In/Visible

In/Visible: The Exit Interview with SAM's Contemporary Curator

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:29:33 -0800

If you only listen to one art interview in Seattle this year, let this be it.

You could hear the cries from all quarters when Michael Darling announced recently that he's leaving Seattle Art Museum to become chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. With shows like Target Practice and Kurt, he's the rare person whose work piqued the interest of artists, audiences, and administrators alike, and he spoke freely and frankly in this exit interview at his small office inside the Chase tower, looking out at the high-rises of southwestern downtown and the industrial waterfront. He praised big donors and dissed the University of Washington's art grad school, he described what the museum's bought lately, he revealed what works and what doesn't about the renovated downtown building, he named names of local artists to watch, and he gave his take on whether SAM's unwieldy three sites are sustainable given the collapsed economy and WaMu's demise.

He's bound to stir up controversy, but that's not his goal. These considered opinions are his parting gift to the city as someone who still cares about it, and we'd do best to use them in that spirit.

Thanks for the memories and the observations, Michael Darling. (And P.S.: Keep Seattle artists on your radar!)

^{Whiting Tennis, Bovine, became part of SAM's collection during Michael Darling's tenure, along with other works of art by Seattle artists, including Jeffry Mitchell, Eli Hansen, Gretchen Bennett, Dan Webb, Roy McMakin, and Cris Bruch.}

In/Visible: The Morisons: It's Not About What You Have, It's About What You Know

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:47:22 -0800

The art of Heather and Ivan Morison seems left behind from another world: a jacknifed semi-truck with cut flowers spilling out the back; a cabin in a park where visitors meet a Host who has a limited vocabulary; and, now, a giant sculpture made of charred, sooty wood, shaped in the form of a kite. It leans on the architecture of the Bellevue gallery Open Satellite, seemingly having fallen onto this place. But from where? Why? Can we use it to get back there?

Listen in as Heather talks about ruins, Arthog (the ancient wood they bought in Wales), and the failure of British prisoners to survive in Tasmania. The starting point is Frost King, the sculpture at Open Satellite named after the first kite ever to lift a person (1905; it was designed by Alexander Graham Bell). If you could escape, where would you go? If you couldn't, do you know how to survive where you are?

(My written piece on Frost King here.)

In/Visible: The Teaching Artist

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:38:56 -0800

^{Each pair of glass eyes embedded in the sculptures correspond to one of the members of K.O.S.}

The story of Tim Rollins and the Kids of Survival in the South Bronx is, by now, legendary. They're the subject of an exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, and last week Rollins and K.O.S.er Angel Abreu talked onstage at the museum to a packed room and an overflow crowd of 40 watching a simulcast in the museum's education wing.

What really happened all those afternoons in the broken-down public-school studio, with Rollins determined not to let these kids flounder and these kids wondering what the hell this white guy was trying to do?

Hear about it in this interview, taped at the Frye just before the talk. My review of the show is here.

(One P.S.: I forgot to ask on tape why there haven't been more girls in the group. It's a common criticism of K.O.S. Rollins answered candidly when I brought it up after the interview. He said, one, parents didn't want their girls running around with boys after school, and two, when there were girls, there was sex. A girl would go to the bathroom, a boy would go to the bathroom, and they'd come back a half hour later. There never were restrictions on who could join, but Rollins could get more done just with the boys, he said.)

In/Visible: In Neverland: Marc Dombrosky's Trip

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:06:08 -0800

^{Crooked Castle (2009), embroidery on found paper, 8 1/2 by 11 inches}

The day Tacoma-based artist Marc Dombrosky moved to Las Vegas and started a job at a furniture warehouse, the furniture warehouse went out of business and Michael Jackson died. Dombrosky and his wife, artist Shannon Eakins, found themselves lost in the desert. Dombrosky's new show at Platform, Neverland, came out of the sensation of that day and the scavenging and repairing that followed. (Review of the show here.)

Dombrosky is a great talker; you definitely want to listen in.

In/Visible: Tannaz Farsi: Art, Iranian Revolution, and Forgetting

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:07:40 -0800

One white wall of OHGE Ltd. has been turned into a white billboard with a slightly different-colored-white area inside it where a message might have once been.

A megaphone hangs inside the left side of this cloud. On the right side is a small thicket of gleaming white fluorescent lights leaning against the wall. Colored roses coated in glitter lie in a heap on the floor.

There's another room parallel to this one in the gallery, approached through a door. In that congruent room, large white block letters spell out "I FORGOT" so that, if the wall were removed between the rooms, the letters in one room would appear in the same position as the empty area of the billboard in the other room.

The billboard has been divided from its message, and all that remain are two incomplete halves. There is only silence that might once have been, or might yet become, speech. The kind of silence that wants breaking.

This installation is called The future belongs to crowds (a line taken from Don DeLillo), and it's by Eugene-based, Iranian-born artist Tannaz Farsi. She made the piece after the Iranian demonstrations this summer.

Listen to her talk about it just before the opening on December 3. It's up through January 14, 2010.

In/Visible: Josh Faught: Sculpture Is An Imperial Force

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:32:46 -0800

The stringy weavings leaning on the wall outside the elevators at the Seattle Art Museum look at first like they are semi-spent stuff on its way out of the galleries, to somewhere else. But once you spend a minute with them you begin to see they're their own place. The artwork is called Endless Night, and it's by Josh Faught. It consists of imperfectly woven, window-sized afghans derived from a 1-inch-by-1-inch pattern of a view out a window at night. The afghans (the nights) grow increasingly darker from left to right, having been dyed in indigo. A little pink candle on one is trying to cast some light. Next to it is what Faught refers to as a "failed" weaving, an afghan wrapped around a post and tied messily like a frayed flag.

Endless Night is an intriguing, unusual work of art by the relatively unknown artist who won this year's Betty Bowen Award. Turns out his other works�incorporating weaving, political pins, video, found objects, books, photographic imagery, nail polish, and spraypaint�are intriguing, too. They use deliberately modest means to wrangle with some big questions about sculpture, authority, materials, gender, tradition, and power.

He speaks from his home in Eugene, Oregon, where he's been teaching since 2007, after getting his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. (He cites influences you can check out here, here, and here�those first two, notably, have Northwest roots of sorts. His work is also on the Grizzly Bear albums "Horn of Plenty" and "Friend.")

Listen in.

In/Visible: Finding Robert Mapplethorpe in a Box on a Shelf

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:57:26 -0800

Sylvia Wolf was curator of photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art when she discovered a trove of unknown Polaroids by Robert Mapplethorpe in a back room at his foundation. The artist, who died in 1989, only shot Polaroids for a few short years before moving on to his better-known, tighter, neoclassical style.

Now, almost a hundred of the Polaroids Wolf found are the subject of a breathtaking, tender, revealing exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle�having already visited the Whitney and museums in Chicago and the UK.

This conversation with Wolf is the story of how they�and Mapplethorpe�came out.

In/Visible: Stelarc: The Man with the Ear-Arm

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:16:38 -0800

A smart man recently asked me, "Why does Stelarc have an ear on his arm?" I replied that it has to do with ideas about how the body is not located where it's located anymore; that in this wild world of instantaneous reproduction and projection and distribution, we are located in several places at once. The ear won't ever hear�it's eventually just going to have a microphone that will be connected to the web so that anyone anywhere will be able to hear what it hears. It will be the listener's ear, not Stelarc's ear. You'll have an ear on his body. It will also be Bluetooth enabled, so you'll be able to call the ear and the receiver will be implanted inside Stelarc's mouth. If he closes his mouth while you talk to him, your voice will only be projected into the inside of Stelarc's head. If he opens his mouth, your voice will be heard by anybody Stelarc is standing near.

"Yes, but why does he have an ear on his arm?" my friend continued.

And it was a fair question.

Stelarc is the name (his last and first names conjoined) of an Australian artist who has been making performances that involve technological extensions to and experiments on his body since the 1960s. His most famous project is the as-yet-unfinished ear-on-arm, but he's done many others, including throwing the products of his and a fellow artist's liposuction into a robot-like blender for a gallery installation and being suspended by his skin 25 times.

I've never seen any of Stelarc's work in person�except when I sat down to do this interview with him. Meaning: I've seen the arm.

It was hidden under a black jacket (DO NOT HIDE YOUR ARM-EAR UNDER A BUSHEL!), so I asked to see it, which felt slightly dirty. It looked like it looks in the photographs with one important distinction: the two large scars near it. They produced in me that queasy-stomach feeling that makes me uncomfortable in my own body out of something like extreme empathy.

For me that was the best part, so I tried to ask him about queasiness. I tried to ask him slightly more personal and loosening questions. (Is your body completely covered in scars under there? What are you going to do with your body when it stops living?) He's an academic and has quite a set script, which I don't mind too much�but when I asked questions that went further, I didn't get too far. I left with the impression that Stelarc is a lovely person of great intellect, but perhaps more Cartesian than he'd want to let on. A great artist? I'm not yet convinced.

Listen in and see what you think.

In/Visible: Paul & Richard, The Podcast

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:41:28 -0800

On September 3, Paul McCarthy and Richard Jackson flew up from LA to give what turned out to be a hilarious and historic talk at Seattle Art Museum�but a few hours before that, they sat down in a brightly lit conference room upstairs at the museum for a private conversation with a tape recorder and me.

