From "Flourishing Remnants," by Matthew Olds and Heather Joy
It’s the second anniversary of the Blitz Capitol Hill Arts Walk tonight, Thursday. Held from 5 to 8 p.m. (or later), the walk has some 40 participant venues. Whatever you do, make time to stop by Vermillion for their newest installation, “Flourishing Remnants.”
The most striking thing about “Flourishing Remnants” (at Vermillion through July 2) is its cohesion–from the large paintings of Matthew Olds to the delicate and deceptive photographs of Heather Joy and the perspective line drawing on one wall–the is a quiet and palpable weight to the installation. It has a roof. A skeletal, decaying one, but a roof nonetheless.
With excellent use of the Vermillion gallery, slender tree trunks are installed in a loose grove. In Olds’ large paintings, splintered latticework forms float and advance, supported by trees that seem to be in a struggle to simultaneously disappear and proliferate. In contrast, Joy’s photographs of greenhouse roofs at first appear sharply modernist, but reward a long gaze with their somewhat Victorian detail of glass and joints stained with rust and mildew.
What is tangible is the sense of both an extended conversation and a place behind these works. The conversation is apparent, as Olds and Joy have worked as a husband-and-wife team for ten years, and place reveals itself to be the Beall Greenhouses on Vashon Island, in use since the turn of the last century and now abandoned.
At one point housing 25 acres of roses and orchids and supplying the world, they are now clearly fragile, fragmented forms participating the quiet riot of Northwest greenery that overtakes everything that stays still too long.
Olds and Joy have done a nuanced and lovely job of capturing the fascination and contradictions inherent in watching structures dissolve and nature run her course, and their installation is one of the best I have seen at Vermillion.
