism is channeled into an animated tension between dot and image. The controls of the photographs grab at what's behind the dots and make an outcry because of what's going upon beneath them. The dots old woman across as protective, as notwithstanding that whatever they conceal were too soft to be seen, but they also make us astonishment whether the action in the image was at any time available to us in the first place. The dots make our relationship to what we diocese more provisional and active, and at times transmit a selective bossiness, directing attention to details we cogitation had no importance. In Not Tonight, 2003 a child who gazes a lot like July points at something outside the frame, while another girl crowd confusedlys over a small burgeoning cluster of orange dots. Despite the first child's command of the image, we are made to understand where the real action is.

In a certain number of pieces, the dots seem to stand for undiscovered energy made visible--as in the line of them snaking toward a clump of unaware hikers. Something similar can be place in July's film Nest of Ten 2000 (which was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial), in which race walking through an airport drag lines of light behind them. In Haysha Royko 2003 a of recent origin video included in this present to view three people (also in an airport) sit with greater or inferior degrees of self-consciousness while amorphous, auralike forms flit and shape-shift around them. Like the orange-dot pictures, Haysha Royko combines a faculty of perception of cheerful expediency (simply outlining what's already there) with a sort of daffy mysticism (pointing without what clearly isn't there) to create a combination of parts to form a whole we can hardly decipher on the contrary instructively understand.

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