McCarthy starts right in with a story about his liquid bodily functions, which seems right enough.

^{This is Paul McCarthy in a performance, but in real life, his hands are pretty much that big. Yup. Really.}

And the writeup of the later talk�again, basically a classic�is here.

In/Visible: Alice Wheeler: I Tried to Contain Myself But I Escaped

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:19:26 -0800

In Alice Wheeler's smart and tight but generous new show of photographs and a video, Women Are Beautiful�named after Garry Winogrand's series but reframing it completely�she's hit a stride. You can hear it in the way she talks, too, about the 60s, old Seattle versus new Seattle, places she calls "Man's Lands," and her subconscious pursuit of green eyes. Wheeler's a rock-hard feminist with a record of being underestimated. It's about to end.

Don't miss this interview.

In/Visible: Making Art While Nervous: The Plein-Air Prisons of Buddy Bunting

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:06:24 -0800

Buddy Bunting stakes out prisons. He parks by the sides of their roads to sketch, photograph, and videotape them in a hurry, before he gets caught.

Nobody is supposed to look too closely at a prison. Bunting does it in part because prisons are what he knows. Growing up in a Maryland area where a prison moved in and provided plenty of jobs, Bunting's regular friends were prison guards as well as prisoners. He knows the in and the out, so he stands at the border and makes art. (Click images to enlarge.)

The first image above is a bowed panorama view (the gallery wall doesn't actually curve leftward) of Bunting's 30-foot ink and pencil portrait of Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla, Oregon.

The second image is a detail of the part of the painting that depicts the "work" building (those four vertical doors), where private businesses can "rent" the extremely cheap labor of prisoners for a time.

This 30-foot painting�without weather or plant life, or any signs of life at all, punctuated by insanely erect lampposts�is the centerpiece of Bunting's solo show High Living at Crawl Space, which is full of stark, colorless scenes that convey a powerful, tense sense of place and time. He's nervous while he works, he says, and that comes through. But his images also are made with a cold observational eye. They take no stands, testify to nothing, cannot be convicted or exonerated.

Listen to the artist talk.

In/Visible: Art and the American Way: SAM Curator Patti Junker Talks

Tue, 12 May 2009 17:41:42 -0800

'I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine.' --John Adams, in a letter to his family, 1780

What is the trajectory of early American art? From a time of war to the Gilded Age? That's the question subtly raised by the exhibition Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery at Seattle Art Museum through May 25 (pictured is John Trumbull's self-portrait, with paintbrush and sword). Although the exhibition is an idiosyncratic study, based as it is on a single collection (Yale's), it's also a proposition about the possibilities of art in a new democracy�art as a tool of political rhetoric, art as a sign of wealth, art as a way of memorializing, art as a way of promising better things to come, art as a display of national ambition.

In this podcast, SAM American art curator Patti Junker talks not only about Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness�especially its trajectory, as in the Adams quote above (which is painted on the gallery wall at the entrance to the show), from struggle toward enlightenment (which resulted not only in great early photographs but also in not a few ostentatious sofas!)�but also about SAM's entire season of Americana. That includes exhibitions by contemporary artists Titus Kaphar, Corin Hewitt, and Mary Simpson and Fionn Meade; a show of relatively controversial paintings of Native Americans by the 19th-century Victorian George de Forest Brush, who couldn't stand to look; SAM's own Bierstadt painting of Puget Sound; and SAM's recent acquisition of a Louis Sullivan elevator facade from the Chicago Stock Exchange building.

The exhibition is just generalized and crowd-pleasing enough not to dwell much on the unhappier, or more hypocritical, aspects of early American life. But there are hints in and among the hits. A series of intimate pencil drawings of the Amistad captives, by William H. Townsend, is touching (pictured is "Grabo," ca. 1840; click to enlarge).

Junker shares her own theories about several things�why de Forest Brush stopped looking, why Bierstadt's Puget Sound isn't as laughable as we all thought�even as she explains why it's impossible to do an 18th-century portraiture show except in New Haven. Listen in.

In/Visible: Corin Hewitt: The Desire and Anxiety of Reproduction and Decay

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:39:19 -0800

Corin Hewitt does not think of himself as a performance artist in the traditional sense: his performances are always in the service of demonstrating how images are made, and�perhaps sending up the way that performance art finds this end no matter what�they result in an ongoing series of images.

In 2007 at Small A Projects in Portland, Hewitt set up a space for himself that was part-kitchen and part-photo studio. Visitors could watch him from an aperture in the wall. What they saw when they looked in was him cooking up his food at the same time as he was cooking up his photographs using materials he'd brought with him. He did an earlier version of this in Redhook, N.Y., and a later version at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has a great video and photo archive from the project here.

For the Portland project, he brought with him various cooking implements, foods, plasticine, patterned fabrics he'd bought in Portland, and printed-out images of Native American baskets in the collection of the Portland Art Museum. He set to work, sending each of these materials through a process of continuous transformation pictured in (and effected by) photographs taken by four different cameras: a 4-by-5 traditional format camera, a Polaroid, a 35mm, and a digital camera.

He might weave a copy of the museum basket out of multi-colored pasta, set the pasta basket down on a backdrop of vividly patterned (woven) fabric, and take a photograph. That photograph might make its way into another photograph of the artist eating a bowl of the pasta, which might also include, in one corner, a camera not being used but still sort of standing there and watching the moment.

Things that get consumed in Hewitt's performances often reappear in another form. He might take a bite of a pear, sculpt a perfect copy of that bitten pear, and then take a picture of the two together. That picture might appear again in another image, and so might that pear's core appear in a photograph of the installation's compost pile. (Every Hewitt performance includes a compost pile.)

At the Whitney, the outer walls of the built studio-in-the-gallery served as an exhibition space. Hewitt would change out photographs every so often, as he made new ones. There is no such thing as a final photograph in Hewitt's work; something that appears on a gallery wall now may later appear in a photograph sitting in a compost heap. What do we decide to keep and what to let go of? How do we decide what's worth taking a picture of, and what should be left on the periphery?

Hewitt's work playfully and poignantly points to the way that photography transfers matter from one form into another through desire and anxiety about reproduction and decay.

The Portland performance did not have enough space for gallery walls, so the current SAM exhibition is serving as the second half. Titled Weavings, it's an installation of 75 photographs of varying sizes, styles, and techniques (remember, there were four cameras). They're a hodge-podge; there's no linear order to them, which is an invitation to the viewer to form his or her own ideas about what they're looking at and how it got there. And another version of this exhibition�transformation is Hewitt's calling card�exists in a new, hardcover book of the 75 photographs published by J&L Books. In the book, the scale of the varying prints and the sensation of looking into a building through 75 individual windows is lost, but the qualities of each image�this interplay of sculpted and edible pieces of food, that patch of slimy shine on a rotting melon�are heightened.

When Hewitt came to Seattle for the opening of his show, he sat down for this podcast, and turned out to be a master of ungodly eloquence. Our talk ranged from Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependency to the death of his father when he was young to a photograph's dual role in providing a model for future behavior and a document of the past. When we began to talk about decay, a fleet of sirens drove by. You'll hear.

In/Visible: Titus Kaphar, Pushing His Own Damn Boat

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:57:55 -0800

Titus Kaphar is a black artist who doctors history paintings so they're not so quietly (or unquietly) racist anymore. He takes this, for instance,

and turns it into this.

The original Thomas Eakins oil painting, Rail Shooting on the Delaware from 1876, is part of the Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery exhibition visiting Seattle Art Museum right now. (It's often cited as an example of a good, relatively equitable relationship between a black man and a white man, which Kaphar understandably finds a little hard to take.)

Kaphar made his response, Push Yuh Own Damn Boat, especially for the occasion of his simultaneous show down the hall at SAM.

The frisson of the direct response is powerfully specific, and its presence in the museum at the same time as the Yale show cracks open some of the under-explored issues in the history exhibition simply by inserting the doubt of an alternative perspective. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is richer because it shares a space with Kaphar, the history-painting explorer.

Kaphar is the first recipient of SAM's biennial Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship, which is devoted to supporting black artists.

But it would be a mistake to see his work as limited to the context of race. Every cut he makes into one of his paintings�copies and interpretations of old European and American paintings�is different. He might cut out a woman to release her from the man she's standing next to; he might slice away a warrior and lay him on a pedestal in order to give the man some deserved rest; he might turn some figures toward the wall and others out into the room in order to engage with the basic questions of modernism in painting. He also uses tar to redact entire areas of a painting.

^{"I still don't know how it ended like this, but it began when one of the older women called her blackness into question" (2007)}

How does Kaphar think about his own work, and how does he feel about being celebrated as a black artist? Listen in.

In/Visible: Going Out of Plumb

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:36:05 -0800

And for his next trick...

Stranger Genius Alex Schweder makes performance architecture. He's interested in relationships, in permeability, in the way bodies and buildings affect each other, in the way artists and audiences interact even. But he also knows that "audience participation" can easily turn into an excuse for an artwork to become one-shot entertainment. You get it, then it's over.

