Sometime before the end of the day tomorrow, give yourself a gift. Ride the light rail to Veronica gallery to see the free show Spill Kit before it closes. Veronica is right at Mt. Baker Artists Lofts, located directly under the train station. Spill Kit is photography, sculpture, and video by Wynne Greenwood, Paul Berger, and Erin Jane Nelson.
The best reason to see the exhibition is that it contains a 42-minute video by Wynne Greenwood called First Show/Punk Show, of a performance by her now-defunct video band Tracy + the Plastics, in which she played all three of the female members, interacting live with the other two, in their costumes, on video.
Greenwood is one of the most brilliant artists ever to work in Seattle; she still lives here, but you don't get all that many chances to see a chunk of her work like this. This year in New York, the New Museum honored her with a solo exhibition. At Veronica, you see why. First Show/Punk Show is hilarious, profound, complicated, political, punning, and unbelievably, ultra-accessible.
"You can't clean up until you've made a mess," Greenwood sings after her bandmates have spilled tea and overturned an animated goldfish bowl; Spill Kit gets its name from this moment. A spill kit is whatever you need to clean up whatever is in disarray. All of the show's works are disarrayed enough to be open for rescrambling in any number of ways.
In miniature, flameworked glass objects that resemble creatures (and that totally dare you not to take them seriously), Nelson has messed with various species (including sculpture itself)—this all seems related.
Berger is another important Seattle artist, who here shows a digitally produced collage of layered images that appears to be infinite in its ability to multiply as you look at it. Patterns are detectable but it is impossible to reduce the fragments to anything like a whole quilt. The whole produces a proliferating sensation. So many images on the surface—snapshots, found photographs, digital animations—come together in so many different ways that my brain felt like a photocopier making a different print each time I blinked or moved my eyes.
There must be an endpoint when all is seen, and stops moving. Maybe you'll get there.
