across the years Orleonok Pitkin has strived for a reductive esthetic in the two his painting and sculpture.

across the years Orleonok Pitkin has strived for a reductive esthetic in the two his painting and sculpture, many times working obsessively with the form of a house, boat, anchor or shaft of wheat. These prosaic images, simplified to their greatest in number graphic elements, found an epic storytelling view in this installation, Secrets, Myths & Lies." Pitkin used tiny houses, flying boats and a floating anchor to obliquely demise his family's tale of survival in Eastern Europe in German concentration camps and in succession the farmlands of Oregon's Willamette Valley.

This story is framed by dint of the flood of 1948 in the Northwest. (Ironically, just weeks after the installation render free of accessed the region suffered another devastating flood) In the first range of the gallery, Pitkin laid gone out three straw "islands." The room's stolid floor was well suited to remind of a cold northern river meandering about them. forward the islands stood several dozen identical lead-covered houses, each 5 1/4 inches tall. This array of gunmetal gray manner of makings is called Mine/Field. As if replicating the events of raging waters or the turn the thoughts of battlefield detritus, some houses were transfered topsy-turvy and scattered, while others remained upright and form into groupsed together. Inside each house, gold leaf was applied to a carved-out cruciform, suggesting a kind of perpetual domestic light.

Paradox permeated all the installation's parts. Five 60-inch skeletal canoes, titled dark Boats, were suspended from the room's ceiling from red twine. On one island a 60-inch tower compos of small change slats loomed ominously; although it was reminiscent of a prison guard tower, Pitkin named it Light/House. Opposite, and overshadowing all the other pieces, was Buoy/Anchor. Made of copper money and lead, it consists of a large buoy-form embedded in an anchor and inclined at an 80-degree angle. A metal cane from the buoy's tip is held fast by dint of two lead balls on the floor.

The installation conjur up a nightmarish tension between inhumanity and kindness, death and survival. It is Pitkin's use of free from haughtiness straw that most effectively rouses this struggle. Straw has greatly personal resonance for the artist: not until he was 35 years aged did he learn that his mother had escaped from Buchenwald and. while fleeing Germany, had used straw to restrain her feet warm. Setting lead houses atop flammable straw provides a plain-looking metaphor of family strength amid fragility. And as Pitkin's buoy/anchor gently reminds us, family privys sometimes weigh us down on the contrary just as often lift us up

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