This is Seattle artist Keeara Rhoades's coming-out show, her first big solo exhibition in the city since graduating from UW with an MFA in 2008, and it's hot and strange, a collection of garage-glam baseballers (all played by Rhoades) represented in altered photographs and video installations. The show, at Gallery4Culture for two more days, is called Undercover Holidays.

The overall conceit is that Rhoades takes on the role of four baseball players: umpire, pitcher, catcher, and hitter. Each of the roles also relate to members of her family. In her statement, she says she's most like a hitter (in real life), but she's most fascinated by and "susceptible to" the powers of an umpire-type. No wonder that her umpire character in the videos comes across like an irresistible dom. She doesn't care about you. She will do with you what she will, and you'll like it.

In elaborately detailed but messy and bright costumes, as well as the multiplication of gender-bent roles (as the hitter, she wears a tight metallic dress with extra-long sleeves over a pantaloon-style skirt and with Chuck Taylors—with stiletto heels on them), Rhoades taps into the classic feminist video tradition of the 1960s and '70s, but also more recent, clangy video artists descending in the line from LA's Mike Kelley to the current darling of New York, Ryan Trecartin. Her emphasis on tapestry and surface (there are furry chairs and reflective but unclear mirrors) also references the richness of, say, the painting of Velazquez or Dutch masters. One video is only a collection of costumed legs, light falling on the colors and shapes. It is beautiful and mysterious and dark—but not overly serious. Take a free pack of her baseball cards on the way out (the umpire's says "She likes 'gang mentality' singing such as punk rock gang vocals and chain gang hyms. She might be tone deaf but has great depth perception. She calls 'it' as she sees 'it,' and is skilled at reading between the lines").