SEATTLE TIMES

What to see this week: comedians of color, Clyde Petersen’s vision of the Northwest and DIY art

Sep. 21, 2021 at 6:00 am Updated Sep. 21, 2021 at 5:17 pm
Megan Burbank
Catch the Northwest on Super 8mm

”…In a world of Instagram filters and perfectly edited YouTube videos, there’s something soft and lush about images pulled from Super 8mm film, especially when it captures the landscape of the Pacific Northwest — tiny roadside chapels, the curved stone of the bizarro Maryhill Stonehenge, gutted-looking midcentury sedans along the Green River, the heady green of Rattlesnake Lake, a massive stump amid the detritus of the logging industry.

You can see all these and more in Clyde Petersen’s new show, “Even Hell Has Its Heroes,” which opened Sept. 18 at J. Rinehart Gallery and stays up through Oct. 16. Petersen’s show isn’t just about the Northwest’s beautiful, strange and sometimes gloomy environs. For five years, Petersen worked with the band Earth, and turned it into a major subject. Using Super 8 film, the artist, filmmaker and musician created an experimental music documentary about the group, grounding it in Northwest surroundings. The images in “Even Hell Has Its Heroes” are drawn from that footage.

Petersen is one of those Northwest artists whose works feel both rarefied and DIY: They’ve shown at Portland’s Time-Based Art Festival and received numerous high-profile artist grants, but always contain an analog, punk-adjacent spirit, a chronicling of art and artists, and it’s always worth seeing in person…”

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