Sculpture: Looking inward, reaching out at biennale

As I walked around the Bellevue Sculpture Exhibition 2006, I couldn't help but observe the city's skyline. The glass-and-steel buildings project themselves out — a kind of sculpture in themselves.

One of the newest, which houses city hall and the police station, encloses light and transparency in sleek and streamlined design. It's in this building and in the Bellevue Downtown Park that the city's seventh sculpture exhibit, a biennale, opened on June 17.

The exhibit provides lots of fodder for a city that is ready to look outward even as it critiques itself. The sculpture show has been the lesser-known counterpart to the now-discontinued Pacific Northwest Annual juried show held at the Bellevue Arts Museum, which included two-dimensional work.

Along with the Bellevue Arts Museum's recent narrowing of emphasis from fine art to an exclusive focus on craft, the sculpture show stands to make its own mark.

This year's exhibit is the largest so far, with 39 pieces selected from more than 500 entries. Artists from outside the United States were included for the first time, and the largest number of artists from Washington state, 20, were accepted. A five-person jury of artists and arts administrators selected the work.

A high degree of craft and eclectic style defines the selection. A few pieces could have been culled to raise the overall degree of sophistication. Perhaps the inclusion of some less-accomplished pieces is due to a too-large committee approach. Regardless, there's lots to see.

The pieces can be regarded as objects in themselves, abstractions of shape and color that reflect the hard edges and shine of city architecture. Or they can reflect ruminations on environment and community. The best of them serve as a kind of conscience, a means for the city to question itself.

Exhibit review


"Bellevue Sculpture Exhibition 2006," through Oct. 9, Bellevue City Hall, 450 110th Ave. N.E., Bellevue;

Bellevue Downtown Park 10201 N.E. Fourth St., Bellevue (425-452-4852 or http://www.bellevuewa.gov/).

In the Bellevue Downtown Park, Anne Thulin's red giant vinyl balls — they look like weather balloons stuck on trees — strike a playful and provocative tone. The teasing red balls contradict everything in a venue better known for the prim and proper: exaggeration, sudden exclamation.

Gregory Glynn's pieces of split maple log evoke elegance and also sadness. The raw wood bears the evidence of its working: being cut, then split. Uniform horizontal incisions along the length of the pieces meditatively mark time, echoing the concentric progression of tree rings. Reassembled in an upright formation, the long pieces trace the shade of the tree's former existence.

Steven Jensen's more whimsical black and white carved rings and spirals on logs recall tribal ornamentation, didgeridoos and modernist design.

In Bellevue City Hall, people can pay utility bills and contest parking tickets. A free Internet computer lab accommodates a democratic flow of information. Citizens can eat lunch at a plaza outside, attend city-council meetings or turn themselves in at the police station.

They can also contemplate Caroline Mak's "Cross Sections" in the lobby of City Hall, consisting of sheets of foam about a yard in width reaching from floor to ceiling. Various size pieces ripped out of the foam make the material look less industrial and more organic, a hole-ridden porous covering or growth. Evoking padded cells, decay and infestation, the piece counteracts the idea of progress often embodied in a city's ideals.

In another piece titled "Embroidery," Mak uses pins to hold sewing threads in place along the wall. The threads delineate the locations of electrical wires and piping inside City Hall's physical walls, playing off the idea of showing the workings of City Hall. The fragile threads suggest transparency of process and also the personal, if humble, notions of mending and binding torn or disparate material.

Lucia Enriquez: lucia_enriquez@hotmail.com