At the end of ’09 – up and at ’em

At the edges of art, energy moves inward. It clears plaque from arteries and makes way for new images to hit us in the heart. Two exhibits roto-rootering into the new year in Seattle are Rattle My Cage at Vermillion and This Is The Future The Rest Is History at TARL.

Rattle

All the artists in Rattle (curated by Sierra Stinson) were students of the dazzling Gretchen Bennett when she taught at Cornish. Rattle has no duds although possibly a few too many toenails. The artists include: Amelia Layton who paints the unraveling world (geometries that trail off into recycling, birds who’ve wandered out of their forests, hipsters who’ve forgotten their lines in the play);  Michael Rioux, who has a fresh appreciation of decay, and Brett Walker , who is hilarious. (Also, Morgan Johnson, Joel Kvernmo, Rosa Lazzarini, and Mckenzie Porritt, along with a sculpture and colored drawing from Bennett, both worth the trip all on their own.

Rioux:

(Taking over from Chris Crites, Stinson will be curator of Joe Bar starting in January. That’ll be fun.)

The Future

TARL is the underground version of the recently demised Crawl Space, which, as its title suggests, knew its way around the back entrances to things. TARL currently exists basement of Jessica Powers and Matt Browning‘s Capitol Hill home but looks forward to a nomadic existence.(TARL organizers are Powers, Browning, Rebar Niemi, Anne Mathern and Brendan Jansen.)

First up at TARL are Raymond Boisjoly and Ryan Peter. Their charmingly insufficient back-to-the-future installation starts with a musical question: How else to build a future but from a child’s version of the past? It features a plywood dinosaur with a tape playing the sound of a garbled human voice freely impersonating a dionosaur’s as a tribute to Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961) at Seattle Art Museum.

I’m in love with their wood-grain prints of similar ancestor figures, some of which are sliding off the wall.

Now that Yoko Ott is winding up her tenure at the Hedreen Gallery (She left to direct Open Satellite), Seattle University needs a Hedreen Gallery director. I nominate Powers. She’d be perfect.