Fels' Fishy Creations Tell The Tale Of Global Trade

----------------------------------------------------------------- Visual arts review

"Le Tonnare," mixed media by Donald Fels, at the Foster/White Gallery, 311 Occidental Ave. S., through Sept. 28. Hours are Mondays through Saturdays 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Sundays noon to 5 p.m. -----------------------------------------------------------------

It's not often that you go to an art gallery and get a primer on economics. But visit Foster/White Gallery this month and you'll come away knowing a little something about the Mediterranean bluefin tuna industry, and how modern air freight and the Japanese sashimi market have changed the ancient Mediterranean fishing industry forever.

Given this summer's stand-off between Canadian and U.S. salmon fishermen, and the historical importance of the Pacific Northwest fishing industry, the show may also provoke a little thought on possible parallels between the world Donald Fels describes and our regional economy.

If this sounds like dry stuff, don't worry. Fels, a Fall City artist, has been making artwork based on global trade for the better part of a decade, and, amazingly, he pulls it off. With the aid of a few photographs, a couple of explanatory gallery notes and a lot of colorful collage and mixed media works, Fels this time has created a show that is at once playful and evocative, informative but never didactic. It's also surprisingly fun, even if it's not necessarily the most polished show you'll see this month.

Fels is as much anthropologist and economist as artist, and to do his artwork, he travels to foreign lands to investigate his subject matter. In the early '90s he spent time in Southeast Asia to create an installation about the Southeast Asian tin and rubber industries for the Tacoma Art Museum. Though it didn't require foreign travel, this summer he displayed a piece about the Northwest plywood industry at an exhibition at the Bellevue Art Museum.

For his current project, Fels traveled to a small island off the west coast of Sicily. For thousands of years the Sicilians fished for bluefin tuna, building elaborate net-and-trap systems to catch the fish, which are some of the strongest and fastest swimmers in the sea. By the late 19th century, enterprising Sicilians were also building canning plants so the fish could be captured and immediately canned. Capturing and canning the fish became the main industries on many of these islands.

Now, however, the Sicilian bluefin industry is virtually gone. Bluefin meat is among the most highly prized in Tokyo's fresh fish markets, and Japanese industrial trawlers now catch many of the fish before they enter Sicilian waters. Efficient air freight means that the fish can be flown fresh from the trawlers to Japanese markets, where a whole fish goes for $10,000 to $15,000.

Fels' art aesthetic is rough and tumble. In the two galleries' worth of mixed media works he has created for the show, he slashes paint onto boards and sutures the boards together with bits of paper. He attaches rusting gears and levers onto two-dimensional works to evoke the clanking machinery of a cannery. He pastes posters and can labels from the mothballed cannery he visited onto his collages.

With metal bands Fels makes three-dimensional tuna bodies that morph into missiles and cyborg tuna submarines. He creates cultural whirlpools by mixing images of a buxom and youthful Sophia Loren - the '50s pinup girl for southern Italy's working-class men - with Japanese tide charts.

There's humor and a dollop of machine-age anxiety in his "Robotuna," the tuna that becomes a submarine. But there's also a tender sentimentality in a piece such as "Florio's Dream," which is a painting of the inside of a canning plant, now empty. The plant has the vaulted arches and architectural dignity of a Renaissance cathedral. There's a map of Sicily in the top corner, and the cannery's colorful red logo unfurls across the bottom. The painting leaves little doubt that the cannery was the heart and soul of the island, the place where people earned their livelihood and also found a certain social communion.

Though Fels is describing the ghost of the Sicilian bluefin industry, he does so without political finger-pointing.

"I find global trade fascinating," said Fels. "Here is a situation involving two ancient cultures, the Sicilians and the Japanese, and neither one is to blame. There is no blame. It's economics. You simply don't can something that's worth $10,000 to $15,000 fresh."

Fels is surprised that other artists don't mine what he considers the rich subject matter of global trade and economics.

"I feel strongly that the world is way more complicated than most of us bother to notice," said Fels. "But I don't feel that that means chaos or that we should all be overwhelmed by it. I'm interested in how we attach meaning, both personal and cultural, to the world around us, and that is what economics is about.

"It's also what art is about. So I hope someone coming into the gallery can revel a little in the complexity of the world."