Balance is precarious in “Uneasy Landscapes,” a 25-year retrospective of work by Seattle artist Harriet Sanderson. Anatomy is scrambled, too, and spatial orientation can be uncertain.
Sanderson, who came out of the University of Washington’s MFA printmaking program in 1990, has good reason to be alert to the imbalances and uncertainties of the flesh. As curator Elizabeth Bryant explains in the exhibit catalog, Sanderson was suffering from “acute, undiagnosed, untreated post-polio syndrome” when at the UW, which made the physical side of art-making a challenge for her. (One video on display in “Uneasy Landscapes” makes it clear she has little or no strength in her right arm.)
Anderson addresses this bodily frailty from a number of angles, in a variety of media. And at its best, it’s a complexly layered meditation on the nature of the flesh in all its flaws and mortality.
The show is uneven, in part because Sanderson’s channels of
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