So how does he handle performance architecture? In this podcast, he talks about his priorities and his hopes, his fears and his promises. He especially addresses Stability, his latest work, in which he and artist Ward Shelley are living on a teeter-totter trush at Lawrimore Project for a solid week. The artists will knock each other off balance every time they move or receive any supplies (you can take them supplies from their "Needs List" here).

Stability is part of a larger exhibition called Stability and Other Tenuous Positions, running through May 2 at LP.

What else is Schweder up to? Much.

1. He has a show coming up in Berlin in June, at Gallery Magnus M�ller, called This Form Follows Your Performance, in which he changes your living space according to how you behave in it. (His description reminded me of Hadley + Maxwell's awesome Decor Project.)

2. A new version of his A Sac of Rooms Three Times A Day, first seen at Suyama Space in 2007, will be part of an exhibition called Sensate at SFMoMA.

3. Simultaneously he'll have a solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery in SF.

4. This one is something he'd like to do, but not something he's actually working on already. You know about the woman who married the Berlin Wall (and consummated it) and the woman who married the Eiffel Tower (profiled in a documentary called The Woman Who Married the Eiffel Tower)? Well, Schweder would like to design spouses for these and other "objectum sexuals," or people who fall in love with inanimate objects.

It's good to see that his genius is being recognized all over the place.

In/Visible: Those Indian Paintings: Now Hear from the Curator Who Discovered Them

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:49:50 -0800

The 17th-to-19th-century Indian paintings visiting Seattle Asian Art Museum this winter have made perfectly rational people drool. On normally empty weekday afternoons, the galleries are full of clumps of people clutching magnifying glasses and craning toward the miniature details, rapt. (My review here.)

Now hear the curator of the exhibition, the wondrously named Debra Diamond, talk about the paintings.

In/Visible: Art in Obama America: So How Will Art Change?

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:50:59 -0800

Obama equals change, right? Well, how does change apply to art?

You've seen art by Dan Webb and Susan Robb, now hear them talk about what they think should change in art, and what should never change in art.

I throw out a bunch of questions, and they respond with a bunch of ideas: Is irony really the enemy? (Yes.) Does the national government have a role to play in the lives of artists? (What national government?) Will the collapse of the market help make better art? (It already has.)

Don't expect them to agree. Webb is working in public art as a political statement; Robb has just returned from the Global Creative Leadership Summit in New York, where she was the only visual artist included among a bunch of world leaders in every field. (Here's one of the panels she found herself on.) They both have plenty to say about the future of art in Obama America.

In/Visible: The Artist Who Would Like to Redesign Seattle's Street Grid

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:10:13 -0800

Is this the real meaning of public art? Art that actually reshapes the environment to better suit what the public needs?

Cheryl dos Remedios would say yes. Here's my column about what she wants to do, and just click to listen to our entire conversation about the LIV Project.

--Jen Graves

In/Visible: When Museums Sell Their Art: The Tackling of a Taboo

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:48:54 -0800

^{Jackson Pollock's Mural, which cash-strapped University of Iowa administrators considered selling last year.}

Last month two pretty shocking things happened in the museum world. One, the nation's best contemporary art museum considered subsuming itself in another museum but did not seriously or publicly consider selling art to keep itself afloat. Two, a far more obscure museum did sell two works of art in order to keep its lights on�and was publicly blacklisted by the museum community.

These are not isolated cases. Universities and libraries have tried (some successfully) to sell off artworks to square up their balance sheets. Other museums, like the Detroit Institute of Arts, are holding on to their van Goghs despite facing tens of millions of dollars in shortfalls. And it seems there is news every day about another museum's financial woes in this economy: today's exposed victim is the Denver Art Museum.

To people outside the art world, the math can seem obvious: If museums are sitting on all this valuable art, why don't they sell some of it to pay the bills?

That, as you can imagine, makes many art people scream.

Things tend to devolve quickly into shouting matches.

But do they have to? Is compromise possible? Can museums ever sell works of art except for the purpose of collecting more art (the current rule)? Where did that rule come from? And who is the best authority for determining whether sales that do fund other art purchases are in fact justified?

Into this controversy waded Jori Finkel, a writer from Los Angeles for the New York Times, whose story about the history, philosophy, and controversy of deaccessioning�"Whose Rules About Art Sales Are These, Anyway?"�appeared on December 28.

Now, in a taped phone interview, she takes an even broader look, talking about what didn't make it into her story and what her greater goals were in writing the piece.

She also directs attention to voices outside the usual suspects (which are also worth checking out for background here, here, and here): Michael O'Hare's public policy paper "Capitalizing Art Museum Collections: Awkward for Museums but Good for Art and Society," and Adrian Ellis's 2004 essay for The Art Newspaper, "A New Approach to the Deaccessioning Issue."

Once you start thinking about it, you can't stop. And the current rule seems both incomplete and overly restrictive. Surely there's an opportunity here for reasoned reform.

UPDATE
Editor's note: One blogger central to the conversation about deaccessioning at the National Academy and elsewhere was inadvertently left out of this conversation. Check out the work of Lee Rosenbaum (Culturegrrl) here.

In/Visible: Roger Fernandes: An Artist His Ancestors Would Recognize

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:18:16 -0800

^{Roger Fernandes's Sleeping Spirits Awaken (2001), acrylic on canvas, 30 by 40 inches}

It took Seattle Art Museum eight years to put together its current exhibition of Salish art�the art of the native people of this region�and SAM's show, amazingly, is the first major museum exhibition ever devoted to the work and culture of the Salish.

Why has Salish culture been so lost for so long? What is it really about, and how does the SAM show succeed and fail in presenting it?

Salish artist Roger Fernandes�who grew up in an apartment on Capitol Hill but in a close Klallam family (the Klallam are from the Port Angeles area)�talks about his own search for his artistic heritage, and why he deliberately makes art that his ancestors would recognize.

(For my review of the SAM show, click here.)

In/Visible: Lawrence Weschler: The P.T. Barnum of the Mind

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:31:00 -0800

^{Photo by David Shankbone}

What Lawrence Weschler does is he writes about the world in ways that make it seem bigger and much more exciting�both more complex and more penetrable�than you ever thought before. He does this by writing (for magazines, in books, on the web) about art, politics, and science, drawing them all together. "I write about people who are just moseying along in the dailiness of their lives and suddenly catch fire," he says. It's not far-fetched that he's written about torture and repressive regimes: what interests him is that spark, "the thing that has to be repressed when repression takes place."

He also runs cultural things: New York University's New York Institute for the Humanities and Chicago's Humanities Festival; Alastair Reed calls him "The P.T. Barnum of the Mind."

In this far-ranging conversation, he talks about everything from how his Robert Irwin biography, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, was self-medication; how modernism sprung from the invention of kindergarten; whether sub-Saharan clitorectomy or the North American college application process is stupider; a performance of Waiting for Godot by imprisoned lifers in Sweden (who escaped on tour!); and how The Stranger accidentally got him into a fight with his then-boss, New Yorker editor Tina Brown.

You really don't want to miss listening to this. Just saying. I'm going to listen to it again myself.

In/Visible: An Artist Becoming: Caleb Larsen

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 20:43:14 -0800

^{The Date the Internet Told Us We Would Die (detail), by Caleb Larsen}

Caleb Larsen is a young artist (now studying at RISD and clearly very caught up in art history) who works extensively in digital media and has his first real outing in Seattle at Lawrimore Project this month. I caught up with him to talk about the generation of a patch of frost in the gallery, how to film boiling water without steaming up the camera, the restoration of the oral tradition to the epic of Gilgamesh by way of computer, mopeds, titles, and his death.

^{Caleb Larsen's A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter, a wooden box that sells itself on eBay}

In/Visible: Dias, Riedweg, and the Art of Figuring Out Where You Stand in the World

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:05:04 -0800

Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg first showed this artwork, Funk Staden, at the politically charged Documenta mega-show in Kassel, Germany in 2007. It hung in a European palace in the hometown of the German who first depicted Brazilian cannibals in the 16th century�and now it has come, in expanded form, to Seattle.

Dias is Brazilian and Riedweg is Swiss German, but they live in both places and speak several languages. They're culturally interstitial people who make interstitial art; wherever they are they find and become attached to communities of Others�people who don't usually appear in art, except maybe as vague subjects: janitors, prisoners, sex workers, or in this case, the impoverished residents of the favelas in Dias's hometown of Rio de Janeiro, where paranoid and otherwise secretive drug dealers throw elaborate private funk balls.

Funk Staden is an enactment of a mini-funk ball organized by the artists. What you see above is a shot of the whole installation of video screens and mirrors at the Frye; below is a still from one video.

In this extended interview, the artists talk about how they made this work and why, about what the election of Barack Obama means to them, and about their 14-year relationship to each other, to various cultures, and to artistic practices from formalism to documentary filmmaking.

In/Visible: Betty Tompkins: On Making Fuck Paintings Since 1969 (NSFW Image Included)

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:39:11 -0800

^{Fuck Grid #34 (2007), pencil on paper, 17 by 14 inches}

Betty Tompkins began making Fuck paintings in 1969. It was the height of minimalism and conceptual art, so she thought she'd try calling them Joined Forms. She eventually dropped the act and just called them Fuck paintings, adding Dick paintings and Cunt paintings, too.

