At Traver Gallery downtown, longtime Vashon artist Scott Fife presents a new show of captivating work, Cardboard Kingdom (through Dec. 23). Through a process of trimming, gluing, folding and screwing together castoff scraps of archival gray cardboard, the artist creates expressive animal and human heads. In the past, these have included oversized busts of famous faces, from Bruce Lee to Abe Lincoln to Kurt Cobain (the last of which was a favorite of mine from a Seattle Art Museum show in 2010).
ArtSEA: Notes on Northwest Culture is Crosscut’s weekly arts & culture newsletter.
But aside from a tousled bust of “Young Hemingway,” the current show emphasizes animals. With a lioness, horse, jaguar, polar bear and others, Fife nods to the myths humans build around these creatures as well as our interconnectedness. His keen skill at manipulating a simple paper product is evident in each animal’s face — rather than a general idea of a polar bear we see an individual one, with battle scars and backstory.
I’ve been a fan of Fife’s figures for many years; when I interviewed him in 2011, he spoke about what draws him to create bears specifically. “The bears, while not vanishing at this time, may soon become a memory of the wilderness, of the West before settlement,” he told me. “There is melancholy to it — a predator that’s almost defenseless.”
These pieces are highly crafted (note the detailed cardboard fur) but seemingly raw, with a patchworked palpability. The beasts lie around on supports as if still in progress, their stories not yet finished.
At Traver Gallery downtown, longtime Vashon artist Scott Fife presents a new show of captivating work, Cardboard Kingdom (through Dec. 23). Through a process of trimming, gluing, folding and screwing together castoff scraps of archival gray cardboard, the artist creates expressive animal and human heads. In the past, these have included oversized busts of famous faces, from Bruce Lee to Abe Lincoln to Kurt Cobain (the last of which was a favorite of mine from a Seattle Art Museum show in 2010).
ArtSEA: Notes on Northwest Culture is Crosscut’s weekly arts & culture newsletter.
But aside from a tousled bust of “Young Hemingway,” the current show emphasizes animals. With a lioness, horse, jaguar, polar bear and others, Fife nods to the myths humans build around these creatures as well as our interconnectedness. His keen skill at manipulating a simple paper product is evident in each animal’s face — rather than a general idea of a polar bear we see an individual one, with battle scars and backstory.
I’ve been a fan of Fife’s figures for many years; when I interviewed him in 2011, he spoke about what draws him to create bears specifically. “The bears, while not vanishing at this time, may soon become a memory of the wilderness, of the West before settlement,” he told me. “There is melancholy to it — a predator that’s almost defenseless.”
These pieces are highly crafted (note the detailed cardboard fur) but seemingly raw, with a patchworked palpability. The beasts lie around on supports as if still in progress, their stories not yet finished.
