The idea of the artist as solo creator of their singular vision emerged during the era of global political and cultural uncertainty at the start of the 20th century. Artists, reaching for new ways to make sense of their world, echoed the changes happening around them in their work. Audiences grew to expect the shock of the new. In both science and art, Einsteinian relativity became the new rule, that truths were dependent on perspective.
Western culture has held on tight to this image of the artist ever since, and has been equally slow to open to alternative ways of working. So what image materializes when you hear about individual artists who are also a creative couple? What do you see when I tell you that they are not only makers, but curators of ideas, challengers of convention, carriers of skills, and collectors of objects?
One richly plausible answer is held in the retrospective exhibition Dennis Evans and Nancy Mee: Fifty Years, on view at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. This complex show reveals both the multitudes and connecting threads of this Seattle-based pair’s story, unfurling in a way that honors many facets of their work.
On entering the exhibition, one is struck by the scale of Evans’ and Mee’s work. Evans’ wall pieces pulse with color both within and around the frames, while the detail of objects and text on their surfaces draw the viewer close. Mee’s standing sculptures, constructed primarily of combinations of worked metal and manipulated glass, occupy space in a way that is consistently human, both in size and references within.
Along the curved wall of the gallery is some of Evans’ early performance and installation work, contextualized by the Muybridge-style sequential black-and-white photographic proof sheets revealing Mee’s documentation of these events from the 1970s. This early work, such as Instrument Box for 100 Discrete Tune Sounding Stones for Puget Sound (1980) garnered praise by the art world at that time and still resonates today. Renderings on the walls reveal schemes and intentions for the activation of these pieces, the forms of which parallel artist books: you can’t see the whole work unless it is being engaged or performed. All of the parts are essential here: the drafted plans and directives on the walls, the objects themselves, and the visual residue. They honor the work’s challenging-to-capture element of time, and compensate for the viewer’s body not being there as it happened.
The presence and absence of the body also informs Mee’s early work. Particularly striking is Broken Body (1985), a sculptural assemblage of X-ray imagery of curved spines layered with slumped light aqua-tinted sheet glass and surrounded by stout steel. Mee reflected on the choice of glass, which positioned her a vanguard in the field of art glass at the time. “The potency of my material was that it is so beautiful, yet so dangerous. It’s transparent. It’s a barrier.” The juxtaposition with the industrial frame continues this tension, and speaks further about her engagement with material as a communicator: “the material was at obligation to my content.”
These early gestures of each artist shown in the context of subsequent works reveal connections. It is tempting to suggest that they operated like navigators, bodies moving in space with an understanding of the direction they are traveling. But looking deeper, you see that they are collectors of narratives. The exhibition expands beyond their beginnings into a space that feels like an encyclopedic museum nested within a museum of art. Find your way between shaped stone musical instruments, curio cabinets of books and letters, classical figures, vessels, and collected objects, and the forged and fabricated steel and glass. The pieces carry a palpable sense of the continuity of time and the variety of their imagery held together simultaneously.
Several of the works featured in Fifty Years, including Sedes Sapiente and The Calendar Keeper, from Imagine—After the Deluge (2008), are excerpted from sprawling narrative bodies of work that reveal the inner workings of their partnership. Evans reflects, “What confuses a lot of people when we talk about the collaboration is that we…collaborate on an idea and we both take, coming to that idea from different directions.” This parallel play let them lean in to their own way of working. Mee continues, “…vision or concept expressed through material [or] materials used to express concept.”
Being life- and work-partners has meant that these artists were never completely alone in their vision. Yet the space that Nancy Mee and Dennis Evans have built together—from sharing meals to the studio—shaped a narrative of their own. Fifty Years embraces the artifacts of such a creative life while simultaneously revealing larger human stories of mystery, discovery, humanity, and science.
Kristin L. Tollefson
Kristin L. Tollefson is an artist and educator based in Tacoma, Washington.
Dennis Evans & Nancy Mee: 50 Years is on view through February 3 at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, located at 550 Winslow Way on Bainbridge Island, Washington. The museum is free and open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Visit www.biartmuseum.org for more information.
