Top 11 exhibits in Seattle & one in Tacoma

Baxter:

Her sculptures are the dead end of romance. If jukeboxes played visual art, Baxter could turn Jerry Lee Lewis inside out: You broke my will, what a thrill.

Hinrichs:

Fuse Eva Hesse with Richard Tuttle and you've in Heide Hinrichs territory. She has Hesse's love of the ungainly protuberance and the heavy edit of Tuttle's subtlety. In my mother's darker moments, she liked to say, "I wish they'd drop the bomb so we could go underground." Hinrichs is an artist of the solitary's apocalypse. Those who stagger back into the light after losing everything would be lucky to find her sculptures on the floor, the flayed skin of soccer ball bladders hung on a wire or deflated inner tubes curled as if smoked in a fire.

Every fan whirs away, generating nothing. It's not easy being the joker in the pack, the sane man in King Lear's court, the forward momentum surrounded by inertia. Even artists who play it straight are surrounded by what opposes them, be they those rarities encased in success or the more common breed, hearing the echo of their actions bounce off the walls of empty rooms.

In the mythology of American success stories, a go-getter rarely turns into a goofball. Anybody who is up and at 'em can count on cashing in stock options in the not-too-distant future, which is why American comic strips celebrate the cult of the loser.

Although there are narratives here in an Eric Fischl vein, Barnhart isn't interested in creating a common thread.  Fischl would never put such a range of paintings together in one show. He hits a theme and explores it. Barnhart's disregard for connectives approaches Martin Kippenberger's. Barnhart believes in the vibrational field of a painting, and the idea that vibrations on the same frequency tend to fuse. His do. Beg For It at Ambach & Rice is a force field.

Akio Takamori's figures are nearly always lost in thought, caught in that moment when the body pauses and the mind drifts freely across its mental sky. Born and raised in Japan, he pays his country of origin the honor of taking it lightly. Bold and loose, his figures include Japanese spirit babies with oversize heads, priests, warriors, peasants and royalty with the folds of their gowns flapping and more recently, figures drawn from the larger world.

There's an upbeat, irrepressible refusal to judge in her work, a determination not to call anybody a freak, unless as a compliment, and an inability to accept a depressing scene as a downer. She's the kind of person who'd read The Metamorphosis and think it's a comedy.

Breath is proof that the father lives, at least for the duration of the video. The proof that matters is the evidence of love. (Neil) Goldberg conceived this piece after his mother's death and while his father, now dead, was failing. By participating, his father reassured him. The video is the father wordlessly proving that he'll be there, even after he's gone, in every breath his son takes. Look, he's saying. It's easy, and it will never end.

They treated Tacoma like a science experiment, taking core samples of the place distilled into gruesome forms of theoretically drinkable beverages. In all manner of glass test tubes (blown by Hansen), they mixed an alcohol base with Western red cedar, brick fragments from Ted Bundy's childhood home and soil from Port Madison; coyote blood, beard hair, beeswax and butterfly wings; blackberries, club moss from the Hoh rain forest and hydrogen cyanide; soil from Lewis and Clark's Cape Disappointment camp site, concrete from the Boeing plant in Everett flavored with hobo urine, and brick chips from Francis Farmer's childhood home with paint flecks from Curt Cobain's final abode on Lake Washington