August 16 - September 29, 2007

For her first solo show at Lawrimore Project, Seattle artist Anne Mathern turns her attention to Moses Lake whose name belies its Native American origin. Exploring this disconnect, Mathern's new work in video, photography and live performance interrogates the imposition of one's cultural and historical symbolism and persona onto another. Colonial explorers, vision questers, desert mystics and totemic beasts are the resulting subjects when the artist (mis)appropriates herself, her work and a band of disillusioned youth in a ritual-cum-rock show of an exhibition.

Main Space

The show's opening featured a live performance wherein the artist, suspended from the ceiling, bouncing on a sand dune mocked shooting photographs while being pitted against a performance by artist-costumed *fantasy metal* band, Doomhawk. Sought out by Mathern for their subcultural, lifestyle-defined retreat to a mythological realm, Doomhawk's presence will be felt throughout the show in the remaining installation of costumes, photographs, and film--the gallery functioning as a discoverable ruin--a pilgrimage site--its visitors left to encounter the relics of Mathern's ritual performance.

 

Background

There is a cluster of farming towns in Eastern Washington that go by the Greek and Hebrew-derived names of Othello, Ephrata, Odessa and Moses Lake. Nothing else about the white rural American communities is remotely Greek or Hebrew-derived.

Moses of the book of Exodus led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt and into the desert for 40 years. The City of Moses Lake was named after Sulk-stalk-scosum, chief of the tribe whose land it usurped to build the city. For convenience, whites renamed him Chief Moses.

In the Black Box

Screening in the black box is a new video by Mathern, Oriental March.  Here the artist conflates a Danish composer’s vision of “oriental” music, a Middle-Eastern subject in China, the Old and New Testaments, and crusades and vision quests, all with Mathern as the main protagonist who, as it happens, was born in the Middle East herself. 

Also on view in the white cube and hallway galleries will be Mathern’s newest body of photographs which further extend the artist’s interest in spirituality and mysticism.

Read reviews:

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The Stranger

More about the artist’s work