Visual Art

The Hidden Viscera of a Life

Uprising

Suyama Space
Mon–Fri. Through April 13.

The Hidden Viscera of a Life

What's Behind Art Made of Exposed Pipes and Disembodied Soldier Heads


Post a comment »

Recently in Visual Art

Art & Architecture on

Slog

News & Arts

The Stranger Suggests

Critics' Best Bets
Music Arts & Food


Line Out

Music & the City
at Night

Visual Art

Saturday, February 11, 2012

The Women of Georgetown: Art Attack Tonight

Posted by on Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 5:14 PM

FIERCE Art by Nyky Gomez, showing at American Pie in Georgetown.
  • The Stranger
  • FIERCE Art by Nyky Gomez, showing at American Pie in Georgetown.

When you think of Georgetown, you think of men. First off: George. Second, the burly working-class history of the place. Third, there's the military-industrial-complex-titled ART ATTACK! Which is awesome, and which I love—it is clearly the best art walk besides Pioneer Square's (and is celebrating its fourth anniversary tonight)—but it doesn't put you in mind of the womenz.

This, however, is misleading, as I recently discovered. The artist Julie Baraoh, who recently took over the reins of publicizing Art Attack (Larry Reid of Fantagraphics used to do it), sent me an email a few weeks ago selling me the idea of "the women of Georgetown" as a story. I was reticent. Then I went to visit, and women came out of the woodworks over the course of a two-hour walk through the neighborhood. Three of us lady-snowballed into a whole gang of women. We stopped traffic at least once just by appearing to desire to cross the street, there were so many of us.

THE STABLES Run by independent curator Mary Enslow.
  • The Stranger
  • THE STABLES Run by independent curator Mary Enslow.
All of which is to say that when you go to Art Attack tonight, you should keep the ladies of Georgetown in mind, too. There's Baraoh, whose Krab Jab Studios is home to three artists and a writer. There's Angielena Vitale Chamberlain, who is in the running for kindest, warmest person on the planet, and who operates Belle Vitale Studio. Chamberlain also founded, in 2007, the Georgetown Arts and Cultural Center, which you have to check out if you haven't already. It's an old union hall-slash-ballroom converted into an exhibition and studio space around the corner from Stellar Pizza on the northern end of Georgetown. Right now at the center, Betty Jo Costanzo—who before moving to Seattle last year was teaching and working mostly as a performance artist in the Bay Area (at Mills and CCAC, among other places)—shows lushly painted landscapes that look like they're in extremely slow motion.

DONT MISS NAUTILUS An assemblage by Yvette Endrijautzki.
  • The Stranger
  • DON'T MISS NAUTILUS An assemblage by Yvette Endrijautzki.
Throughout the neighborhood, women rule as owners, operators, and independent curators at spaces including Calamity Jane's, Stellar Pizza, the Stables, Full Throttle Bottles (where Erika Tedin is reported to be the brassiest woman in Georgetown), the Roving Gallery, Georgetown Trailer Park Mall, Two Tartes Bakery & Cafe (showing photographs from Arts Corps), American Pie (showing collage works by Nyky Gomez), inside the Old Rainier Bottling Plant (ask Mary Tudor about her secret recipe for making her oil paintings roll up without cracking), and Nautilus Studio.

Nautilus is an eccentric home and studio designed to look like a shipwreck. You do not want to miss it. The lady artist behind all this is assemblagist Yvette Endrijautzki (her male partner is Jethaniel Peterka).

Art Attack starts at 6 and runs to 9, but many places are open later. GO!

Friday, February 10, 2012

Yann Novak's Joshua Tree at Dusk Opens Tonight

Posted by on Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 11:10 AM

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

Currently Hanging: Cris Bruch's Ration Stamps

Posted by on Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 10:10 AM

4_w800_h541_s1_PT0_PR0_PB0_PL0_PCffffff.jpg
  • 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.)

