SEATTLE
Samantha Scherer at Davidson Contemporary

This show of new work by Samantha Scherer at Davidson Contemporary confronts the link between the narrative and the visual by displaying 19 small watercolors relating to the disastrous 1914 voyage of the “Endurance” to Antarctica. Sir Ernest Shackleton, author of a celebrated literary account, led the expedition of 27 crew-members, who became icebound aboard their three-masted ship, which eventually sank. In these paintings on paper, Scherer freeze-frames elements and aspects of the trip once the explorers left the doomed vessel. Although they were rescued, Scherer focuses on their stranded proximity to the “Endurance,” which is shown in gradual stages of disappearing into the enveloping ice. Using black watercolor paint only, Scherer gives us a clue as to how such a distant tale relates to her earlier work, paintings of the eyes of celebrities (seen at SOIL in 2004): the World War I-era celebrity of Shackleton and the returning crew, their fickle fate and posterity as adventurers and foolhardy survivors.

The 37-year-old graduate of Kansas City Art Institute and the University of Washington is a master of the miniature. Averaging 8 to 10 inches by 21 inches, the pieces of white Stonehenge paper act as the perfect snowy backdrop for the minute, calamitous tableaux. Tiny groups of figures are set upon the paper at varying distances from one another. With no horizon lines visible, sky merges into snowfield. Although each image is related to the overall tale, it is self-contained and dependent upon the image’s own internal timescape. Viewers are free to create their own plot development; each watercolor has its own temporal logic. Edge, Endurance and Endurances (all 2007) have the ship alone, or in a double-view. Others, without the ship, like Orders (III), Pack (II) and Pack (III), are more frightening. They set an individual or group of men alone on the fierce blankness of the snowy environment. Could it be that Scherer’s prior fascination with celebrityhood is just a jumping-off point for comments about the lonely isolation of people caught in unfortunate (and absurd) circumstances?

In Still (II) and A Popular Diversion (II), the fates of the expedition’s dogs and penguins are featured. In these works, Scherer’s perspective is God-like, detached and cruelly playful, even as she raises issues of rescue, escape and hopelessness. These are strategies that lift the works out of illustration onto the plane of art. In realizing this transformation, the individual paintings stand on their own, free of interconnected, yet distracting, historical contexts.