Shot taken in Seattle at 17th Ave. and Harrison St., an affluent, gracious old homes portion of Capitol Hill:
Archives for April 2009
God told me to give you the finger
From George Chacona via Devon Cannon:
From Charles Krafft, occasional poet:
GOD TOLD ME TO GIVE YOU THE FINGER
God told the Jews to leave Egypt.
He told the Mormons to go to Salt Lake City,
Set up a giant choir, and a 7up bottling plant.
Then God told me to give you the finger
The next time I saw you.
It is not that God is angry with you,
You cannot anger God.
It’s just that
He wants to be sure
You still believe in miracles.
Seattle Erotic Art Festival
(Image left, Deborah Alma Wheeler. Click to enlarge.)
Opens May 1. Web site here.
Artist/curator Sharon Arnold put together a good local list, here.
I can’t imagine a better image for the festival than Wheeler’s partially unzipped carrying case carried into erotica by metaphoric implication.
Every year this festival gets better. Even in the beginning, when the art wasn’t worth noting, the audiences certainly were. (Stories here and here.)
Joey Veltkamp is in this year’s lineup with a lovely painting from a series celebrating the 1970s:
Robert Arneson isn’t, but I hope somebody celebrates self-love in his honor.
Bob Zoell – street signs
The artifical intelligence of art and nature
Stout’s sculptural models are filters through which he distances himself from the world. As a kid, he worked in a hobby
store. Systems tinkering was mandatory. The geeky youth he must have been is now blinding us with science and passing it
off as art. From his cracked accounts, the tragedy of our
cracked relationship with the earth takes slippery and uncertain shape.
She works in the gap between flesh and fantasy, nature and technology,
attraction and repulsion. Her meanings slide across each other like
tectonic plates. What grinds to powder between them is the audience’s
certainty that it knows what’s going on.
Dennis Hopper – street signs
Double Standard, 1961, via MAN
Birds past their pull date
Audubon killed his models to paint them alive. Since his day, more artists have tended to let the dead be dead. Lately, there are a lot of dead out there.
Plank piece sex change
Art for dyslexics
Letters sideways and shuffled in the middle (via):
Do the letters spell out Lancelot, LA’s Chance Lots or Jack Pierson’s title, Last Chance Lost? Just as dyslexics don’t limit themselves to one meaning, the work itself invites multiple readings. Pierson’s battered cluster of light-struck letters is the equivalent of Thelonious Monk’s embrace of wrong/right notes…
Because everybody knows that in art, wrong can be right.
(Baldessari)
Stephanie Syjuco at James Harris Gallery through May 2.
Wallace Stevens/Michael Spafford – 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
When the visual engages the verbal, the former is frequently an illustration of the latter. Michael Spafford’s homages to Wallace Stevens’ poem are a rare choice, not the usual echo. They are a duet with Stevens, a point/counterpoint.
Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird first published, 1917.
Spafford’s woodcuts of the same title, 17.5 by 23 inches, from 1975, with a second entirely different set a decade later. Images via Francine Seders Gallery.
That’s why for each stanza there are two images, the first from 1975, the second from 1986. (Click to enlarge.)
1.
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
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