Life Drawing

It's 2:30 in the morning when Ryan Alexander-Tanner shows up at my doorstep to be interviewed. He's a self-described "chronic insomniac," so it's a natural hour for the bespectacled, 6-foot-4 comic artist to talk about his show, The Prisoner, running throughout July at Sequential Gallery. I'd never met Alexander-Tanner, but the 24-year-old is best known to Willamette Week readers as the man behind the erstwhile comic PDX Exposed, a series of Polaroid-style vignettes that captured slices of Portland life, which ran in the newspaper's pages beginning in the summer of 2005 and ending this April. WW received a fair number of inquiries asking where the young illustrator had gone, so his gallery debut seemed a natural time to check back in with him.

There was something voyeuristic about the artist's WW series, which illustrated quotes from Alexander-Tanner's real-life interviews with his subjects, from street musicians and hair stylists to barbecue cooks. Now, in The Prisoner, the artist has produced another body of work dealing with another kind of voyeurism, with mixed results. While a student at Pacific Northwest College of Art, he became interested in sequential art (art-speak for subdivided panels of comics) and fragmented narrative, which lends itself to Alexander-Tanner's penchant for drawing out-of-context moments in time. Interested in exploring these ideas further, he emailed the Oregon State Penitentiary and arranged to correspond via snail mail with a randomly assigned inmate. Between January and May of this year, the artist exchanged letters with the prisoner, whose name and location are being kept confidential, but who, according to Alexander-Tanner, has eight years remaining on a conviction related to robbery and parole violation. In March, channeling Truman Capote, the artist visited the prisoner face to face and sketched him for future drawings. The 15 drawings and 15 pages of correspondence featured in the show hold interest but are far from revelatory. "The food here is nasty meat," the inmate writes, "that is so many colors and sogy vegetabls.... I never killed nobody and I didn't steal no car eather. God bless you."

"He's not an extremely articulate guy," the artist admits, "but hopefully it opens up some investigations. I have my own conclusions, but I like to let people come to their own." The artist says he wanted to explore stereotypes about prison life: the juxtaposition of cultural fantasies about life behind bars with the more mundane realities. Despite this ambitious goal, The Prisoner proves more stereotypes than it disproves. As conceptual art, it is as "sogy" as the prison food about which its subject whines. In Exposed, Alexander-Tanner revealed movements outside the realm of expected experience. Those panels took you off guard and captured your curiosity about the people and their odd circumstances. At heart an intriguing concept, Prisoner could have more incisively explored its subject.

Alexander-Tanner—whose next project is, oddly enough, drawing product labels for Dave's Killer Bread, the local company owned by former prisoner-cum-baker Dave Dahl—doubts that his inmate understood how he fit into the whole fragmented-narrative thing. "I think he was just happy to have someone to write to," the artist says, which was a fortunate development for the project. "Most prisoners won't exchange letters with men, only women. They're hoping for conjugal visits."

Sequential Gallery, 328 NW Broadway, #113, 916-9293. Closes July 1. The show also contains the artist's

panels.

See PDX Exposted @ www.wweek.com/media/7723-1.jpg, www.wweek.com/media/7723-2.jpg, www.wweek.com/media/7723-3.jpg, www.wweek.com/media/7723-4.jpg, www.wweek.com/media/7723-5.jpg

See panels from The Prisoner @ www.wweek.com/media/7723.jpg

WWeek 2015