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Tut, Tut

Posted by on Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 2:22 PM

I just got word:

On Thursday, Feb. 16 tickets become available for general public purchase for Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs, opening at Pacific Science Center May 24, 2012.

Let the mother of all blockbusters begin.

Currently Hanging: A Video Game in Which You Are the Cat of the Iranian Prime Minister

Posted by on Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 1:43 PM

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 identitypaintings 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.

Don't Call It A Gauguin Show

Posted by on Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 12:13 PM

Cadaverous_Male_12_Medium.jpg
  • 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.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

The Art After Dinner Party: Mass Public Clitoral Action

Posted by on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 2:30 PM

The clit of Lynn Schirmer.
  • Courtesy Lynn Schirmer
  • The clit of Lynn Schirmer.

Seattle artist Lynn Schirmer today announced a new project called After Dinner Party. The title is a reference to Judy Chicago's early feminist masterwork The Dinner Party, which is on long-term display at the heart of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party is a vagina thing. After Dinner Party is clitoral, a body part that's inherently more politicized, more feared, more misunderstood, more ignored, more attacked, more everythinged. It's time to clitoralize.

At this point, After Dinner Party is just a web site—but one with drawings of the clitoris that already make you remember its shape when you close your eyes. (I did not already have a 3D projection of the clitoris in my brain; maybe you did.)

The project has two upcoming (ahem, upcoming) phases, set to begin during Pioneer Square's First Thursday Art Walk in May:

At present, After Dinner Party consists of two kinds of activities: a curated art exhibit and celebration; and a loosely coordinated series of individual and/or mass public actions. The form and scope of the second portion is entirely dependent upon the energy and creativity of participants. The goal is to represent the shape of the clitoris, in as many art forms and in as many venues or public spaces as possible, all over the city.

You've really gotta check this out.

Pacini Lubel

Posted by on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 1:50 PM

Tip Tolands 5-foot-tall ceramic Boy, Oh Boy (2008)
  • Pacini Lubel Gallery
  • Tip Toland's 5-foot-tall ceramic Boy, Oh Boy (2008)
After eight years in Pioneer Square, many-media gallery Pacini Lubel—representing painters but, as often, 3D artists in jewelry, ceramic, and glass—is moving to Palm Springs.

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.

So I'm Facing Off With This 200-Year-Old Emaciated Guy on the Front Page of This Morning's Paper

Posted by on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 1:12 PM

Carved_20Male_20Figure.jpeg
  • Courtesy of the British Museum, London
your picture on the front page of the local section of the times nice work

This was the text message from a friend that I received at 7:25 this morning. I loved this text message, because my picture in the paper is just the sort of thing that makes my Mom happy, and I love every single thing that makes my Mom happy.

The picture in the Times is by the great photojournalist Alan Berner. He caught me unwittingly mirroring the early/mid-19th-century cadaverous male figure on display at Seattle Art Museum. He is the first piece of Polynesian art you see in the big new show Gauguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise, and he bends you down to him—at which point his shocking visage smacks you, and keeps you riveted there. He is seriously fierce.

He's carved out of wood, and the gaping pupils of his eyes are made of obsidian. His irises are formed from shark bone. He was found on Rapa Nui (later called Easter Island), and taken into the British Museum in London, where he still resides. Back on the island, he would have been carried around rather than standing on any kind of pedestal; hunched, he can't stand on his own.

This is the picture I was taking while Alan Berner was taking his picture of me.

398642_3315742492266_1229329422_3552067_2074921801_n.jpeg

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Read

16comments

Friday, February 3, 2012

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Read

13comments

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Read

3comments

First Thursday Is Here

Posted by at 12:22 PM in

Friday, January 27, 2012

Read

4comments

Read

3comments

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Read

7comments

Read

1comment

Friday, January 20, 2012

Read

3comments

Read

4comments

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Read

2comments

Read

2comments

Read

1comment

Read

7comments