What keeps a woman working on photorealistic paintings of hard-core heterosexual pornography for 40 years? Well, she did take a break in the late 70s and early 80s to make works that were all text, of which she says: "I bored myself silly, so I went back to sex."

Listen to her talk about her quick rise, her years as an art-world exile, her comeback, her repeated brushes with censorship.

In person her works can be surprisingly tender; they can also be harsh and cold in the Chuck Close way (some are created by stamping words on the canvas rather than with brush strokes).

I'm sorry to say that her show of paintings and drawings (especially two exquisite drawings created in the 1970s with a Dremel tool, which she only knew to be called a "flexible shaft," causing some great innocent doublespeak), at Lawrimore Project is only up through today, October 18. (We tried to do this interview earlier, but because of scheduling conflicts and illness, we just couldn't.)

Her own web site is here.

Here is an image she alludes to in the podcast, her single homage in all these years to the breast. This one is called Fuck Grid #32:

In/Visible: Wandering Storyteller Marooned in Seattle: Alec Soth at the Sorrento

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:16:08 -0800

^{Gus's Pawn Shop from the series NIAGARA by Alec Soth}

Alec Soth is a particular sort of wandering American storyteller, a lyrical documentarian. When people talk about his photographs, they bring up names like Robert Frank, like Flannery O'Connor, like Mark Twain, even.

Recently Soth was in Seattle, receiving an award from the Photographic Center Northwest and staying at the Sorrento Hotel on First Hill. I met him just after he arrived, and he was already a little out of sorts. He had lost his wallet. Then he found it, I don't know how, he left me in the lobby during that part, and when he came back we ordered Diet Cokes and went upstairs to sit down and talk. He didn't have a camera with him, or was it that he didn't really feel like shooting? He was crotchety and smart and evasive and funny and open all at the same time. Something about him was resistant to the interview process (in a good way), even though he talked plenty. I think you'll see what I mean. You'll also hear him reveal what he's working on, which involves hiding out. It also involves making art about the election process while trying like hell not to be political.

Also, he wholeheartedly agrees with Ed Schad's take on my take on nostalgia and sentimentality when it comes to art. (Me, too. Not my take, I mean, but Ed's take on my take.)

In/Visible: Mary Temple and the Doubting Zone

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:51:45 -0800

Mary Temple spent weeks at Western Bridge making a huge painting that opened to the public last weekend. (The image above is from an earlier, similar installation on the East Coast.)

The painting is extremely quiet. It is white paint on white walls, and depending on the light, it can almost disappear entirely. It is painted to fool you into believing, at least for moment, that it's not there. When you walk in, it looks like there's nothing in the room at all, just the shadows and light beaming in from the windows of the building. This is what Temple calls "the doubting zone." She has her reasons for sending you there.

In/Visible: Wade Kavanaugh: Making the Regrade Reappear

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:55:00 -0800

There was a moment in the influential California artist Robert Irwin's artistic life�documented in Lawrence Weschler's classic book Seeing Is Forgetting the Thing One Sees (my love letter to the 25-year-old book here; the new 25th-anniversary special edition can be pre-ordered in hardback for $31.50 here or in paperback for $16.47 here)�when Irwin realized he was looking around.

He was painting one or two thin lines across a canvas, and kept moving them up or down just slightly until they felt absolutely right. It could take weeks to get one line in the right place. And then, when they were perfect, he realized he had another dilemma: they were only perfect in his studio, where they were made. The placements of the lines depended on the room around them, not just the white space of the rest of the canvas. Irwin realized that, for him, art doesn't stand alone. He was making art in relation to what was around it.

Well, once you start bringing architecture or space into the experience of art, you might as well bring in time, too. That's the idea behind New York-based artist Wade Kavanaugh's new installation at Suyama Space, in which the bumps of land that were leveled off in the Denny Regrade at the turn of the 20th century reappear in rough, ghostly form indoors.

The bricks that make up the mounds are handmade from scraps of salvaged drywall layered together like wafers. The choice of drywall makes it as if the artist is imagining the walls of the gallery deconstructing into the shape of the former land on the site.

The rough, sandblasted surfaces of the bricks�there are 10,000 of them, according to the artist�and their subtle spectrum of color due to the original uses of the pieces of drywall make the piece visually engrossing, especially when seen from slightly above, on the staircase adjoining the gallery.

Unfortunately, Kavanaugh had to deal with several egresses from the room (four exit doors, two bathroom doors, and a fire escape, if you can believe it), so there are too many paths through the land forms, and the movement aspect of the experience feels unresolved.

Before you head down there (the show's up through December 12), listen to Kavanaugh talk about the genesis of his idea, what the colors tell you, and what he does with all this material when he's finished.

In/Visible: Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn: Vaudevillians of the Apocalypse

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:04:00 -0800

L.A.-based artists Harry Dodge (born Harriet, but now not identifying as either male or female) and Stanya Kahn are as uncompromising as they are hilarious. The entertaining but unsettling performances in their videos�both in front of and behind the camera�are plainly spontaneous, but the final works are carefully crafted. To get a sense of what they do, watch a segment of their Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out here (that's Kahn you see in the frame, and Dodge is shooting).

Then listen in to this sprawly phone conversation with them.

For more, there's a comprehensive New York Times profile of the artists here, and a nice Time Out piece about them here.

Their 2006 work Masters of None (pictured above) is screening at TBA:08 in Portland through October 4, and the artists will talk at the Back Room Friday night, September 12.

In/Visible: Sam Davidson of the Long View and the Bowties

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:49:00 -0800

^{This photograph is old, but Davidson doesn't look very different today. He still wears the bowtie.}

Sam Davidson has run a gallery in Seattle for 35 years: He knows where all the bodies are buried. But he also deals in quiet art, often prints, generally the sort that doesn't send a lot of journalists around to bother him. He's an undertapped resource.

A few years ago, Davidson opened a contemporary satellite in the middle of the East Edge Artwalk route�near SOIL and Platform, Shift and Punch. Mike Sweney ran Davidson Contemporary, and artists could take risks there (John Grade, for instance, completed his first-ever installation there; Grade is now showing at Bellevue Arts Museum).

But about a year ago, Sweney went to work for the state, and Davidson has decided to close the contemporary space. Its last show is this month's.

Sam Davidson isn't going anywhere, though, and he's got a lot of knowledge and plenty of opinions, as soft-spoken as he is. In this interview, he talks about why he's disappointed with Seattle Art Museum and the Olympic Sculpture Park, the bravery he expects from the Henry Art Gallery, his love for the ducks at the Frye Art Museum, how he's something of a "Broadway Danny Rose" character, and why he won't join the bowtie club of the Northwest.

Here's the Davidson Gallery, in Occidental Square, that is staying open:

In/Visible: Leo Berk and the Cave

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:00:00 -0800

On the morning of September 12, 2001, as the United States descended into a pit of disbelief, Seattle artist Leo Saul Berk happened to be in Guatemala, descending into an ancient Mayan cave. Tourists aren't allowed in, but Berk and some others bribed the guards, who then conducted the tour of the dark, totally disorienting place�a place Berk was unable to get out of his head afterward.

Now it's finally come out of his head, and into the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University, in the form of strange, surrealistic, suggestive shapes in two drawings and a sculpture-on-stilts.

Listen to him talk about the whole experience.

In/Visible: Sweden's Feeling Sinister

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:00:00 -0800

That's a still from a digital video made with clay animation by Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg. It's called Feed All the Hungry Little Children (2007), but, as you can imagine, it is not as innocent as the title makes it sound. It is, in fact, quite sick�even though nothing that happens in it is really wrong.

The lascivious woman lures the hungry pack of children from their crevices in the back side of a tenement. (See what I mean that something's wrong but not overtly wrong, just by the potential entendres in that sentence?) The children surround and grope her. They pull out her breasts. She feeds them. It is a clay-milk orgy. Then, they close their eyes like babies do after you feed them, when they go to sleep, except these babies look overstuffed, and like they might have choked to death, just a little.

It's all very sinister and vague, which is basically the tone of the entire show Ask A Banana, Baby at Howard House. The show features three Swedish artists�Djurberg, Annika von Hausswolff, and Johanna Billing�and their videos, animations, and photographs. It's not a big show, but it makes a definite impression.

Hear curator Sara Callahan, who is Swedish herself, talk about why she chose these works, which make Sweden seem so, well, freaky and freaked out.

In/Visible: Isaac Layman: Making Photographs Out of Nothing at All

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:13:18 -0800

That's Isaac Layman. He's asleep, perfectly still except for the rise and fall of his torso as he breathes. The camera is making a picture of him that takes four and a half minutes to complete�it's a digital process, but it mimics the earliest photographs, when people had to remain perfectly still for minutes on end so that they would be captured as if in a single, clear moment. Any movement would be tracked in the final image. Here, Layman mounts a digital back onto a traditional 4 by 5 camera, and it records one line 1 pixel wide by 8,000 pixels high and then moves to the right to record the next line. Layman is being downloaded.

If you look closely, you can see that his pockets are scallop-edged�that's not the way they really look, it's an effect from the motion of his breathing during the shoot. But that's kind of a gimme.

What's stranger is the fact that Layman himself doesn't know what was going on in the mind of his subject at the time this was shot�he was asleep. He's in the same position we are: seeing someone without really getting any information about him.

