Rachel Maxi’s The Lay of the Land at Grey:
Creatures and Curiosities from the Digital Kitchen at Vermillion:
Paula Rebsom at Form/Space Atelier:
Outskirts
is a site-specific infiltration using photographs and a kiosk to
narrate a previous site- specific exhibit by Rebsom developed during a
residency at the Ucross Foundation in a Wyoming prairie dog metropolis.
Regina,
Thank you ever so much for this recommendation in ArtsJournal. Outskirts exhibits Aug 14- Sep 6. Your fair and generous coverage of our petite atelier is gratefully appreciated. I would like to take this opportunity to write a little about Paula Rebsom at Form/Space Atelier. For more information about Paula’s current exhibit, please visit our blog at http slash slash formspaceatelier dot blogspot dot com. The following curator’s notes will help elucidate the present and future exhibit principle and curator’s rationale. I met Paula Rebsom during the autumn of 2006 in preparation for a two-person show I was curating at Form/Space Atelier, which at that time was located at 1907 2nd Avenue in Seattle. This address was the founding location of Form/Space Atelier, provided as part of the sponsorship package which also included two paid assistants, about $1000 worth of catered food for opening receptions each month, much postcards, oversize postcards, beautiful postcards and the postage to mail them with, thousands of dollars worth of branding and graphic design expertise, and on and on. Not to mention an executive washroom for the curator, myself, Paul Pauper. And a private parking space, which I mostly used to let Steven Schrock use to make paintings by shooting a paintball gun at a canvas. But that was 1907 2nd with corporate sponsorship, and I digress. Soon after meeting Paula and her co-exhibitor Stephanie Robison, who most recently locally exhibited at TAMs roof January 2009 a site-specific building crane which looked almost exactly like the building crane Greg Boudreau exhibited in Form/Space Atelier in November 2008. Except Stephanie Robison’s was partially festooned with some kind of white cloth or paper and was on the roof of the Tacoma Art Museum. In February 2006 Paula Rebsom delivered a huge c-print of a sculpture, Stephanie was driving, and she ended up tearing the rear-view mirror off of the Chevrolet Suburban after the garage door had prematurely descended on the roof of the SUV and she was trying to back out from under it. Some kind of timer on the garage door I guess. Anyway, the show was really amazing, with Stephanie’s sculptures and Paula’s photograph of her sculpture. The exhibit was called Designated Landmarks and Jen Graves made us Stranger Suggests for that week. It was site-specific in that Robison and Rebsom painted a wall a fantastic color of mustard yellow, and used the carpet squares in a different way than had been done before. I ended up leaving that wall for a few months because I guess it had really registered somewhere with me intellectually and I kept exhibiting things on it and curating for its mustardy grooviness. I would say like The Rolling Stones and the Caribbean influences they adopted for a while. Paula’s photograph of her own sculpture (a coyote) and Stephanie’s sculptures (my favorite was a scaled-down miniature golf hole) really were an amazing exhibit, and an unqualified critical victory. In autumn 2008 I asked Paula if she would please give us another exhibit, and she agreed to show August 2009. She mentioned that she had been in residence at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming and that she had a number of superb photographs of her site-specific integration while at Ucross. We agreed this would be the exhibit principle for Outskirts, the exhibit which exhibited at Form/Space Atelier in August 2009. In a wonderful piece of news I found out in August 2009 that Stephanie will be exhibiting at the Art Gym in the near future. Also, she has contacted an Oregon biologist studying coyotes and is working out the details of a infiltration into the coyote habitat much the same as the prairie dog colony infiltration at Ucross. I hope Paula will consider exhibiting at Form/Space Atelier the marks she makes in the coyote habitat. Thanks again for the column inches, Regina. Sincerely, Paul Pauper, Curator and Janitor, Form/Space Atelier.