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 REVIEW Finding His Voice Orleonok Pitkin has been exhibiting in Portland for more than 20 years. Is his current show the beginning of an identifiable style or yet another experiment? BY KATE BONANSINGA |
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Deaf Words: Mute Songbirds Orleonok Pitkin Laura Russo Gallery 805 NW 21st Ave., 226-2754 Ends Jan. 30 Orleonok Pitkin's big, bold black-on-white charcoal renditions of single songbirds dominate the main exhibition space of the Laura Russo Gallery. Lined up in a grid, they have a graphic bravura; the stark context for each bird is limited to a single branch. On the opposite wall are Pitkin's tiny, computer-generated images of human mouths. Cropped from the faces to which they belong, they're portrayed in the act of speaking. The same two mouths--one male and one female--are the subjects of all 33 pieces, which look like small, subtly colored film strips. Each piece includes several frames of either mouth articulating a single word--scribed in small letters on the mat-board border--such as bed, play, hide, birth, sex, laugh, home and taste. The artist credits Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as primary inspiration for this exhibition. Bauby's book is the autobiographical tale of a sharp mind and sensitive heart in an incapacitated body; he dictated the story, letter by letter, by opening and closing one eye. Pitkin considers this story a reminder not to take things, particularly effective communication, for granted. Words are often misunderstood. Just as Bauby's active mind was robbed of its appropriate context--a healthy body--Pitkin renders songbirds without the context of a forest, mouths without the context of faces, words without the context of sentences. Whereas he drew the birds with age-old vine charcoal (burnt wood, basically), the mouths are Giclée Iris prints, a state-of-the-art form of digital output. Like the artist's two media, unheard or misunderstood songs and words date from the beginning of verbal communication to the present moment. The ironic aspect of this exhibition is that it is empowered by the very things that Pitkin intends to present as problematic: words. The show's title is provocative in itself, and the written artist's statement is downright poetic. Pitkin's explanation had me momentarily convinced that both bodies of work were about the subjectiveness of communication. But do the works of art convey this on their own? Not completely. In fact, the aesthetic relationship between the digital prints and the charcoal drawings is tenuous. Both sets of images use the magnetism of repetition, an effective design tool, and both are well-executed. But they are two distinct bodies of work that could easily have been done by two different artists. This is Pitkin's Achilles' heel. Since graduating in 1971 from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where he is now an associate professor, he has had solo shows in Portland every few years. His last exhibition at Laura Russo in 1996 consisted of three-dimensional, iconic architectural forms on a blanket of hay. Before that, he painted and sculpted. Through it all, he has lacked a consistent vehicle of expression. Now well into mid-career, he has no style to call his own. Granted, that's not easy to achieve. There's a fine line between churning out formulaic images and developing a distinctive artistic voice. Equally fine is the line between unsystematically skipping from one style to the next and consistently pushing an identifiable style to new levels of excellence. However, there are numerous 20th-century artists who have succeeded in experimenting while simultaneously creating work easily recognized as their own. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are two such artists. Local examples include Christine Bourdette, Michael Brophy, Lee Kelly, James Lavadour and Dana Louis, who is a particularly good example. Only in her mid-30s, Louis abruptly changed from figurative work to more organic imagery many years ago but now seems to have settled on a seductive and identifiable aesthetic, however varied her materials. Deaf Words: Mute Songbirds is well worth seeing; Pitkin's ideas are important, and the pieces are well-crafted and beautiful. Maybe Pitkin will stick with this method of portraying the subjectiveness of communication, the ability of images to convey what words cannot and the numbing but soothing quality of repetition and isolation. If he does, he may finally pin down a consistent visual means of imparting his thoughts, and this exhibition will represent the beginning of a late bloom.
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