Michael Brophy at Linda Hodges - Seattle, Washington - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, Feb, 1997 by Matthew Kangas

In his second solo show at this gallery, Michael Brophy used landscape painting to confront a very real environmental dilemma. Superficially majestic, Brophy's five 8-by-8-foot oils on canvas and five smaller 3-by-3-foot paintings reveal their political position slowly. Brutally cropped so that the treetops are never visible, these landscapes envelop the viewer in the forest of the Pacific Northwest. But despite sharing the size and much of the inflated, quasi-religious grandeur of Albert Bierstadt and other painters of the Rocky Mountain School, Brophy's paintings set out to expose the ecological aftermath of Manifest Destiny: the "colonization" and subsequent destruction of millions of acres of virgin-growth forests. Astoundingly, he is able to achieve this with humor.

Typical of Brophy's wit is the fleet of vicious chain saws flying through the air in Swarm (1994). The whimsicality of these flying tools is balanced by the very real scene of desolate clear-cut land in the foreground. A more recent painting, Worth (1996), shows a subsequent stage in the destruction of nature: a man, evidently a real-estate developer, is seen in a forest clearing. He studies an architectural plan for a tacky chalet, spreading out the drawing on a huge tree stump. More tree stumps and, in the distance, a tiny blue "Port-o-let", are depicted in Out (1996). Settlement (1996), where tiny cabins are visible at the base of giant tree trunks, employs an extreme reversal of scale to make its point. Human beings may enter the forest to pillage and dominate, the painting seems to say, but nature's ominous and unpredictable power remains potent.

The loose brushwork evident in these paintings is deployed more evenly and coherently than was the case with the canvases Brophy showed last year at Laura Russo Gallery in Portland, but in all his work he comes across as a painter of anti-heroic subject matter on a heroic scale, wittily and effectively chronicling the fate of our environment.