• Steven Miller
• GOING TO CALIFORNIA WITH AN ACHING IN MY HEART Riding down I-5 with Yann Novak.

The last time sound-and-sight artist Yann Novak had a solo show in Seattle, it was mesmerizing—subtle and abstract, but you knew just what it meant for you. It happened at Lawrimore Project, on the occasion of Novak's moving to Los Angeles after eight years in Seattle. I wrote,

But Relocation, as the show is called, tells a larger story, too, about all kinds of movings on, from any position of relative comfort into a newness, and the way the process itself changes the terms you thought you understood about each location when you made the decision. The place you decided to leave is better than ever; along the way, you keep reading the landscape for clues that won't matter anyway; and arriving is not arriving but starting something from a weird and awkward distance away from where you'll eventually locate yourself. (Do you ever have this experience, where your mind roams back to the way you saw your apartment for the first time? That'll be your last view, too.)

Now Novak has a new show, also made of recorded sounds and images, this time captured at dusk at Joshua Tree National Park. It's called Blue.Hour, it's at Jack Straw, and it opens tonight at 7.

• Courtesy Lawrimore Project

Seattle artist Cris Bruch has released a new series of limited-edition woodcuts based on designs from World War II ration stamps. They feel timely and just right coming from Bruch, given his longtime emphasis on bold formal gestures as well as committed politics.

He says:

The rationing program was instituted to ensure adequate supplies of necessary commodities for the war effort, to prevent civilian hoarding, and to provide for an equal distribution of food and commodities to the civilian population of the US. I was struck by the magnitude of the program, and that the US government had made such a huge effort to get across messages that seem both quaint and utterly timely.
Given our current political environment, where any government effort to promote, however timidly, an equitable distribution of resources is decried as anti-American, I realize our national attitudes have become selfish and narrow by comparison. Rather than look for solutions to our economic problems in conservation and considered consumption, we are told that the answer lies only in stimulating consumer demand. Convinced of the inevitable good of wealth, excess, and economic expansion, we have completely lost touch with the concept of "enough."

The prints—woodcuts on rag paper, 8.75 by 8.75 inches per stamp, are only $125 each; get them by emailing here. (A full, uncut sheet of 6 stamps is 18 by 27 inches.)

There are those who will dismiss this video game because you don't kill anybody in it, or even really win. The point is making your way through the story—which means navigating a seriously pleasurable landscape that combines collage, Persian and Indian miniature painting styles, and comics. The game is called The Cat and the Coup. It's also a work of art by Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad. (Cue debates about art and video games.)

Somebody does die in the course of the game: its central character, Mohammad Mossadegh. He's the democratically elected Iranian prime minister who supported the nationalization of the oil industry and was ousted in 1953 in the CIA-backed coup that installed the Shah. (In real life, he died in house arrest.) In the game, you play the character of his cat. At the end, Mossadegh floats to his death on a cloud/wave of oil.

The Cat and the Coup is part of the exhibition Asian American Arcade at the Wing Luke Museum. It opens tomorrow, I got to see it yesterday, and I recommend it. It's a layered collection of playable games and works of art that link video games and identity—paintings of cheat codes by Seattle's Jonathan Wakuda Fischer, for instance, plus a documentary called Gold Farmers, about a mind-boggling shadow industry in which Americans pay Chinese workers for video-game characters that have already been played at the lower levels of games and now come stocked up with privileges and extra lives, wealth and weapons, etc. Boggle.

• Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, London

That's a better image of the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) figure I posted about yesterday, in the Gauguin & Polynesia show at SAM. You can see more clearly here from the extreme curvature of his spine that he was meant to be held, not to stand. (He is incapable of standing alone; I don't know what kind of photo-voodoo here makes him look like he's doing it.) You can't quite get the intensity of his stare in this picture. There's no single image that's capable of capturing his power, really.

Gauguin & Polynesia was in Copenhagen first and will not be seen anywhere else after this. It's already proving to be a crowd magnet at SAM, but it's much more than that. Rather, it contributes to the historical processing of not just one lone guy named Gauguin but the entire colonial-modernist adventure. By the time you come to the end of the show, my guess is you'll no longer think of it as "a Gauguin show."

Lots more images and thoughts to come.

• Pacini Lubel Gallery
• Tip Toland's 5-foot-tall ceramic Boy, Oh Boy (2008)

Pacini Lubel's Seattle incarnation was voluptuous and uncalculating. It felt uneven, but I saw works of art there that stunned me into adoration.

And since it never seemed like the gallery was jockeying for position in the scene, when you found something great there, it felt like a discovery.

Fare well in Palm Springs, Pacini Lubel.