These are the artists shortlisted for the Henry Art Gallery's new award, The Brink: Respectively, Isabelle Pauwels (Vancouver, B.C.), Gareth Moore (Vancouver, B.C.), Isaac Layman (Seattle), Matt Browning (Seattle), Aaron Flint Jamison (Portland), and the apparently basically un-Googlable Alex Felton (Portland) (that last image came up under his name, but we have no idea what or whether it has to do with him).

The prize is $12,500 plus a solo show at the Henry, and the winner will be announced April 17.

What do I think of this list? I'll tell you when I find out more about Jamison, Moore, Felton, and Pauwels.

In Matt Mitros's show at 4Culture, smooth, glassine monochromes erupt. Craters have broken out on these otherwise undisturbed resin surfaces, which are contained in wood frames. The little mountainous bodies of the craters are rough, but at the center of each is a pool of shiny, hard, colored resin. The craters are like reverse ceramic objects, with glaze on the inside.

Mitros studied in the ceramics department at the University of Washington, graduating in 2006. According to the materials he lists, none of the works in his current show is actually ceramic. But even with resin and wood (the only two materials listed), he exploits the ceramic-centric tension between surface and substance. The surface is a tense border; a skin/site of explosive events. Or not quite explosive but mimicking explosiveness, aping nature. If you look closely, the artist's fingerprints are all over the grayish little hills. The hills express two forces, one real and one symbolic: the artist calmly and carefully forming them, and whatever the imaginary event was that pushed them up to disturb this otherwise serene surface. A comparison to Alex Schweder's erupting surfaces is inevitable.

But there's something disturbing in Schweder's work that's missing from Mitros's events, which are tidy and formal—frozen, safely, in time. The best expression of this is in three framed works with the same glassine surfaces, but these surfaces are interrupted not from within but from air blown on them before the resin dried (or as it was drying) (a detail, at left, from Insufflate II). This creates craters in the surface, but these craters recede downward, providing a murky view of the surface under the resin as if you were the one underneath trying to look out. Where the other craters top hot volcanoes, these craters were formed by the resin cooling around the blasts of air.

A large sculpture (pictured) treats the gray-painted plywood floor as the interrupted surface. Frozen rivulets of cream-colored resin appear to have burst up and pushed a rectangular segment of floor so it hovers a few feet above the rest. It's a sort of fountain, freeze-frame.

Mitros's works are refined and controlled, representing action at a remove. There's attraction and poignancy in this, but don't be surprised if something feels a little deferred.

UPDATE: The artist emailed me an explanation of his process, and it was interesting enough to pass along:

Hi Jen,
You're onto something when you say, "reverse ceramic objects". The "volcanoes" are made by making a pinch pot out of clay and smearing it to the base panel. The hollow interior is filled with resin. The clay is scraped away revealing the negative space of the inverted ceramic vessel. This is why you can see the "finger marks" which are artifacts left from the forming process. The clay is a crucial building device during the construction, so in an esoteric way these may in fact be ceramic sculptures if one defines a work of art by its process rather than the product/medium (ie not all paintings rely on paint).

Ceramics is a means to an end.

-Mitros