Mary Iverson

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(The following is an exerpt from the November 2006 article, "Why the Web is Weak")

The work of  Mary Iverson, on exhibit upstairs at the Kimball in the Garage Gallery, is completely different in effect from Annie's. Executed in flat layers of opaque color, washed pigments and thin straight pencil lines, there is very little tactile quality in these pieces that would be lost in reproduction. But Iverson is a marvelous colorist, and the balance of colors is something mechanical reproduction has yet to match in real art, whether it be the pricey coffee-table art books with widely varying color prints, or the images on the internet which, no matter how expertly they might have been manipulated to match the original on the designer's computer, are still susceptible to the vagaries of interpretation supplied by the variety of monitors and color settings.

I imagine that Iverson's attention to color comes largely from her work en plein air, a practice you would not readily assume by looking at her works at the Kimball; she reduces the Seattle dockyards into geometric diagrams of rectangular flat color laid out in strict lines of persepective. More Mondrian than Monet. Her fascination with the port of Seattle began with more naturalistic plein air studies of cranes, but while on the premises (another example of the importance of being there) she began to look closely at the shipping containers the cranes spent all day moving. Her best works in this exhibition are those where overt references to the port, such as cranes, bridges and large buildings, disappear and give way to an endless repetition and variation of her shipping crates. The planes of these are executed in a variety of ways (including a lack of execution) and Iverson's sometimes shifting perspectives can be vertiginous at times.

Iverson’s subject matter is perfect for our times. In a period of globalization, when companies are building cargo ships so large they will not fit through the Panama canal (and so are forcing its enlargement) and most sea cargo, with the exception of bulk commodities like grain and oil, travel in standard-size containers, there may be no better subject to depict the idea of a global network, and its standardizing effects, than Iverson's endlessly repeating and shifting cargo crates.

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