Sam's Rental/Sales Gallery Features Northern Lights

The Seattle Art Museum's Rental/Sales Gallery has always been a great place to browse for art and to test your tastes. Director Barbara Shaiman pulls contemporary art from most the city's leading galleries and digs up new artists herself by regularly visiting cafes and alternative art spaces.

One of the strengths of the gallery is that you get to look at contemporary work from every imaginable genre, from figurative paintings and photographs to abstract mixed media and drawings. And if you're not ready to buy, you can rent art works for a few months with no strings attached.

Right now, the gallery is especially worth a visit. For the first time, Shaiman is showing artists from Vancouver, B.C., none of whom is regularly shown in Seattle. Shaiman announced a few months ago that she wanted to broaden the geographic horizons of her gallery, a smart move considering that few other galleries in town pay much attention to the B.C. scene.

The three Canadian artists on exhibit this month are Angela Grossmann, Monique Fouquet, and Gu Xiong. In B.C., the three are represented by the Diane Farris Gallery, easily the city's most ambitious and risk-taking showcase for contemporary work.

Most compelling of the three is Grossmann, whose work with photo collage, oil painting and mixed media is figurative, suggestive and full of layered metaphor.

The works can be quite large, some are almost four feet by three feet, and in the group of paintings on display, she has used 60-year-old mug shots from a Canadian prison to create portraits that have a 19th-century look. Her subjects stare straight into the camera, unsmiling. They could be photos of Ellis Island immigrants or Western pioneers.

Once Grossmann has added her own painting and mixed-media additions, the works become even more intriguing, a curious mix of the highly personal and the anonymous.

Fouquet creates oil-on-canvas and photo works that are about female beauty. She contrasts close-ups of parts of her own face - her mouth or forehead - with her painted reproductions of classical female statues. Comparing reality with the ideal is not a new theme, but Fouquet's work manages to avoid being trite at the same time that they are, aesthetically, quite accomplished.

Xiong was a Chinese art professor who fled China after the Tiananmen Square political crack-down. He settled in Vancouver, where, because of his limited English, he took a job in the University of British Columbia's student cafeteria.

But he couldn't help making art, and the silkscreen and acrylic paintings he came up with are boisterous pop-art images of the detritus of the cafeteria. There are mugs with tea bags still in them, cigarette butts, crushed Coke cans.

Shaiman says she'll bring another group of Canadian art works to the gallery in March. Also on view now is a show of black-and-white works in all media that includes some gems by local artists.

The gallery is located at 1334 First Ave. in the building just to the north of the Seattle Art Museum. The show of Canadian artists is up through Oct. 18. Information: 206-625-8997.

Out from storage

The Henry Art Gallery is opening Part Two of its "Unpacking the Collection" exhibition on Oct. 16 in the north galleries, the original Henry building.

Now that the museum has more exhibition space, it can dust off some of the collections that it has had in storage for decades.

Selections from the upcoming show will include late 19th- and early 20th-century landscapes, 20th-century modern paintings and prints, Indian textiles, works from the Northwest School of mid-century painters and photographs.