Artists build a skillful 'Architectural View' at Prographica

Architecture contains many metaphors: the house stands in for family, the skyscraper for power, a series of rooms for the discovery of self or the divine.

Rather than hinting at hidden meanings, the engrossing little exhibition of structural images at Prographica Gallery is more overtly about artistic process. In the hands of these four artists — Steve Costie, Eric Elliott, Laura Hamje and Elizabeth Ockwell — architecture is a literal framework for the revelation of how a picture is made. This is a show that makes you itch to pick up a piece of charcoal.

The title of the show, "The Architectural View," emphasizes the position of the artist or viewer. We are placed outside of, within, underneath or above structures that are made vividly real or just barely visible through a variety of means. Again and again, the artists reveal how an image is built up on the paper — through dense graphite markings, lyrical ink lines or thick brush strokes.

The most intriguing works in the show play with our perception, as in Elliott's beautifully spare painting "Structure," which just barely allows a cube to emerge from the short daubs of blue and gray paint. In all of his work, Elliott, an emerging Seattle-based artist, seems to consider very carefully every stroke of oil paint or ink before committing it to paper. It's a cerebral process that results in elegant, organic and mesmerizing effects.

Ockwell, a well-established artist who just recently retired from the Art Institute of Chicago, creates exquisite ink and watercolor drawings of historic, often ornately ornamented, buildings. All of the images are deftly made, but my favorites are ones that create a tension between realism and abstraction.

In "Bode Museum, Berlin," Ockwell treats the scaffolding around the building with as much exquisite line work as with the baroque building itself. After focusing on this concentration of nimbly rendered details, your eyes can wander off to peripheries of washy abstractness.

For Costie and Hamje, both Seattle-based artists, the relationship between gesture and perception is paramount but in strikingly different ways. Costie almost attacks his work, layering on bold lines of graphite, erasing other lines into the dark mass, and then drawing in yet more. It's a visceral, expressive process that's sometimes just barely contained within the ambiguous architectural forms that he chooses.

Our vantage point is also uncertain. With "Aerial Large Format #1," the title suggests a bird's-eye view, but we seem to be looking up at the rounded arches or even horizontally at a row of windows that mirrors itself. About his series of "Ground" works, Costie writes that this juxtaposition of recognition and abstractness "is often meant to convey things that may not be comfortable; there is something pending perhaps, with a hint of something dangerous, something not fully seen or understood."

The external world plays a larger role for Hamje, who is at an early stage in her career. Hamje states, "Traveling to a new place removes us from complacency. When comfort is disturbed, perception changes." While the subject matter of her work is instantly recognized (bridges appear frequently) and the color palette is quite soothing, her big brush strokes abstract the images and "disturb" a comfortable viewing position.

Rather than hanging the exhibition artist by artist, gallery director Norman Lundin has mixed the works up, encouraging them to speak to each other in terms of scale and line. The layout kept me looking back and forth across the gallery, creating an active, spatial viewing experience that seemed in keeping with the theme of the show.

Lundin, a painter with a former, lengthy career as a faculty member at the University of Washington, has recently taken on the role of gallerist. Prographica will mark its first year in business in December and is on the right track with thoughtful, good-looking shows like this one.

Lundin's intimate knowledge of artistic process is evident when he talks about the show, saying, "When describing subject matter, an artist can arrive at a point where, (among hundreds perhaps thousands of paint strokes) a couple of strokes may make the subject matter disappear or, if gone, bring the subject matter back into view. From the artist's point of view, this 'shift' is a very interesting place to be."