Regina Hackett

From the department of great covers, Arcade Fire does Talking Heads, via CAUGHT UP INSANITY:

Acclaimed in Europe and Asia, Shimamoto has not enjoyed the prominence he deserves in the United States. Suddenly, he’s lighting up both coasts, in Target Practice at the Seattle Art Museum and Under Each Other’s Spell: Gutai and New York at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center on Long Island.

(Photo via)

DWG, a look at contemporary mark making, opens 6-9 p.m. at OHGE, featuring Gala Bent, Timothy Cross, Linda Hutchins, Counsel Langley, Peter Foucault, Kevin Haas and Scott Kolbo.

Good group.

Bent:

My capacity to appreciate arts elimination shows is ever increasing. I catch every episode of Project Runway, So You Think You Can Dance and American Idol. I hadn’t seen America’s Best Dance Crew till this season and only tuned in because Massive Monkees is on it.

In
Seattle, MM is hard to miss. I’ve seen its members in small clubs and large
stadiums, during competitions and solitary star turns, but I’ve never
seen them so flat as they are on America’s Best Dance Crew.

I
blame the show. Its tight, brassy format kills what’s best in its subject. Given the freedom to set its own agenda, a great crew will reveal an ability to expand on a moment and keep uncovering different
aspects of solitary and group moves within a circle of discerning
admirers.

I like Afro Borike and Vogue Evolution or at least I
think I do. I’d love to see them in a different setting. Even so, I
hope MM takes it all but won’t be following them to the finish line, as
this show too painful to watch. It proves it’s possible to ruin a great
thing by wrapping it in shoddy packaging and imposing  truly goofy challenges. I like the judges, especially
Shane Sparks, but they too can’t breathe inside this show’s stale air.
Dance crews deserve better.

Check this for a sampling of the real deal. The movie wasn’t so hot, but this trailer is thrilling.

Massive Monkees’ Jerome Aparis in happier times. Photo, Josh Trujillo.

The light looks as if it’s crawling out of its skin. His Web site.

After Betty Bowen’s funeral, a friend remembered her rousing him from a deep sleep in the early a.m. After his grumpy hello, her melodious voice came through the phone line.

 What have you done for the polar bear today?

Bowen died in 1977 at age 58. Although chiefly remembered for prodigious cheerleading on behalf of Northwest artists, she was also a fashion-forward supporter of civil rights, ecology and education for everybody.
In 1978, a group of her friends approached the Seattle Art Museum with the idea of an annual award in her name for emerging Northwest artists.

As the economy continues to limp along, more artists need the money. Surely they’re not bothering to apply primarily for the honor, which is local. Artists taking news of their win to New York, LA, Chicago and even San Francisco are stones dropped in a dream pond that sends out no ripples.

Within the region, however, a Bowen means something, although there is
a lot more award money in play in recent years, thanks to the Brink, the Neddy, Artist Trust, the Arlene Schnitzer Schwitzer Award, the Stranger’s Genius Awards, and grants from 4 Culture and City Artist awards from the Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs.

Finalists this year are Jovencio de la Paz and Josh Faught from Oregon; Jenny Heishman, Sean M. Johnson and Matthew Offenbacher from Seattle.

Press release here.

Paul Bogaers is a master of ambiguity.

Land(s)cape at Soil. Featuring Julie Albert, Lise Graham and Cable Griffith.

Beloved by grade-school art teachers, cut-out paper on paper collage can easily be overworked and inert, especially the way Alpert makes them, which is stuffed to the gills. And yet, hers work. It’s easy to see the ghost of Romare Bearden in her rough-hewed shapes. She’s going for similar territory too, the crumbling walls and make-do repairs of a rundown urban core.

She hasn’t hitched her wagon to his star, however. His tonalities are dark and tightly orchestrated. Hers have a wider range, with a little zing of wild thing.

If Graham had created the world, buildings would be able to lift themselves off their foundations to dance. They’d settle back without missing a beat or cracking the skulls of their occupants.

Griffith is a pattern painter aspiring to volume. If he painted heads instead of landscapes, he’d give them crew cuts. As his shapes hug the ground, their pastel shades, like yeast in dough, attempt to rise.

Fullness Passing, Patricia Hagen at Punch Gallery through Saturday.

Hagen is interested not in ripeness but what follows it, after the baby’s been fed, the seed has dropped from the pod and the cut flowers have begun to droop in the vase.

Witness, David French at Linda Hodges.

French’s sculptures remind me of keepsakes, something broken off and saved to be passed down from mother to daughter, a moment of youth long gone.

Carrie Marill and Robert Yoder at Howard House.

(Yoder reviewed here. ) Marrill’s men at work: They’re too busy to notice that they’re already gone.

During a drought in Orange County in the 1990s, there were wide dead
lawns spray-painted green and signs nailed to trees saying, “Armed
Response.” Some people were pretty successful with their faux-nature
plots, but others upped the yellow and threw in a bit of neon for a
probably unintentional Flash-Gordon-on-the-moon look. Nearly 20 years
later, the latter is the shade increasingly showing up in landscapes.

(Alice Wheeler, Homeless Camp, Seattle)

Barney Kulok, Crescent Street, Queens, New York

Ezra Johnson, still from The Time of Tall Statues

Elizabeth Sandvig, Landscape in Spring with Owl

Adam Sorensen, Banks

Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.

Song of Solomon

Artists threading the scarlet tend to color within the lines.

Man Ray

Man Ray again

And again, when his favorite erogenous zone became weather.

When we’re talking about erogenous, however, nobody beats Marilyn Minter’s Green Pink Caviar, trailer below and on the link.

For coloring outside the lines, credit goes first to Irving Penn, 1986, …

and second to Ariana Page Russell, whose photos of her flushed and/or painted body are amazing.