DAYS OF OUR LIVES. “One Week” by Mary Iverson is inspired by
 the volume of container traffic that flows through the Port of Tacoma each week.

Once upon a time ships bound for the Orient departed with silver and gold in their bellies and returned to the West laden with fine porcelain, furnishings, tea, spices and silk. Things have come full circle now. Instead of hemorrhaging a national supply of precious metal, our precious trade deficit grows ever more out of balance and ships return not with bellies full of exotic cargo, but with decks stacked high with rectangular, metal containers that are made to be placed upon waiting train cars or flat bed trailers pulled by semi trucks. These 40-foot, rectangular shipping containers are filled with the cheap consumer goods bound for retail outlets all over the country.

Recently, local artist Mary Iverson – a self-confessed art geek with a fascination for numbers and measurement – has created a body of work derived from the visual and conceptual spectacle that is the Port of Tacoma. Our working waterfront with its constant influx of cargo containers is the basis of Iverson’s new works that are featured in her latest show, titled “One Week,” currently on display at the University of Puget Sound’s Kittredge Gallery.

The seed of Iverson’s show is her calculation that an average of 952 full, 40-foot containers flow into the Port of Tacoma every week. To illustrate this volume of containers Iverson has created an installation of wooden volumes – blocks and boxes – on the floor of the gallery space that provide a visual representation of the amount of imports that pass though our city each week.

While this sculptural installation is cerebrally intriguing, it is Iverson’s paintings that are the heart of her show.

The back wall of the gallery is taken up by a 20-foot long painting entitled “One Week.” This monumental painting shows a vast, flat landscape occupied by shipping containers receding to a vanishing point on the horizon. Iverson shows the graphite skeleton of her work: the mathematical, geometric, pencil-drawn grids that reduce a landscape of rectangular containers into a visual abstraction. Using her pigments she fills in just enough of the pencil-drawn spaces to suggest the panorama of the modern shipping port while still retaining that cool abstraction.

Indeed, Iverson seems to delight in existing in this space between the figurative and the abstract. The landscape of the industrialized shipping port affords her a venue to accomplish this feat.

Illustrative of Iverson’s modus operandi is the conceptual painting and the photo documentation for a mural of a railroad yard that she did for Titus Railroad Park in Kent.

Here, the sweeping curve of a multi-tracked railroad yard is deduced to a series of rectangular shapes receding along the curves of the parallel tracks. The visual essence of a busy railroad yard is conjured up. Yet at the same time the image is almost pure geometry accented with lush color.

The exhibit features numerous canvasses on which Iverson has, with the deft hand of the draftsman, drawn concise lines in graphite before she applies the lush mixtures of pigments into which she dips her brushes. Among these are a number of wonderful gems such as “M5, Rust.” On this 12-inch by 12-inch canvas Iverson fills the geometric drawing with thick, rich reds, lush yellows  and blue-grays. There are areas in which a painterly mottling of the reds, blues and yellows is especially delicious to the hungry eye of the beholder.

Iverson is a creature that has found a unique artistic niche in that liminal space between geometric abstraction and the industrial landscape. Her “One Week” is well worth a viewing before the days run out.

“One Week” runs through Feb. 27 at Kittredge Gallery on the UPS campus. For further information contact (253) 879-2806 or visit www.ups.edu/campusmap.xml.