Archives for 2009
Crime – an LA, Seattle & New York survey
– Alan Ginsberg
Seattle crime, the artists
Chris Crites
Jack Daws, CECI N’EST PAS UNE BONG
New York crime, the singer
Roy Zimmerman, Dick Cheney
Sample lyrics:
“When it’s late at night we can go back to my place,
where he can tap my phone and shoot me in the face …
Dick Cheney, ain’t he, the sexiest man alive ….”
South Central LA – street sign
The compressed space of the surveillance society, with barren implications extending past the frame.
Seyed Alavi – signs of the times
Not so super heroes
Susana Raab, The Unfortunate Result of the Demise of the Public Phone Booth, Metropolis, Illinois, at Dean Jensen Gallery through Aug. 29.
Gilles Barbier, The Hospice, (detail)
Mark Newport, Batman
Dan Webb, Knight in (non-shiny) duct tape armour. No rescues on the horizon.
Saving trees, one leg at a time
Carrie Marill at Howard House through Aug. 29.
Christian Weihrauch
Or, saving babies, one tree trunk at a time.
In India, this painting might get you killed
New York Times story here.
Dumpsters – the ultimate urban symbol
Evan Hecox
Christian Martin Hoff
Maxi continues at Grey Gallery through Oct. 3.
Godzilla (exhausted) in Bellevue
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.
exhausted through Oct. 3.
Your Own Private Idaho – tattoos to shoes
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.”