by Rosemary Ponnekanti
Tacoma News Tribune, February 2, 2009

When Mary Iverson looks at ports, she doesn’t see ships. She sees shapes: squares, rectangles, lines, stretching out to infinity in endless geometric patterns. For a while now, Iverson’s looked at industrial Seattle – but now, for a show currently up at the University of Puget Sound’s Kittredge Gallery, she’s turned her sights to Tacoma.  

The Port of Tacoma, to be exact. For “One Week,” both the show’s title and that of the major floor and wall pieces, Iverson worked from the port’s annual report. Calculating that, on average, 952 40-foot containers full of goods enter the port every day, she started to play around with how that would look physically, all stacked together.  

Having made thousands of plywood replicas (each 4 by 1.46 by 1.46 inches) of those shipping containers, she’s combined them in various sculptural permutations. There’s a stack of all 952 pieces, a cube of them plus an open prism representing the volume of the remainder, one asymmetrical prism. Seven permutations inhabit the Kittredge floor like an extremely tidy toddler play area.  

It all seems like fun until you realize, as Iverson did, that these containers represent cubic miles and endless weeks of stuff, the consuming reality of our world.  
On the walls, Iverson displays her usual mix of mathematical precision and minimalist beauty. Here the containers are drawn in graphite grids, painted in oils in her usual muted olives, teals, maroons and grays.  

The immense calculation of the operation of the port speaks in the pencil perspective lines reaching to an infinite vanishing point, while the containers themselves pile up like an Escher trompe l’oeil or stack warehouse-style.  

Unlike Iverson’s Port of Seattle works, which include cranes, movement and a general feeling of usefulness, “One Week” concentrates on volume itself. Painting some boxes solid, others one- or two-sided only, the artist plays with concepts of fullness and emptiness, a calm, minimalist but critical comment on the endlessness and shallowness of consumerism.  

And the irony, as Iverson herself points out, is that these qualities, removed from context, lead to a stark beauty.  

Also in the show are some fascinating replicas of Iverson’s recent public art: murals at Seattle’s Union Street Electric Gallery or the Titus Railroad Park in Kent, along with plans and installation shots.  

No such prosaic, earthly commentary for Bill Colby in the Kittredge side gallery. The former UPS professor’s “Skyward” series of Northwest-school, nature-based prints reside serenely in their own sphere of existence.  

Woodcuts made with acrylics, they drift through a universe of planetary circles, swimming protozoa, wafting clouds and dashing comets, with the occasional forest. The vivid sky-blues and aquas, swept through with whites, golds or reds, are chunky, but blend more than the average woodcut in an almost painterly fashion.  

It all adds to the overwhelming feeling that, in Colby’s universe, all is pleasant.  

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568