i'm so glad i saw this

Life with a newborn and two active older brothers dictates that my "alone time" means trips out with said newborn, who is still very dependent on me (a revisit to Dr. Sears' Baby Book reminds me of the transition that this little guy is making-- from womb, where all needs are met without communication, to this wide world where his needs are met only by learning to give cues. What a leap! Newborns have to do a version of talking from the moment of birth...) The other day, on one of these escape trips to Ballard, I was so excited that I caught Supramundane at Ambach and Rice a mere few hours before its disassembly. I went mostly because I wanted to see Robyn O'Neil's drawings in person, and those were fantastic. But it was Whiting Tennis' Coulda-shoulda-woulda that really moved me.



This grid of sculptures, each about the height of a hand span, were a materialization of synthetic thought...quiet connections between abstracted forms and figures and architecture grouped into a believable family of structures that read like scale models of temples-for-one. The single readymade component-- a metal garden spray head-- along with the humble piece of paper that had been crumpled into a cone to echo the forms of its other, more constructed counterparts, were category-challenging, and produced a delightful variation on the theme. A quieter message comes through these misfits that fit so well. It seems to me to be the sculptor's acknowledgment of the relative power of modest objects that can, when selected and displayed, add an important piece to the dialogue between his more-labored experiments. There's a humility in that, I think, and it shows in Tennis' interview, in which he describes his deep connection to inert objects:



I like this review of another of Tennis' shows as well...