Tue 27 Jul 2010
Bette Burgoyne show at Vermillion Gallery
Posted by Marlow Harris under Art , Seattle NewsNo Comments
This is the last week for Bette Burgoyne’s show at Vermillion Gallery at 1508 11th Avenue on Capitol Hill.
Here’s a review of the show by Laura Macomber at Visual Art Source:
Bette Burgoyne’s latest exhibition of pencil drawings channel a deep, dark, and mysterious mythos: with titles such as “Whisper Vapor,” “Sacrum,” and “Primordia,” they’d better. Each drawing, a veritable webbing of wispy white lines that merge, plait, and even throb across their surfaces of coal-black paper, offers a new and semiopaque supernatural vision of worlds – of creatures, of material, of flora – that only our imaginations can rightly access.
Burgoyne’s work, however, is rooted in the natural world: “Each drawing,” she claims, “is a reinterpretation and combination of observations made from looking at many things: clouds, rocks, erosion, light, mammal ears, leaves, fur, waves, lichen and science illustrations of electromagnetic fields.” But where we might think we see echoes of birch trees, outlines of sand dollars and bird beaks, so do we sense the decomposition latent in them. Burgoyne’s pencil-tip latticework is as equally redolent of severed brain tissue and bone, snapped spinal columns and ashes and dust. Any of these drawings might inspire loneliness or sublimity or repose. Their exquisite pencil work will simply inspire.
Each piece, an exercise in meditation, is elaborate and complicated and is made using white Prismacolor pencil on black paper.
The show is up at Vermillion Gallery until July 31.
