Regina Hackett

In a repeat of an event in Berlin,titled, Its Form Will Follow Your Performance, Alex Schweder is looking for five people in Seattle who want free architectural advice from a performance architect. Ideally, he says, the five will not be directly connected to the art world.

From Lawrimore Project, where the results will be exhibited:

These people need to be of limited means, and willing to have this
process documented and agree to him exhibiting or publishing this
documentation. He will then meet with these ‘clients’ for about an hour
at Lawrimore Project and hear what is wrong with their apartments. He
will then give them free advice about how to renovate their apartment.
they will go home and ‘perform’ this renovation, document it and send it
to him via email. They will then discuss the shortcomings and
successes of the renovation and try it again. This will again be
documented by the client. This correspondence will continue until they
agree their apartment is renovated.

Schweder:

I am interested in taking what we usually think of as an object and
understanding it performatively.

From Trouble:

Rather than suggest a rearrangement of walls or different paint color,
Alex wrote a short set of instructions for each “client” to behave
differently in their home. This shift in action constituted the renovation.

Its Form Will Follow Your Performance (Seattle) runs at Lawrimore from June 9 – 16. Prospective clients can email their
interest to:  scott@lawrimoreproject.com  with the subject line
“Free Architectural Advice.”

Schweder is the 2007 Genius Award winner from the Stranger. Jen Graves story here. My review of Schweder’s A Sac of Rooms Three Times A Day here.

A great gallery is a rarity in any city. For thirteen years, starting in his living room and moving into Belltown before establishing himself in Pioneer Square, Billy Howard had a great gallery. As each year ends and I look back on the memorable shows, Howard is consistently at the top of the list. Howard House will close June 12, Seattle’s first major gallery to fall victim to the economy.

Nothing illustrates the depth of the gallery’s lineup than the fact that five of its most stellar artists (Dan Webb, Victoria Haven, Leo
Saul Berk, Alex
Schweder and Joseph
Park) walked out together in 2007. Those who wanted other galleries in the region found them on the
top tier. Those artists were the cream, but skim the cream at HH, and
most of what’s left is still cream.

Below is a small survey of Howard House’s greatest hits. It barely scratches the surface.

Park The Grand Odalisque, 2001 oil/linen 30 x 36 inches

Gretchen Bennett Hand-cut Walnut Wood-grain shelf paper on wall, 2005, 9′ h

Debra Baxter Crystal Brass Knuckle (I am going to realign your chakras motherf*****)
Quartz crystals, sterling silver
7 x 6 x 2.5 in
2009

Sean M Johnson Grandpa
2008
Rocking chair, Jack Daniels bottle, pack of cigarettes
60″ x 46″ 38″

Robert Yoder
Harmon
2004
lego on wood panel
20″ x 20″

Mark Takamichi Miller Thieves: Man at Party
2008
acrylic, wax, urethane, oil and glass spheres on canvas over board
48″ x 72″

Jon Haddock
Wang Weilen – Screenshot Series
2000
chromogenic print from digital file created in photoshop
22.5″ x 30″
Edition of 3

Karen Ganz
Blue Puppet
2003/04
photogravure etching on paper
13″ x 11.5″

Cameron Martin
Conflation
2006
screenprint
edition of 25
30″ x 40″ (Howard House had the first show for Martin.)

Lauren Grossman  Whithersoever
2006
iron, plastic, rubber
10″ x 13″ x 10″

Howard’s goodbye letter here. Jen Graves on the end of Howard House here.

No water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles

Marianne Moore
1887 – 1972

Modernism scorned the decorative. More than a century later, its patterned flourishes are a kind of ghostly garden for Claudia Fitch, now showing at Greg Kucera.

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, 2010
Graphite oil pastel on Strathmore drawing paper
45.5 x 37 inches

The door leads nowhere, but the windows wake you up. So do her figures. Pried from plinths and niches, they wrap themselves in cultural influences and jump into 21st-Century space, landing lightly.

FLATSCREEN, 2009
Ceramic, steel, gator board, flocked paint
26 x 15 x 6 inches

Love the boots. Through June 26.

Loose from their strings or using them as weapons, puppets in contemporary video, collage and sculpture tend toward the coarse and the brutal. They clump through their lives with a relish that is almost obscene, hypnotized by their own desires.

Artists who stand out in this crowded field include Nathalie Djurberg, William Kentridge, Paul McCarthy, Sarah Anne Johnson, Cat Clifford, Kiki Smith, Nayland Blake, Kara Walker, Dan Webb, Dennis Oppenheim, Anne Chu, Thomas Schutte and Pierre Huyghe.

Add to that list Martha Colburn, whose Puppet Regime is at Ambach & Rice. Like Kentridge, she draws her tragedies from history, but she adds her own wild hair of pop culture and feminist humor. A dense collage of cutout, found and hand-colored figures collide in her videos and small Polaroid photos. Predator and prey flash by, trailing wreckage. Their score is chaos, and they never miss a beat.

Through June 27.

