Seattle Art Museum modern/contemporary curator Michael Darling has flashed his well-concealed muscle again.

When Art Basel Miami Beach (coming up December 5-9) invited him to curate the fair’s Video Lounge—a video-art center set up in a building adjacent to the convention center hosting the massive fair—he agreed.

Video Lounge curators typically sift through material submitted by the various galleries in the fair, try to suss out some general themes, and then put together a program for the video lounge.

Darling threw out that model.

He decided this would be a Pacific Northwest show. And it is.

The 19 artists in the 90-minute loop that will play all day during the fair include Anne Mathern, Jack Daws, Mary Simpson, Hadley + Maxwell, Rodney Graham, Vanessa Renwick, and Euan McDonald. (Some of the artists don’t live in the Northwest anymore, but all have connections to this region.)

In addition, Darling put together three evening programs, by theme. One is “Return of the Wild West,” with work by Damian Moppett, Simpson and Fionn Meade, Matt McCormick, and Renwick. Another is devoted to Miranda July. And a third, called “Storytelling,” features Gary Hill, Judy Radul, Renwick, and Harrell Fletcher.

The show is a quick-chute escape from one corner of the country to its opposite, both geographically and culturally.

What sort of work is in the show?

“There’s definitely a nature theme: people filming in forests and addressing the beauty of this location, but also in an ironic way and poking holes in that, so it’s not just rhapsodic,” Darling said in a phone conversation. “There’s definitely a rock-and-roll and music-related interest that bubbles up in different ways. As a counterpoint to the natural beauty thing, there’s also a sense of simmering violence, maybe, that comes out in pieces from Vancouver and also here.”

Darling says he hadn’t planned on bringing the loop to show in Seattle, but I desperately hope he’ll be able to. When was the last time anyone did a video survey of the Northwest?

^{A still from Rodney Graham’s A Little Thought (2000)}