Layman's whole show of new work at Lawrimore Project�called Photographs from the Inside of a Whale, and shot entirely in his Seattle home�is an investigation into how good the information you get from a photograph really is.

Listen to him tell it.

In/Visible: Oliver Herring: The Man Who Says Yes to Everything

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:20:00 -0800

Oliver Herring is a Brooklyn-based artist who works relatively traditionally, in photography, sculpture, and video. But since 2002, he also has had something on the side: something called Task.

Task is an event involving volunteers who come together in a public place for an entire day and give each other tasks to do for the whole time they're there. While it's happening a mini-society forms. All Herring does is choose the volunteers, start things off, and then observe. This happened in Seattle June 28; my on-the-scene reporting on the first part of it is here; a longer essay considering it is running in next week's paper.

In this interview, conducted on the eve of the event in Seattle, Herring talks about why Task is actually not on the side of his studio work, but instead at the heart of it. He talks about the outbreak of Task "parties" around the country. He talks about his year of saying yes to everything.

Listen in.

And here are two images from Seattle's Task (photographs by Duncan Scovil):

^{These are the bleachers that lead down from the Fifth Avenue level to the auditorium. Remember 83-year-old Bob from my earlier writing? That's him up and moving around while a young woman naps.}

In/Visible: Artists of the Apocalypse Speak

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:46:40 -0800

That there is Matthew Day Jackson's Chariot II (I Like America and America Likes Me) (2008), the centerpiece of the Henry Art Gallery's new show The Violet Hour. It's made of a Skip Nichols race car (crashed/Corvette), steel, wool, felt, leather, stained glass, fluorescent light tubes, solar panels, fiberglass, and plastic.

Like Jackson's other two works in the show, this one is a glorious thing to look at and look at and keep looking at. It's also full of associations in and outside of art�the first to come to mind are Richard Prince's treatments of upstate New York, Beuys's plane crash and rescue by the Tartars, and stained-glass windows that survive in bombed-out cathedrals. Traditional Western art and pioneer stories are swirling around, too: the driver's seat is made from a leather cowboy saddle, and set in the passenger's seat like an eerie mask is a reflective astronaut's helmet wrapped in gray felt. Oh, and the entire sculpture is solar-powered.

^{That's the "shattered" windshield of the car.}

^{There's the cowboy saddle and the space helmet inside the car.}

The Violet Hour is a remarkably entertaining show for being so simultaneously grim. Jen Liu's videos feature Pink Floyd standards sung in Latin plainchant, Black Sabbath�s �Iron Man� performed by a community brass band and performed as an operatic aria for a soprano, cannibalism, brutalist architecture, and pretty young men. In Croatian artist David Maljkovic's videos, young people in a post-communist daze linger under the burdensome, overpowering modernist architecture of the Italian Pavilion of the Zagreb Fair, loitering in and around cars that have been immobilized.

The overlapping themes in the show reveal themselves continually: cars, architecture, nature, text, religion, crystalline forms. It's a show in which you can do plenty of mental work while also having a great time.

Talking to the artists (except Maljkovic, who had to remain in Croatia with his wife, who's expecting) was much the same experience. Have a listen.

In/Visible: How Does It Feel Winning the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards?

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:25:00 -0800

On the beleaguered morning after the opening party for the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards last Saturday, the five winning artists sat down in a conference room in the Portland Art Museum and gave each other insane love. This recording is the result of that union.

There was Whiting Tennis,

Dan Attoe,

Marie Watt,

Cat Clifford,

and Jeffry Mitchell.

In/Visible: Stefano Catalani: Inside a Once-Infamous Museum

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:24:18 -0800

The Bellevue Arts Museum hasn't exactly had an easy time of it, what with the shutting down, the "signature" (read: impossible) architecture, and the embezzling.

Okay, but what does its contemporary curator, Stefano Catalani�who has produced more exhibition catalogs in the last few years than any other local curator�have to say about working at BAM?

Here he is. (And here's a site that says he is actually an Italian prince. He does have a princely mustache...)

In/Visible: The Black Art Show of Sandra Jackson-Dumont

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:10:42 -0800

Click here to listen.

^{Laylah Ali's Untitled (from the Greenhead series) (1999), gouache on paper, 10 by 11 1/4 inches}

A few months ago, I wondered what Seattle Art Museum planned to do with its gallery devoted to artists of African descent. There was talk of residencies? Group shows?

The new group show, Black Art, is not only the first broadly themed effort in the small gallery, it's also a self-reflexive exhibition about the function of the gallery itself. It asks, how useful is the term "black art"? What if blackness were looked at as broadly as possible?

The show is a harvesting of SAM's permanent collection for "black art," plus a handful of loans. The results are sometimes surprising.

Listen to Jackson-Dumont tell it.

Here are more of the images in the show:

^{Randy Hayes's Victor/Victim (1982), pastel on paper, 83 1/4 by 50 7/8 inches}

^{Halford Lembke's Crouching Negress (1932), wood, 6 3/8 by 3 1/16 by 2 7/8 inches}

^{Max Beckmann's Jahrmarkt (Annual Fair): Der Neger (The Negro) (1921), drypoint, 29 by 26 cm}

^{Mark Tobey's Broadway Girl, Head (1957), sumi ink on paper, 23 1/2 by 15 1/2 inches}

In/Visible: Fever Dreams

Wed, 28 May 2008 14:00:00 -0800

^{Sergio Vega's Paradise on Fire 5 (2007), photograph}

Sergio Vega, who was born in Argentina and now lives in the foresty middle of Florida, has been working on a project called Paradise in the New World for 10 years.

Using his own writings�in voices from academic to confessional�plus photography, sculpture, and video, Vega goes in search of the promised paradise. He treks to the area of Brazil where explorers once said this paradise could be found (pictured above, in a 2007 fire), and he looks at our estranged relationship to tropical paradise as moderns, often distinguishing between First-World and Third-World definitions of modernity.

^{The parrot phone is one example of modern systems mimicking natural ones. A talking bird becomes a talking machine.}

Vega's newest additions to the project, photographs and a video of two men who discovered and worked in the Brazilian gold rush of the 1970s, are on display at the young contemporary art space Open Satellite in Bellevue, in an exhibition curated by Pablo Schugurensky. Facing off with the Bellevue gallery's gigantic window wall is a blackout curtain cut to look like a giant silhouette of a jungle canopy.

Vega sits down in the gallery and talks while his home�or at least his home town in Florida�is burning.

In/Visible: Hey Dario, I Just Got Your Woolly Mammoth Hairs In, Give Me A Call

Wed, 21 May 2008 14:00:52 -0800

San Antonio-based artist Dario Robleto has two shows up currently at the Frye Art Museum, but that's not why In/Visible decided to do two podcasts with him rather than only one. It's because he's too interesting to cover everything in one sitting.

In part one, recorded and posted in late April, Robleto talked about his personal history in and around hospice and honky tonks in Texas, and about his philosophy of "attainable magic."

The wild materials he uses in his artworks are all real things in the world, as far-fetched as they sound�for example, there's trinitite, glass produced during the first atomic test explosion from Trinity test site, when heat from the blast melted the desert sand.

In part two, recorded May 15, Robleto focuses on his materials, explaining how he gets them and what they mean to him. (Here are a few examples of what he uses: bones from every part of the body, ground seahorse, men's wedding bands excavated from American battlefields, residue from female tears of mourning overlaid with residue from male tears of mourning, pain bullets, tracheal extractor, ground pituitary gland.)

His latest find? A multimillion-year-old blossom, perfectly preserved, and a multimillion-year-old raindrop, caught in amber. Those objects will be part of an upcoming group exhibition (called Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet) with Mark Dion, Ann Hamilton, Xu Bing, and four other artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Robleto is also in a group show called Old, Weird America (the title comes from Greil Marcus's take on Dylan's basement recordings) at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.

His 10-year survey, Alloy of Love, opened last weekend at the Frye in Seattle. Below are two of the many works in the show.

^{Sometimes Billie Is All That Holds Me Together (1998-99), hand-ground and melted vinyl records, various clothing, acrylic, spray paint. Several new buttons were crafted from melted Billie Holiday records to replace missing buttons on found, abandoned, or thrift-store clothing. After the discarded clothing was made whole again, it was re-donated to the thrift-stores or placed where it was originally found.}

^{Detail from A Color God Never Made (2004-05), cast and carved de-carbonized bone dust, bone calcium, military-issued glass eyes for wounded soldiers coated with ground trinitite (glass produced during the first atomic test explosion from Trinity test site, c. 1945, when heat from blast melted surrounding sand), fragments of a soldier's personal mirror salvaged from a battlefield, soldiers' uniform fabric and thread from various wars, melted bullet lead and shrapnel from various wars, fragment of a soldier's letter home, woven human hair of a war widow, bittersweet leaves, soldier-made clay marbles, battlefield dirt, cast bronze teeth, dried rosebuds, porcupine quill, excavated dog tags, rust, velvet, walnut}

In/Visible: The Artist Running the Artist-Run Zine

Thu, 15 May 2008 09:03:13 -0800

^{Matthew Offenbacher's The Freak in a State of Total Tokenism (2007), oil on canvas, 49 by 29 inches}

Matthew Offenbacher is the painter behind La Especial Norte, the latest in a spotty but notable historical lineage of artist-run zines in Seattle. (Anyone remember Redheaded Stepchild?) He talks about how this one came about, and what he wants to do with it. And, tangentially, why his newest paintings are of his cat.