Magritte, The Lovers, 1928 (via)

Part 1: Big Kiss

Tanya Batura, Intricacies of Dreaming 1  2004 Clay, airbrushed acrylic paint

Ariana Page Russell, Heat Wave
2008, archival inkjet print, edition of 5
18 x 26 inches

Part 2 – can’t breathe

Tanya Batura Inhale, 2003, Clay, glaze, china paint

Dan Webb, SHROUD, 2008
Carved wood (Redwood)
22 x 7.5 x 11 inches
Collection of the Seattle Art Museum

If as John Russell maintained, a “painting is a vegetable construct that changes in time,” a sculpture is a mineral construct whose longevity is marked by change.

Greek and Roman statuary is famous for the thousand-yard stare in its wide and empty eyes, but the Greeks and Romans who made it wouldn’t know it from Adam. They painted their product with dark eyes and even eyelashes. (Think Goth, ancient world version.) Part of our relationship with the work is with what time, not artists, made.

Los Angeles sculptor Tanya Batura makes earthenware busts airbrushed with acrylic paint. They look fetal, even though drawn from adult models. Blank but wounded, they are gestating in time’s garden, perfect but born past an unattainable prime.

At James Harris Gallery through June 19.

The princess who couldn’t bear the burden of a pea was not an artist. She is an emblem of the useless sensitivity of a blue blood. In the human garden, royalty is a hot house flower on luxury’s life supports.

Ariana Page Russell is more sensitive (and hearty) than that. She has dermatographia, which means her immune system is always on red alert for blistering news from the outside world. Even the lightest scratch will cause her capillaries to dilate and welt.
While the situation doesn’t scream opportunity, Russell turned it into one.

 In 2005, she began to draw patterns and words on her skin, which she photographed.


Index
2005, C-print, 11 x 16 inches, edition of 8

Flora
2006, C-print, paper size: 20 x 24 inches, image size: 13 x 19 inches;
edition of 8

A couple of years later she turned images from her welted skin into wallpaper and temporary tattoos. Her body is her instrument, but it no longer confines itself to playing a dermatographic tune. Skin is the casing for everyone’s sack of flesh. To ward off the ills it is heir to, desperate measures are taken.

In her current exhibit at Platform Gallery, Save Face, vulnerability becomes war paint.

Gush archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8
archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8 (Images of her belly button bloom across her face and chest.)

Seethe
archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8
archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, 2010, edition of 8 (Sensitive skin becomes sci-fi armor.)
Through June 29.

From Charles D’Ambrosio‘s Seattle, 1974, collected in Orphans, published by Clear Cut Press:

The Seattle of that time had a distinctly coma-like aspect and at night seemed to contain in its great sleepy volume precisely one of everything, one dog a-barking, one car a-cranking, one door a-slamming, etc., and then an extravagant, unnecessary amount of nothing. Beaucoup nothing. The kind of expansive, hardly differentiated, foggy and final nothing you imagine a coma induces. I read the silence as a kind of Nordic parsimony. An act of middle-class thrift. A soporific seeded into the clouds.

Christopher Martin Hoff paints the old Seattle alive in the new, what the town looked like before big money and business took hold in the 1980s, making the place famous for its opposite – hustle and innovation.

The Line
2010
Oil on Linen
30″ x 24″

Living in Seattle at the tail end of its coma, New York photographer Joseph Bartscherer paused midway as he crossed against a late-night light in Pioneer Square and gestured around him.

You’ve got cars in the streets, lights in the buildings and towels in the bathrooms. Where are the people?

Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and out
comes…nobody. The light in Hoff’s paintings hits the street like a reprieve from death. Not wanting to be disloyal to death, locals stay home with their shades drawn.

The Blanket
2010
Oil on Linen
28″ x 28″

There’s a tenderness to Hoff’s exactitude, bringing to mind Rackstraw Downes.

The Pulpit
2010
Oil on Linen
24″ x 22″

Even when Hoff’s scene is dry, his streets have the volume of the wet. The Doubloon, image below, has to refer to Captain Ahab’s promise to the first man who spots the white whale. That man will be entitled to pry the coin off the mast and keep it forever in his pocket, unspendable at the bottom of the sea.

The Doubloon
2010
Oil on Linen
20″ x 20″

I’ve been running Hoff’s images on my blog as long as I’ve had a blog. (Hey! Look at this!) But you can’t see their most distinctive qualities in reproduction, their quake and swell, their home-chord of silence, of light making a temporary appearance after a long season of gray.

Aside from other artists, few people know Hoff, even in Seattle. Modest with old-world manners, he avoids the necessity of using them, keeping to himself as he paints on the street instead of from photos in his studio.  For what it is and what it is building into, his work is insanely undervalued.

Through May 29 at the Linda Hodges Gallery.

Can wrap a stair in one.

From Kader Attia: Casbah Jonction Stairs 2

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day has proved unpopular with Pakistani censors, who did what they do best: block access.

Here are two of my favorites, anonymously posted to avoid death threats. And death. To avoid death. You want to kill for your fanatical understanding of your religion, we need to beam you back to the 14th Century, where you belong.