When you write some short story-poems and you superimpose them on silent videos of landscapes, and even if you house the video screens in elaborately crafted plywood cases shaped like blue US mailboxes laid on their bellies, and you put each box on one level of a stair platform, it’s still not an art installation. It’s a poem with a picturesque moving backdrop. Don’t try to fool me. So say I to you, Hugo House, where today I visited your “art installation” called The Eight Essential Ingredients, of which the above sculpturish hoo-haw is the main component.

In other art haps, Seattle U’s new Lee Center for the Arts opened Tuesday. It’s mostly a theater building (what’s with art stuff that’s mostly something else this week?), but it has a gallery fronting 12th Avenue, curated by Carrie E.A. Scott, a writer for The Stranger, who said she plans to devote the space to Seattle artists, especially in solo shows where the artists can interact with the gallery’s particular dimensions and conditions as a street presence.

The first show, though, is a simple thank-you to benefactors of the center who are also collectors. On display are six artworks grouped under the heading Collecting Drama, including Cindy Sherman’s 1995 closeup of herself as a glam spacebot (below), last seen at Western Bridge and owned by Bill and Ruth True; Marc Chagall’s stick-in-the-sand 1973 lithograph “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” from the collection of Ellsworth and Nancy Alvord; and one work each by Kenneth Callahan, Robert Rauschenberg, and Anthony Quinn.