In/Visible: Doing It Right

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:00:02 -0800

Maxwell Anderson (who, yes, is grandson of the playwright) was in Seattle a few weeks ago to discuss issues of international art repatriation at Seattle Art Museum�in conjunction with the Roman Art from the Louvre show that's closing this weekend.

We caught up with him at an absurdly late hour after his talk (11 pm PS, 2 am his time), but he was as eloquent as ever. The fact is, Anderson is one of the smartest and most up-to-date museum directors in the business, and in this podcast, he describes many of the philosophies that make him so good.

Just listen.

And check out the best museum web site in the country at the museum where he's director in Indianapolis. Next year, the IMA will open its 100-acre art and nature park, which sounds something like what the Olympic Sculpture Park could have been but isn't. Anderson says it won't be about "trophy hunting and monument building."

Oh, and here he is doing one of his regular YouTube videos about the art at the museum. (Yes. Imagine a director making time to do that.)

In/Visible: Heaven Early

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:36:51 -0800

^{An installation view of Dario Robleto's An Instinct Toward Life, in his show Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others at the Frye. (Photos by Adam L. Weintraub)}

2008 is not even half over, and I'm putting money on Dario Robleto's new exhibition at the Frye Art Museum as the Seattle exhibition of the year. Basically, Robleto, a San Antonio-based artist, went in search of a dead Seattle woman, Emma Frye (co-founder of the museum), and this show is the story of his dark travels.

^{A closer view of An Instinct Toward Life, with two madonna-and-child paintings from the permanent collection.}

Not much is known about Emma, except that she was married to Charles, had a miscarriage, and never after had children. Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others is an imagined walk through her life led by a call-and-response of 19th-century paintings from the Frye's permanent collection and 21st-century "sampled" sculptures made by Robleto using such materials as melted-down audiotape of the longest-married couple talking about their marriage, melted lead excavated from various wars, and fulgurites, or glass made from lightning striking the desert. The show is also a story about the making of an art collection, about war and love, and about loss and the remix�but this is enough to start with.

^{A detail from Robleto's sculpture Time Measures Nothing But This Love.}

Just listen to the artist talk.

In/Visible: The Disillusioned Photographer

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:15:10 -0800

This month at James Harris Gallery is Margot Quan Knight's coming-out party in Seattle.

She is, basically, a disillusioned photographer. A wonderfully disillusioned photographer. She's become disillusioned from her fantasy (our collective fantasy?) that photographs describe, if not reality, then still a version of truth. Until recently, she made composed images of unreal events that revealed themselves to be fictions indicative of real sensations and experiences, often ones that defy time, like this one (that's her):

^{Drop, 2006}

But then she was hit by a car. And she started graduate school (MFA at Bard; she finishes this summer). And the result of those things intersecting with Berenice Abbott (and other readings in photographic history), a strobe-light dance she saw at Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the thought of her mother getting older resulted in a break�out of which came an entirely different body of work, all based on reflective surfaces.

Artists at the beginning of their careers�and sometimes, artists at any stage�may be doing great things, but they don't always really know what they're doing. That can be perfectly fine, or a disaster. In Quan Knight's case, her eloquence is not necessary to understand her work, but it's a very nice surprise. Listening to her will be well worth your time.

And because these works are all reflective, I'm posting a video (by Quan Knight) that depicts the works the way you would experience them, rather than the blank, more formal stills on the gallery's web site.

In/Visible: Support Responsible Abstraction

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:37:48 -0800

Because I'm a semiotics nerd, one of my favorite pieces by LA-based artist Geoff McFetridge is a drawing of concentric rectangles with the slogan, "Support Responsible Abstraction." When you think about it, there is a lot of irresponsible abstraction going around�you know, the kind determined to mystify some original meaning or impulse that A) may or may not really even be known to the artist, and B) may or may not be worth memorializing in paint anyway. Either way, it pushes the viewer away. What would responsible abstraction look like? McFetridge says it's not the kind that broadcasts that it's hoarding a secret. It gives instead of takes.

McFetridge's background is graphic design. He studied it straight-up as an undergrad in Alberta, Canada, and then moved on to "conceptual graphics" (graphics that are well-considered but often look like crap) as a grad student at CalArts. Now, he has his own studio in Southern California, where he works both as a fine artist, making public murals, gallery pieces, and artist books, and as a commercial designer for various companies (especially skateboard and snowboard), and movies and TV (he did the titles for "The Virgin Suicides" and "Freaks and Geeks").

His new installation in Seattle will be up at the Olympic Sculpture Pavilion for a whole year. It's about where graphics and sculpture meet�about the imaginative transition from two dimensions to three, from flat to real, from general and iconic to specific and personal.

He hung sheets of thin plywood that he bent to look like posters with the ends curled up. They're nailed to the wall, but swaths of blue tape and giant sculptures of tacks pretend to hold them up. One of the giant tacks has the round head of a pin, but casts the painted shadow of a mighty pushpin. It has bigger ideas for itself.

Don't take my word for any of this; listen to the artist talk. I caught up with him while he was working at the pavilion, and we talked about responsible abstraction, pre-op transgeometrism (not a fancy word, but a condition we invented), and why he wouldn't mind designing a cigarette commercial in Japan.

BLVD owner Damian Hayes put up some great photos of the installation in progress on Flickr, and here's one of them:

Want more? Here are two of McFetridge's moving animations: his video of the Whitest Boy Alive song "Golden Cage"...

And an illustration he did for the New York Times Magazine's Year in Ideas 2007...

The installation opens today.

In/Visible: A Roman Art Tour

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 10:17:58 -0800

Listen as Margaret Laird, University of Washington Assistant Professor of Ancient Art & Archeology, takes Jen Graves on a tour of the Seattle Art Museum's Roman Art from the Louvre exhibit (through May 11).

We've also prepared a slide show of images from the exhibition to accompany the podcast.

In/Visible: Behind the Story

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:08:36 -0800

In the story "Gray Area" in this week's paper, Jen Graves takes a look at accusations that two prominent Seattle artists�Lead Pencil Studio, winners of a Stranger Genius Award�are copycats.

"Which is worse," she writes, "theft or ignorance?"

On this podcast is everything that didn't make it into the story: more opinions from curators and the artists, what Graves thinks of the whole thing, and how it crossed her desk in the first place.

Listen in.

In/Visible: What You See Is What You See?

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:26:09 -0800

Eric Eley struggles with illusion. He doesn't like it. He's a facts man, and the depth in his resin drawings is literal depth, with pigment embedded in layers of resin.

^{Plane Drift, resin and dry pigment}, 2007

"I'm showing you what I want to show you," he says of his outer-spacey geometric abstractions, which share affinities with Julie Mehretu's works. "This isn't a piece of a larger world."

He used to be certain about that. But now, his lines, points, and planes are beginning to lead off the edges of his drawings and to fade away into deep space�and he's trying to figure out why, and whether he likes it, and where he wants it to go.

This is an artist who started by making teapots and became a professional seamstress (seamster?) before he studied in the MFA ceramics program at UW.

His newest works are at Platform Gallery in Pioneer Square through February 9, including this drawing, titled In Place of Three (2008)�the dry pigment is applied with makeup applicators�

and the installation/spatial drawing Prospect Fields, which fills the gallery.

Listen in.

In/Visible: Threesome

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:30:11 -0800

This is Ellen Forney doing Kelly O. Meaning, Forney's the artist and Kelly's the subject. Then again, who knows what else happened in that modeling session?

In this episode of In/Visible (and here in video form), the cartoonist and the porn-columnist come together at the Frye Art Museum to talk about the R. Crumb exhibition, Forney's new hardback book LUST (opening party for the accompanying art show Saturday at Fantagraphics), and whether they would let R. Crumb jump on their backs for a ride.

LUST is a collection of Forney's Lustlab cartoons, which appear every week on her blog, in addition to on the Stranger's site. Here's the latest, a tribute to a woman who likes Odd Nerdrum, Zdzislaw Beksinski, and Joel-Peter Witkin:

In/Visible: Exposed to the Elements

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:05:48 -0800

The man with his back to us in the photograph above is Seattle artist John Grade. Mounted on him is his sculpture Collector: two horn shapes made of interlocking wood parts, first displayed at Davidson Contemporary Gallery last year. Back then, the piece hung on the white wall�in a refined state. That was before Grade took it hiking.

Now, the piece has acquired a mane of seaweed: It lies among the oysters�watched over by some oystermen�in Willapa Bay. Here are views of it there.

Later this year, Grade will take it out of the water, remove the oysters that have grown on it, and eat them in a formal feast on the site. After that, the horns will be mounted onto the front of Grade's red pickup truck, where they'll acquire a layer of bug guts as he drives them down to a slot canyon in Utah.

This particular canyon was the driving force behind the shape of the horns in the first place�that and an experience Grade had with hostile Ugandans during a trip a few years ago. (For the full story on that, you have to listen to the podcast.) The horns were shaped to fit snugly into the canyon, and in the spring, the rushing water that goes through the canyon will either scrub the horns bone-clean, or destroy them. Grade will wait to see.

