energetic. In “Urban Indian Series #95” Joe Feddersen uses a stylized high voltage tower as a design element derived from the contemporary landscape. A show of Feddersen’s work is on view at TAM through Jan. 10, 2010. (Photo Courtesy of the artist and Froelick gallery, portland, Oregon)
It began with the making of baskets. The native people of the Plateau derived abstract, geometric designs from the world around them and wove these into the fantastic technology of basketry. Landscape features like mountains or the pattern seen in the gills and guts of the all-important salmon found their way into the basket designs of the people of the Plateau.
This tradition of extracting abstract patterns from the surrounding world lives on and finds renewal in the work of artists like Joe Feddersen, whose one-man exhibition, “Vital Signs,” is currently showing at the Tacoma Art Museum (TAM).
Born in Omak, Wash. (just outside the Colville Reservation) to a mother descended from the Okanagan and Lakes peoples in Canada, Feddersen went on to study at the University of Washington and received his master of fine arts degree from the University of Wisconsin. From 1989 until his retirement this year Feddersen served on the faculty of the Evergreen State College.
“Vital Signs” is a sumptuous visual feast showing off Feddersen’s mastery of a multitude of media: basketry, print-making and glass blowing. In all of these he draws upon his ancestral design traditions, yet he adapts them to reflect the experience of the contemporary landscape.
Thus, the form of the high voltage towers that are a prominent feature of the Eastern Washington landscape are a recurrent theme in all of Feddersen’s media. (The high voltage tower also bears an uncanny resemblance to the Kachina Spirits of the Hopi Indians.) The motif shows up in a charming basket - the 2003 “High Voltage Tower,” as well as in the “Sophia” series of reduction linocut prints, the 2006 “Sound Transit” prints and in the 2003 “Urban Indian” series of monoprints. In the latter of these, “Urban Indian Series #95,” the tower occupies the bottom half of the composition, imposed upon a yellow weave design. The upper half of the composition consists of a network (like an electrical diagram) of blue, green and red lines that seem to soak into the thickness of the paper. The pattern is reminiscent of the work of the Dutch constructivist Piet Mondrian - an impression that one gets from much of Feddersen’s work.
Feddersen is brilliant at finding features of our everyday experience that normally are so much in the background that they go unnoticed. In the weave of a basket or in the design sandblasted onto a blown glass vessel, however, these everyday features become astonishingly beautiful.
There are several blown glass cylinders that are decorated with the design of a tire track. It is something commonly seen in the mud, the snow or the dust but the beauty of the design is rarely appreciated. “Tire” is an example of one of these - a tall cylinder of matte-finished, clear glass with the tire track encircling it in a decorative band. Feddersen’s example is a cue for us to open our eyes and to appreciate the visual patterns in the world around us.
The lines of a freeway - complete with the diamond shapes that mark the high-occupancy vehicle lanes - find their way into Feddersen’s baskets and glass vessels as do the patterns, brick walls, a chain-link fences and the lines painted in parking lots.
Feddersen’s baskets of woven, waxed linen are charming little things - standing up like the starched sleeves of intricate sweaters. Many of his glass cylinders mimic his basket forms. Also in the show is a pair of glass vessels made in the form of funnel-shaped fish traps such as would have been constructed by Native people. One of these, “Fish Trap VI,” is an intense, luminous orange and resembles the nose cone of a space ship that is heated to red hot by reentry into the atmosphere. It seems to pulse with latent power.
Drawing upon the visual traditions of his ancestors, Feddersen works a magical synthesis of the old and the new as he finds powerful patterns in the contemporary world and uses these in both the tradition of basket-making as well as in the modern media print-making and blown glass.
“Vital Signs” is a refreshing and eye-opening exhibit. The show runs through Jan. 10, 2010 at TAM. For further information visit www.TacomaArtMuseum.org or call (253) 272-4258.
