Archives for 2009

Cosmetic change has a bad rap, but not Tirana, Albania, a blighted city revived by the application of squares of color to crumbling buildings, celebrated by Anri Sala in “Dammi i Colori” (Give Me the Colors), from 2003.

Two public projects tapping the same vein are among the most successful in Seattle’s recent history: Dan Corson‘s Wave Rave Cave under a freeway off-ramp on Alaskan Way in Belltown, and Sheila Klein‘s Roosevennavelt: Columnseum, 10 acres of wasteland under the 1-5 freeway on Roosevelt near 65th St.

Corson’s site is a strip between two chain-link fences. To overcome the impact of those barriers, he created wave-like mounds in concrete and covered them in gravel. During the day, their oddity is charming. They look as if a construction crew longing for the sea took license with company equipment during the lunch hour.

At night, those waves become psychedelic stalagmites.

Klein treated freeway pillars as dresser’s dummies. Vertical lines are so slimming.

Space is always the issue at Suyama Space,
the Seattle art center thinly disguised as an architect’s waiting room.
Big, raw and barn-like, it overpowers artists who fail to take its
personality and proportions into account. Failures are rare, because Beth Sellars is in charge of the lineup.

Thanks to the global consciousness of her curatorial vision and to
architect George Suyama, who runs his firm around the gallery he
donates to the public, Suyama Space has become one of the top art
venues in the region.
The price is right (free admission), but the hours (Monday-Friday) are
tough for anybody with a standard-issue job. Even though weekends are
out, the lengths of the exhibits are a saving grace. Most run for three
months. Few people lack a spare lunch hour during that wide a time
frame.

Currently on view, Dan Corson‘s Grotesque Arabesque is a thrill.

Instead of a room, it’s a electric light cave, a Northern lights spectacle  that hangs in the air and glowers from the ground, reflected in a pond. With indigo skylights and a 25-foot wide mirror to multiple the distortions, the bent, electroluminescent strips appear to be drawn in the air.

Through Dec. 18. Free admission

When Douglas Britt, art critic for the Houston Chronicle, was in Seattle last month, he made videos of Target Practice at the Seattle Art Museum and Jason Hirata and Sol Hasemi at the Dirty Shed, which is, truth in advertising, a dirty shed behind Betsey Brock and Eric Fredericksen‘s house.

Good picks, Douglas. My Dirty Shed story here. Jen Graves here.

Some artists need to live by water.

Others need community.

There are artists who don’t care where they live…

As long as they can work there.

Seattle’s Jay Steensma died in 1994 of a heart attack at age 52. Although manic-depressive, he was on medication to control it for his final seven years and his career blossomed, if such a career can blossom. Part of his problem was volume, volume, volume. If we are lucky, some curator is going to dig through his crazy, slapdash excess to find a stellar core of solitude and weather. 

He painted small figures on barren gray plains, abandoned houses, ravaged trees. His grays are creamy, his whites begrimed and his blacks full of shadows. When used, bright color is  a a shock value.

Paintings at Seattle artREsource.

[Read more…] about Jay Steensma – I can feel the heat closing in

Elizabeth Murray

Susan Rothenberg

Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring

Fay Jones

Karen Ganz

Julia Haack

Sabrina Small

Hiking along the Nooksack River in the Cascade Range around Mount Baker, Claude Zervas began to focus on campsites filled with burnt evidence of previous habitation.

One he carried home in his truck, rocks and all. Besides the usual shotgun shells, it contained the charred remains of an upholstered chair. Who burns a chair in a forest? Somebody too drunk to forage, too wet to plow.

Most of the camps Zervas saw were well made, dug deep and surrounded by rocks, but scattered like chickenpox scars on a lovely face, their careful construction could suggest that human damage can be contained in a pit, and that scars don’t affect the whole.

Claude Zervas, Black Hole, 2009

What is constructed, found and constructed again is the theme of From Whence The Rainbow Came at Ambach & Rice, featuring four of the Northwest’s top artists: Zervas, Joseph Park, Dan Webb and Jeffry Mitchell. It’s the best group show in a Seattle gallery in years, proposed and shaped by the artists themselves.
 

[Read more…] about At Ambach & Rice: Seattle’s Gang of Four

Garrett Durant

Michael Spafford

Penrod

Bent

Helmut Stallaerts, from We Make Money, Not Art

R. Allen Jensen allows a rare (to me) sighting of his work on Oct. 2, when he opens at the Smith & Valley Smith & Vallee Gallery in Edison, with a reception for the artist Oct. 3, 5-8. 

Jensen has been making his deformed scarecrows, ruined collages, deft drawings and ornately framed assemblages for more than 40 years. His paintings are scores for a disaster, giving mourning a shape and sealing it into art. Writing about Jensen’s work in 1969, Tom Robbins (then an art critic), put his finger on the strengths of it, that it has “lyric subtlety” and “pictorial breath” while also being “brutalized, ugly and blatantly erotic.”

(Photo, Harold Hollingsworth)

Brutalized, ugly and erotic are good words to describe Jensen’s nuclear scarecrows. His spindly grotesques have some of the power that gargoyles perched on the entryway ledges of cathedrals must have had for the medieval faithful. They are genuinely frightening.
His assemblage drawings bring unimagined levels of delicacy to the horror of Jensen’s position.

(Photo, Harold Hollingsworth)

Death delicately done becomes a minuet, and the clatter of teacups reminds us of the razor’s edge. Hollingsworth, a former student, wrote this appreciation in 2006.