Until recently, Grade was known mostly for his small, intensely controlled charcoal and graphite drawings, like this one, Bog (2005).

His other familiar work was finely wrought, faux-weathered sculptures. The new work comes out of both these traditions. It's formally tight, at least to start. It's not faux-weathered, it actually weathers. It changes with its site, like the process work of Turner Prize winner Simon Starling, and according to the lapsing of time, like (Turner Prize nominee) Darren Almond's videos. (Grade admires both British artists.)

Bog is a drawing that refers directly to an installation Grade unveiled last week: a giant, sagging false ceiling dotted with craters, made of paper pulp and hanging in Suyama Space in Belltown. That's where I met him to talk for this podcast.

Seeps of Winter is the new installation's title. Grade first got the idea for it during a residency near a bog in Mayo County, Ireland. Running by, Grade couldn't help thinking about the human beings frozen under the thick surfaces of bogs for thousands of years�the ones who surface occasionally, staring upward. In Suyama Space, the false ceiling acts as the bog surface; you can lie on the floor to look through at the natural light above.

Like Collector, Seeps of Winter has an adventurous life ahead of it.

Listen in.

In/Visible: Photographs for Underneath a Freeway

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 09:19:53 -0800

When Martha Rosler made her photographic series of Skid Row in the 1970s, she left out the people and instead added words referring to drunkenness, calling the whole thing "The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems." This was her demonstration of what she called "the indignity of speaking for others," in implicit protest of the sort of sympathetic documentary photography made by early 20th-century snappers like Jacob Riis.

Zoe Strauss would side not with Rosler, but with Riis. She backs up her perspective by showing her images not only in galleries and museums�and currently at Open Satellite in Bellevue�but also in an annual exhibition she organizes under a freeway bridge in the tough neighborhood where she shoots the photographs, not far from the South Philadelphia neighborhood where she grew up and still lives.

Hear her talk about her Philadelphia street practice, about her time harassing the Factoria Mall Santa, about what gets on her last gay nerve, and about her mixed feelings on Diane Arbus in this installment of In/Visible.

In/Visible: Dandelion in America

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:54:24 -0800

Seattle-based sculptor Dan Webb's problem is that he can make anything with his hands. He could build a perfect monument, but he doesn't believe in perfect monuments. So he builds things that warp and disintegrate, that survive with compromises.

Twice he's been on the Stranger Genius Award shortlist (2003 and 2007) and his new installation Little Cuts immediately became a part of the regional canon when it was first shown last December. It's up now�just until December 21�at Western Bridge, in a terrific group show with work by Martin Creed, Jordan Wolfson, Anthony McCall, Jeppe Hein, Rachel Harrison, Alex Schweder, Neil Goldberg, Julia Schmidt, and Roger Hiorns. (Northwest readers: Miss it at risk of serious regret.)

Little Cuts (pictured above, at right) is the process of Webb carving a man's head out of a block of wood. In a series of 40 photographs, the man's face emerges from the wood and then grows old; his flesh decomposes leaving only his skull, and then even his bones wither to dust. The dust�all the sawdust from the carving�is encased in a Plexiglas box, set on a pedestal in the center of the room, with the 40 photographs hung on the walls around it.

Next month, Webb has a solo show at Acuna Hansen Gallery in LA. I caught up with Webb in his unheated studio for a peek at the work that will be in that show.

The show is titled Dandelion, in a play on the artist's name (though the down-to-earth sculptor is neither really dandy nor lion), and on his most common theme through the years, survival in sculpture. At left is his floor installation, Dandelion in America. In it, a weed made from the pages of old issues of art magazines like Art in America sprouts up from a pile of the magazines, as if in homage to all the now-forgotten names inside the periodicals.

At right, Rubber Dandelion is a cast-rubber dandelion held up by a bronze wire armature. It will be set on the floor on a platform with springs. Whenever anyone walks near it, the rubber will wobble, invoking the tough malleability of weeds but also, thanks to the wire maze, the appearance of limbs gone slack and on life support.

Listen to the artist talk about these and other dandelions, made of bronze, paper, and Sculpy�and about the chopped-off finger of Galileo, on this week's In/Visible.

In/Visible: Hooked on Paper

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:35:46 -0800

Alison Knowles, performing tonight (December 5 at 7:30 pm at Good Sheperd Chapel in Wallingford�thanks to the inspired programming of Steve Peters' series Nonsequitur and Robert Mittenthal's Subtext Reading Series), is a pioneering sound/visual/performance artist. She made prints with Marcel Duchamp. She was pivotal in early Fluxus. She turns making a salad into a work of art.

And this is the first time she has ever performed in Seattle. Do not miss it. But if you do, at least you can hear her talk, and hear her playing some of her "instruments" from the performance, on In/Visible.

In/Visible: On Style

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:00:47 -0800

When Beth Sellars notices that an artist she's invited to Suyama Space is making something that doesn't really work in the gallery, what does she do?

How involved should a curator be in the formation of new works?

Is it possible to compare the work that curators do with the work that artists do?

Four curators tackle these and other questions in a roundtable on this week's In/Visible: two independent (Suzanne Beal and Jim O'Donnell), and two attached (Sellars at Suyama Space and Jess Van Nostrand at Cornish College of the Arts).

In/Visible: What Mimi Gates Loves

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:07:53 -0800

In the last year, Seattle Art Museum has gotten attention for new architecture, big-name sculpture, and a giant donation of art from various donors to celebrate its new facilities.

But Asian art has always been a specialty of SAM. The place was founded by an Asian art collector�and even now it's run by a scholar of Chinese art who happens to be more famous as Bill Gates's stepmother, Mimi Gardner Gates.

Gardner Gates is not a particularly contemporary soul, or tech-savvy; before we turned on the recorder for this podcast, I introduced her to the concept of Wikipedia, and showed her her own page, which includes a reference to her old friendship with Teresa Heinz Kerry. Of the page, she would like to correct the date of her arrival in Seattle�it was 1994, not 1995�and she would like to know why Bruce Hornsby "lent her special thanks in the liner notes on his 1993 album Harbor Lights." (She did not know he had done that, and she does not know him.)

But here is a rare example of Gates talking about the art she loves, and explaining why. A few times she even seems to break out of official museum-director mode.

Three pieces she geeks out on in particular:

^{14th-century Chinese porcelain painted in underglaze cobalt blue}

^{Chinese vase from early 1700s, porcelain with copper red glaze}

^{14th century ink on paper Flowering Plum branch, by the "amateur" artist Yang Hui}

In/Visible: The Most Promising Young Painter in Seattle

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:07:24 -0800

Brad Biancardi is a formidable painter. He makes strange, wildly colorful images that look like reflected and refracted blueprints, and often, they are based on the real architecture of a room or a building.

He's also the kind of guy who says he doesn't understand color. That one of his paintings at Crawl Space only counts for a half-painting, because it's bad, but that he put it up to demonstrate what he was going through in his studio at the time. No wonder he was a finalist for this year's Betty Bowen Award.

In other words, he's devoted, curious, generous, and talented--and, sadly, moving to Chicago in November. (He's got family back there.)

Listen to what he's struggled with in the studio since last spring. You can see the results at Crawl Space Gallery, where he has a solo show (of 4 1/2 paintings) through Nov. 11, and Platform Gallery, where he's part of a group exhibition called A Spectral Glimpse through Dec. 1.

Here are a couple of teasers:

The Millennium Falcon (doubling, unintentionally, as a Marsden Hartley soldier painting):

1983 Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue "Made in
America" (his first car):

A painting unusual for him in that it incorporates collage (that bird is made of cutouts of eyes), which he calls Enchanted Elevator Shaft or Hawkeye:

In/Visible: Encyclopedic Bushwacking

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:27:47 -0800

Dawn Cerny is the most anarchic of the emerging talents of Seattle. Her work cannibalizes history and spits it out on cheap paper.

In a solo show at Gallery 4Culture in May 2006, wild dogs painted directly on the wall terrorized each other, but they didn't affect the delicate, framed paintings of noblemen on which they were superimposed. The two realms rebuffed each other like opposing magnets.

At Catherine Person Gallery in March, Cerny installed a large grid of dozens of scraps of drawings and paintings on the wall in the form of questions and answers, based on the Victorian magazine Notes and Queries.

Now, she has an eccentric, multimedia double marriage portrait of Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln up at Kirkland Arts Center, as part of Suzanne Beal's excellent Help Me I'm Hurt show.

What is this woman up to? Time to find out. Here are two older works:

In/Visible: A Walking Sculpture That Will Talk to You, Maybe Lie to You

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 23:06:24 -0800

Around 1974, Kim Jones, a former painter and sometime sculptor, became a sculpture himself. He called it "Mudman," and it meant him wearing a latticework of sticks on his back, and covering his body in mud and his head in pantyhose�but interacting with people more or less normally, which often, well, freaked them out.

As Mudman, Jones walked the streets of Los Angeles and, later, New York. He gave performances that included smearing himself in his own shit while hacking at beer cans with a machete he got during his tour in Vietnam, and burning live rats to death, repeating something he and his fellow Marines had done during the war. (The rat act got him sent to court and put on partial probation.)

