Ford Gilbreath Photos Wonderfully Mysterious

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

"Ford Gilbreath: Under the Duwamish and Other Waters" and "Michelle Kelly: Paintings and Drawings," through Nov. 28 at Esther Claypool Gallery, 617 Western Ave., Seattle. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. -------------------------------

If there is a contemporary school of Northwest art, Ford Gilbreath is certainly a leading member. The Seattle photographer's current show of hand-painted photographs at the new Esther Claypool Gallery depict a visual profile of the Northwest that is familiar in its lush, watery beauty, but also darkly unsettling.

Using a camera submerged in a fish tank and lit by two photographic flashes, Gilbreath has spent many dark nights in chest waders walking along the shallower edges of the Duwamish Waterway, pushing his floating camera / fish tank contraption in front of him. The idea, he explains in his artist's statement, was "to see things from the river's point of view, rather than the land's point of view."

What he has come up with is a suite of 22 smallish (9-inch-by-8.75-inch) images that are subtly hand-painted and wonderfully mysterious. They are intimate close-ups of anonymous stretches of the water's edge, compositions of fallen trees and bracken, scenes of environmentally degraded marshlands. What makes them more surprising is that through his underwater camera, we see the scenes both above and below the water's surface. And while the scene may look shadowy above the water line, the scene below the water is even cloudier.

There are many ways to interpret these images. Looking at them as nature photography, they are quite beautiful, and, in the best tradition of nature photography, they focus on the small, overlooked nooks and crannies of the natural world. There's also an environmental message in the photos. The Duwamish is polluted, and though the slime-green scum has a gorgeous jewel tone about it, it hints at environmental mayhem.

But there is also a delicious noirishness about these images that make them fit right in with a certain Northwest gothic point of view. You walk around the gallery looking at each of the images, many of which seem very similar, and you wonder what else lurks in those dark waters. If these were stills from a B-grade detective movie, the next frame would contain the body. No matter how you look at these images, they're mysterious, lovely and great fun.

Also on view at the gallery is work by Seattle artist Michelle Kelly, who makes drawings on paper and oil paintings on panel. Kelly's images are abstract, though they suggest microworlds such as tiny twisted hairs, ganglion knots, nearly weightless seed pods and raindrops. In her exhibition statement, Kelly says she has "developed a language of abstract forms that could, but do not necessarily, exist in nature." She says she also is interested in the "fragility of materials and form which parallels the fragility of our lives and world . . ."

The strongest of her images are the series of odd, white floating shapes that could be tiny sea creatures (there are several tails trailing behind them) or especially good-looking teeth, their roots somehow elongated into elegant white threads. It's hard to know what these white images are, but they're interesting and nicely painted. Less engaging are the graphite drawings, which hint at the patterns of raindrops or snowdrops.