This morning's Art Klatch at Cafe Presse (every Tuesday from 7-10 am; anyone and everyone is welcome) introduced 2008 Whitney Biennial sensation Adam Putnam to Seattle in advance of his opening at Seattle U's Lee Center for the Arts this Thursday. (Here's a nice bit of writing by Putnam.)

I didn't see his work at the biennial (or anywhere else in person), so I have only the thinnest ideas about it. But from what I gather he is a spiritual cousin to Alex Schweder, Stranger Genius winner, who sees buildings as leaky bodies that might eat, drink, and lust like the rest of us. Putnam's work seems much more restrained—we spent a good deal of time this morning talking about the Victorian era and magic lanterns—but related.

Also, kudos to Yoko Ott, new curator of the Lee Center gallery, for taking on the weirdo space of the gallery itself. Putnam's exhibition is the the first in a yearlong trilogy of shows by three individual artists taking the gallery's "distinct character," as Ott so delicately puts it, in mind. The gallery is both an exhibition space and a theater lobby. And its duelling architectural meanings have practical effects. It's a tense place, and I'm never sure when it's open, and sometimes the gallery isn't open but the theater is, even though the art is always there. And that's not even mentioning the space's duelling desires to invite people in from the street (the gallery has a huge wall of largely unusable windows!) and to cradle and protect the art. Ott is calling the series Void Blank Blank—and it starts with what you see above by Putnam.