Archives for August 2009

Carrie Marill at Howard House through Aug. 29.

Christian WeihrauchOr, saving babies, one tree trunk at a time.

Andrew Keating

Tim Eitel

Tyler Cufley

Evan HecoxChristian Martin Hoff

Rachel Maxi

Maxi continues at Grey Gallery through Oct. 3.

Plot summary: An aging monster who feeds on chaos beached itself on suburban shores. As Satan said, surveying hell, “What do mine eyes with grief behold?” Godzilla feasts on cities, adding its havoc to havoc. In Bellevue, the shopping capitol of the region, the orderly flow of commerce had a soporific effect. The beast staggered into Open Satellite, curled its 50-foot-long, 10-foot tall body around the pillars and fell asleep, breaking into soft, rumbling snores.

SIMPARCH‘s exhausted is a rough-and-ready construction devoid of get-up-and-go: animal instinct on the fritz. Visitors can stroll through its back end and crawl out its mouth. Made in handyman-garage style of green U-V fabric over a plywood skeleton with duct tape claws, it’s Jonah without slime, danger, turbulence or redemption.

SIMPARCH’s Matt Lynch and Steven Badgett built it in 8 days with a
little help from a few friends. Kevin Drumm‘s soundtrack of guttural
snores and slurps derives from orchestrated chorus of appliances, some
of which appear to need a tuneup.

Is the Eastside coming into its own? The Bellevue Arts Museum‘s embrace of crafts proved an excellent move. The Kirkland Arts Center is a little jewel, and Open Satellite is as ambitious as any arts center its size in the country.

Only one move remains: Embrace the purse.

Ries Niemi, Walk Thru Designer Handbag. (2007, Stainless steel, 5′ x 10′ x 14′)

A better title would be A Pocketbook Now. Empty yet imposing, weighty yet insubstantial, it’s
an apocalyptic metaphor in the heart of Bellevue’s consumer
culture. Like exhausted at Open Satellite, Walk Thru Designer Handbag blooms where it’s planted, in the latter case at the entrance to the Bellevue Arts Museum.

Alas, its appearance there has been occasional. Now’s the time to buy it and make it a permanent part of the experience of visiting a museum whose neighbor across a wide, traffic-clogged street is a shopping mall.

Business was not brisk at Nobody’s Hero Tattoo
in downtown Boise, which is why tattoo artists Brian Basabe and T. J.
Mahoney  fooled around with the idea of painting shoes. They bought
some plain white Van’s and started to experiment. (Via)

These would be good shoes to wear in a coffin. Who could ask for more? Bob Dylan on speakers and The Big Lebowski
on your feet. The right one’s chill, dude, but the left is the haunted Viet Nam vet, a variant on the character who went screaming
down a hallway that’s on fire, pumping a shotgun and screaming, “I’ll
show you the life of the mind.”

They do the same thing in different media.

Photographer Thorsten Brinkmann

Painter Christian van Minnen

Photographer Magdalena Bors

Painter Michael Brophy

Duffy opens at Vermillion  Sept 1, 6-10 p.m.

The Seattle Art Museum cut 17 staff members earlier this year,
from a staff of 240. Every department is affected, although no curators
were eliminated. SAM has also cut its hours. Beginning in September, it
will be closed Tuesdays as well as Mondays. Exhibitions have been
extended, which means fewer new shows on the schedule.

Maybe that’s a good thing. The installation crew is now down to the size it was before the 2007 expansion, which tripled exhibition space. That’s not counting installation at the Olympic Sculpture Park, which also opened in 2007.

Attendance remains strong, over projections in 2009.

The
museum’s fiscal year 2009 budget is $27 million. The 2010 budget is projected to be
$23,000 $23 million. SAM does not foresee a deficit this year. Given the economy,
SAM would be in fine shape were it not for the Washington Mutual
debacle.

Update: SAM corrected one of the figures it originally gave me. The museum ultimately cut its 2009 budget to $25 million.

[Read more…] about Seattle Art Museum cuts back

It’s your genes. Case closed.

Catherine Chalmers, from Genetically Engineered Mice series:

Opening at Francine Seders Gallery on August 28, reception for artists August 30, 2-4 p.m.: Alison Keogh, Michael Howard, Sam Wildman and Gail Grinnell, collaborating with her son, Sam Wildman. (Images in name order.)

Seattle: Time to show up. Seders has been in business for 40 years. That’s a long time to be as good as she is. Painters are her core, and they include Jacob Lawrence, Guy Anderson, Michael Spafford, Elizabeth Sandvig, Robert C. Jones, Michael Dailey, Lauri Chambers, Pat DeCaro, Norman Lundin, Denzil Hurley and Juan Alonzo. Although she no longer represents Lawrence and Anderson, they chose her as their Seattle dealer for their entire careers.