Leo Saul Berk: caves, mines and hideouts

Monty Python:

First sad sack: We were raised in a corridor. We longed for a room.
Second sad sack: We longed for a corridor. We were raised on a road.

Not since 17th-century Chinese painters focused on the fluid connectives between forms has empty space been as riveting a subject as it is now.

Rachel Whiteread is crucial in this context, but by the time she began to explore the space between legs of a chair, for instance, Bruce Nauman had already been there and gone. (The peerless Peter Schjeldahl described their relationship as Nauman's Chuck Berry to Whiteread's Beatles.)

In Seattle, Leo Saul Berk has his own version of the theme: empty space as landscape narrative. In his exhibit at Lawrimore Project, Deep, Dark, he maps the volumes of famous undergrounds, including the hole in which Saddam Hussein unsuccessfully sought refuge after the U.S. invasion of his country on trumped-up charges.

Spider Hole, 2009  Fiberglass, foam, resin and glass.  6 x 4 x 10 feet.


Berk gives volume to the photos, schematics and renderings of the box-cave trailing a partial tunnel that the U.S. military released to the media. Hanging from the ceiling and painted yellow to mirror U.S. ridicule of the sole occupant, Spider Hole is a positive projection asserting itself with a phallus, snake, tongue and weapon.

Who's weapon? Not the butcher of Baghdad's. Glass beads ordinarily used for roadway strips give the piece its disco glitter.

Quecreek Mine, 2009  Acrylic and walnut.  30 x 2.5 x 22 feet.

If this piece came with a soundtrack, it should be the wacked-out beauty of the Beatles' Come Together.

The Quecreek Mine collapse came after 9/11 and during the build up to the Iraq War. Nine men trapped 240-feet underground managed to run to the highest point of their three-to-five feet high coffin and find a bubble of air as water roofed the structure.

Thanks to the miners themselves and the rescue crew of engineers who did everything right, everybody got out alive. There was only one side to be on during the 78-hour ordeal. When that side won, it was a rare piece of good news for a rattled country. For a moment or two, everybody ignored the inherently flawed nature of an industry tearing up the earth and using humans as disposal parts.

Orange acrylic dips and rises as it tracks a layout through an echoing grid of purple shadows. Cracked in spots and porous throughout, the piece is tapped out, with empty squares where earth used to be. As Chinese landscapes move from earth to sky to water, Quecreek Mine also metaphor for the river that ran through it.