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Friday, July 13, 2007

You Want Art?

posted by on July 13 at 9:50 AM

Yesterday I spent running from one gallery to another, finding.


12:30 pm.

Francine Seders Gallery: Print Invitational

Group show, 11 artists, prints everywhere.
Surprise find: Anna McKee, an eloquent urban romantic in the tradition of pictorialist photography. Listen to McKee, Bonnie Lebesch, and Emily Gherard talk at the gallery Tuesday night (the 17th) from 6-8 pm.

These are by McKee (I love the filmic nostalgia of the top half of the second one):

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And this, by Emily Gherard, is like a goth representation of Lead Pencil Studio’s Maryhill Double.

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1:30 pm.

OKOK Gallery: Installation underway on Gregory Euclide’s I Have Been Remembering: Half Lives & Half Truths

At one point yesterday, there was a full vodka bottle and a hypodermic needle in the gallery’s front window. All for art, man. Euclide used the vodka bottle to collect water at Puget Sound, and he was using the needle to inject single bubble-wrap bubbles with that water—and with tap water and puddle water. The bubbles are mounted on the window first in rows, then injected from the top.

OKOK has a great space—about 1,800 square feet—and because of it and thanks to the imagination of its owners, Charlie and Amanda Kitchings, this is the first time that Euclide, a Minneapolis artist, has taken over an entire gallery to make an installation. For it, the painter cut out tiny, one-inch-diameter circles of paper, painted tiny imaginary landscapes on them, and then adhered a bubble-wrap bubble to each one, so they’re seen through the bubble. Seven hundred of those tiny paintings are lined up in parallel rows on the walls that run in rivulets onto the floor. So at the opening Saturday night from 6-10 pm, you’ll have to watch where you step.

In addition to those, Euclide made an installation that’s basically a storm of paper. On one long sheet, he made a painting of a 360-degree view from the gallery’s door (sent to him in photographs). As he often does, he washed the painting with water after painting it, so it’s mostly an aftereffect of itself. The paper is cut into squares; a pile of them on the floor are backed with stamp adhesive. The artist wants people to take them and attach them all over the city.

Since the show doesn’t open until Saturday, there aren’t images of it yet, but I’m going to attach the invite image so you get a sense of what the tiny bubble paintings are like. They’re for sale individually, and every time one is sold, a marker with the date will go up in its place, so the unspecific little landscapes will be replaced by the chronological facts of their disappearance, changing the installation with time.

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Euclide’s traditional larger paintings are up, too. Here’s a sense of his painting sensibility from an earlier installation:

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A detail from that:

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The opening Saturday will include a sound component by Son of Rose. And in the future, OKOK is doing some cool stuff, including chefs working with artists on pre-opening night meals. Stay tuned to this gallery (showing five contemporary artists on portraiture in August).


3 pm.

Crawl Space Gallery: Diana Falchuk: Sweet Remains

Diana Falchuck (she of the I Love the USPS mailboxes project) works with what she calls “dead food.”

She goes to the grocery store, buys food, and lives with it for months, drying it and experimenting with it to create sculptures that have something in common both with Justin Gibbens’s adorable-scientific drawings of affable mutants and Jim Rittimann’s gory-gorgeous reanimated insects. (She also makes imaginative drawings that bring to mind Susan Robb, but they’re on mylar and hard to reproduce.)

Falchuk is better known for her work postering utility poles and affectionately washing mailboxes, but she has been semi-secretly working with “dead food” for years in her apartment. It’s no wonder the sculptures feel so intimate, even loved.

This weekend is your last chance to see the show; it’s open noon to 5 Saturday and Sunday.

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(lemon, moss, and pink bumps from the bottoms of slippers)

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(carrot and pins)

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(sewn plum, salt)


4:20 pm.

The Anne Bonny (named after the lady pirate): The Theme is No Theme

Spencer Moody’s new store for art, home accoutrements, and dead people’s furniture is terrific. (Please don’t buy the golden chair before this weekend so I can still pick it up.) Upstairs is the gallery.

The standout in the current group show is a giant pink painting. Before I look at it, I’m drawn to the handwritten note on the pink table on the floor. It says:

Spencer, Here is a paintio painting of Shannon Kringen. It is called “A Skinny Shannon Kringen with an Ice Cream Cone.” I can’t imagine that anyone will buy it, really I jo just hope she sees it. Price it however you want, if you do sell it, send me enough money for a pizza. Oh, here are some books as well. I made them today, I have terrible allergies & a head cold. Take care, Derek Erdman.

Aww, he just wants her to see it. How sweet and romantic, like when Eddie Argos says he wants a bus full of schoolchildren to sing to Emily Kane—wait, this woman is hideous, all hairy and pig-faced and slack-jawed, wielding a vanilla waffle cone like a club.

Sadly, there’s no image available of her. (I took a phone picture of her, but I’m just lame enough that I don’t know how to transfer.) You’ll just have to go and see her yourself; you really should.

Kringen, what’d you do to this guy?


6 pm.

Quick stop at Platform Gallery, Ross Sawyers

Sawyers makes large-scale photographs of architectural models he builds. (It’s a not-uncommon conceit mastered by James Casabere.) Sawyers is fresh out of grad school and still figuring things out, including how to mount his work (this dry board-mounted tactic seems to flatten them). I was drawn to this diptych:

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Coming up at Platform: Scott Fife with all new work in September; in October, A Spectral Glimpse, a group show with Platform’s first guest curator, the extraordinarily capable Jim O’Donnell.


6:15 pm.

James Harris Gallery: Rashid Johnson: Dark Matters

I’m writing about this one for next week, so I’ll be quiet here and just give you this link and this image.

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RSS icon Comments

1

Shannon Kringen is the Goddess Kring, a public access channel feature of the 90s (and maybe still today?)

She's an insane somewhat zaftig hippie who talked about herself while staring into the camera, then took off her clothes and danced. She signed up for every open slot on the channel's schedule, so she was on all the time.

Posted by Eric F | July 13, 2007 10:40 AM
2

Jen: Great story in this week's paper. Both personal and universal. I can't stop thinking about it.

Posted by giantladysquirrels | July 13, 2007 10:48 AM
3

You couldn't've put that after the cut so I wouldn't have to spend 5 seconds scrolling through it?

Posted by Judah | July 13, 2007 11:14 AM
4

yeah, could put it after the cut so i won't have to spend approx. 5 seconds scrolling, then another 40 seconds leaving a comment?

Posted by bing | July 13, 2007 12:19 PM
5

"Sadly, there’s no image available of her."

that has to be the understatement of the year.

if only we were so lucky [goog]

Posted by josh | July 13, 2007 4:09 PM
6

Jen --

I am with @2. I just can't stop thinking about it. From a long time reader, I am very very glad that The Stranger landed you. Here's to many more.

(thank you).

Posted by tallsquirrel | July 14, 2007 10:52 AM
7

@3 is right. This post is too long. Basic UI guidelines would suggest that it needs a jump.

Still, awesome work Jen!

Posted by sally | July 15, 2007 11:37 AM

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