In his retrospective opening Friday night at the Henry Art Gallery, documents from those performances join sculpture, installation, ever-evolving war drawings, and a timeline of his life that includes snapshots from his time in Vietnam and begins with a newspaper photograph of him when he was crippled from a polio-like disease as a child.

At Friday's opening, Jones will perform Mudman for the first time in a while. Before you meet him there, listen to him talk.

In/Visible: Verbist

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:07:06 -0800

Drew Daly's latest sculptures are all made from the same single object: an IKEA chair, "an object that has absolutely no shock value," an object "without content."

It isn't the object that Daly hones in on, it's what's happening to it. For these are objects that have been subjected, at least optically, to a series of actions. They've been compressed or expanded, cropped, merged, doubled, and quadrupled. They've been handled like photographs in Photoshop, taken to be as malleable as information.

Why does Drew Daly chop up chairs? Listen in.

In/Visible: Furry

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:09:29 -0800

Australian artist Patricia Piccinini's first American survey is in Seattle, at the Frye Art Museum, organized by Robin Held. It is aptly titled Hug, in an intimation of the warmth that emanates from her otherwise discomfiting work.

There are videos, photographs, and sculptures, all proposing new forms of life�baby motorcycles that will grow up to be regular-sized bikes, faceless furry blobs wiggling around on a living-room floor, toothsome creatures designed by Piccinini as bodyguards for endangered species, a patch of bubbling, hairy, transforming skin. Her creations are wild, slightly beyond control or understanding. So are we, she suggests.

This one's called Embrace. It's life-sized.

Here's a drawing titled Leo.

In/Visible: Comeback Kid

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 09:00:00 -0800

^{Schematic drawing for Anthony McCall's Doubling Back, an installation in which two digitally animated sine waves are projected onto a wall in a dark room as they slowly wrap around one another. Shaped by a haze machine, the light that is projected creates forms in the room that move through a half-hour sequence of two 15-minute segments played forward and backward. In this drawing, the strip at the top refers to the first 15 minutes, and the strip at the bottom is the reverse motion, played out in second 15 minutes.}

When the prestigious jokesters behind the Wrong Gallery were asked to select artists (typically hot, young artists) for the latest edition of the Cream series of art books, one of their choices was Anthony McCall�a guy who broke onto the scene 34 years ago.

Similarly, ARTnews magazine this summer dubbed McCall one of 25 worldwide "trendsetters." Well, yes, he is a great rediscovery, having been absent from the art world from 1980 to 2000. Then again, he started the trend in 1973�of cinematic sculpture.

McCall's 2003 "solid light" installation Doubling Back is at Western Bridge this fall, and I've written about it here. For the opening, McCall was in Seattle, and he was gracious enough to sit down with me for a conversation upstairs at the gallery.

In/Visible: Better Living

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 08:00:20 -0800

L.A. artist Olga Koumoundouros arrived in Bellevue three weeks ago to begin her residency at Open Satellite, a brave new exhibition space that invites artists from out of town to create work here.

In a phone interview before she arrived, she told the story of wandering around Bellevue in search of a coffee and not being able to find one because the urban core is so segregated�residential versus commercial. What she found instead were two crumbling shacks right up next to a brand new high-rise.

What kind of life is dying in Bellevue, and what kind of life is sprouting up in its place? How is the new architecture designed to deliver luxury, and how well does it serve basic needs?

Koumoundouros's installation at Open Satellite, up Aug. 29-Oct. 13 and curated by Lead Pencil Studio, explores just these questions. In this conversation recorded last week, she talks about the process of making it, and about why inviting an artist whose work is socially critical was a difficult but smart way to begin Open Satellite.

In/Visible: Course of Empire

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 09:00:00 -0800

Ken Allan arrived in Seattle a year ago from L.A. He's assistant professor of art history at Seattle University, and he specializes in postwar L.A.�essentially, in the construction of Los Angeles as an art center.

I first came to know him through an essay he wrote looking back at the late Walter Hopps.

He's at work on a book about "artistic practice, spectatorship, and social space in 1960s Los Angeles," and he sat down at his office to talk about the birth of L.A., the way emerging scenes (like Seattle's) perform themselves, the role of a place in shaping art and vice versa, and why there's so much damn L.A. in Seattle lately.

In/Visible: Low Budget and Without Permission

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:29:20 -0800

^{Ceci n'est pas une swingset (This Is Not a Swingset) by PDL. (Photograph by Felipe Luis Naranjo)}

Jason Puccinelli, Jed Dunkerley, and Greg Lundgren are PDL�a group of artists that originally began as an homage/parody of another collaborative trio in Seattle, SuttonBeresCuller. (The guys are all friends.)

So what have they done since they announced their intention to work together for one year starting March 1, 2007? Actually, a lot, all under the radar. They dumped money in public squares in Coin Drops, entertained riders in their cars in Theater Hitchhiking, and interrogated Seattle Art Museum's "don't-touch" campaign at the Olympic Sculpture Park with Ceci n'est pas une swingset. Now, they're about to roll about Portable Confessional Units at Bumbershoot.

They may have started out as fake artists, but at times they've made it hard to tell the difference. That's probably just as they like it. Listen in.

In/Visible: Consider the Iron

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 10:43:51 -0800

Here's what I wrote about Patterson Sims in a Stranger Suggests last week:

Before even-keeled Michael Darling, before take-charge Lisa Corrin, before academic Trevor Fairbrother, there was Patterson Sims, the notoriously charming Seattle Art Museum curator who could always get a collector on the phone and an artwork in the museum's vault. Now he's directing the Montclair Museum of Art in New Jersey, where he put together Anxious Objects: Willie Cole's Favorite Brands.

In this podcast, Sims talks about Cole (Anxious Objects is now at the Frye), his days at SAM, Seattle art now, and whether he's inclined to try to make a move back to Seattle (hint: yes).

(And for more on Cole, the New Jersey artist who has a fascinating fixation on the steam iron, do not miss SAM African curator Pam McClusky's talk with him Friday, August 10, at 7 pm at the Frye Art Museum.)

^{Domestic ID by Willie Cole}

^{Stowage by Willie Cole}

^{How Do You Spell America? by Willie Cole}

In/Visible: New Curator in Town

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 12:48:32 -0800

Marisa Sanchez started in April as assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at Seattle Art Museum�just before the crush of the opening, so her arrival got kind of buried. No more.

Before this, she worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; got her master's degree in art history, theory, and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and originally, she's a Jersey girl.

So what's she like? Listen in as she details her journey from this

^{Van Gogh's Room at Arles by van Gogh (1889)}

to this

^{Oval Billiard Table (1996) by Gabriel Orozco}

to this

^{Untitled (Barragan House, 10) (2005) by Luisa Lambri}

and to why she's dying to see this.

In/Visible: Living with It

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 10:57:35 -0800

Bill and Ruth True are the leading collectors of contemporary art in Seattle. They buy a lot of art and they really do live with it�there are stories of videos playing above the table in their dining room or over a set of stairs. They even accidentally scared one of their children with something they installed in her room when she was young.

But they can't put it all up at home. In 2004, they opened Western Bridge, a contemporary art center that this summer looks empty but is actually full of a new sound installation by Bill Fontana. (The Trues commissioned him to make the work.) They've also given and loaned regularly to museums�The Henry Art Gallery currently has an exhibition up, Mouth Open, Teeth Showing, of several works owned by the Trues, including Doug Aitken's i am in you, having its U.S. premiere.

On a sunny day recently, the Trues sat down outside the St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle University and talked about their history, their hopes, and the way they feel about having exposed themselves publicly at Western Bridge.

Listen in.

In/Visible: Slow Concrete Abstraction

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:43:28 -0800

Cris Bruch has been one of those artists who's famous mostly among artists. No longer.

Lawrimore Project has organized a terrific 20-year survey of his work, which manages to cross minimalism, feminism, and 1980s Pioneer Square. It's up through August 4, and ranges from early sculptures that carry overt social commentary to the complexly built abstractions he makes now.

What are these objects, why does he make them, and how did he get from there

to here?

Listen in.

(Read a review and see more images.)

In/Visible: Magic Mountain

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 14:20:16 -0800

The first time Richard Andrews saw art, it was because a friend of his urged him to get in a car that was rushing toward the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "You have to see it before the bastards take it down!" she told him. He was a teenager. The exhibition was the censored Ed Kienholz show of sculptures including Backseat Dodge.

Andrews became an artist, but eventually he stopped making his own work--and as if to make that completely worth it, pursued supporting the work of other artists with a vengeance.

After 20 years of working with contemporary artists on commissions, installations, and touring exhibitions as director of the Henry Art Gallery, Andrews is about to step down.

But he remembers it all, and he has words of advice (though he'd never call them that) for whoever it is that takes over Seattle's contemporary art museum.

(And as a bonus, he talks about his current work with the Skystone Foundation, which is supporting the creation of James Turrell's Roden Crater in Arizona, seen below in two interior views and from above, in a lithograph--listen to the podcast to understand what you're seeing.)

In/Visible: Art, Guts, and Guns

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:19:50 -0800

Charlie Krafft is the guy who makes the porcelain guns. And plates and vases out of human cremains ("Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Delft").

He's the one whose contribution to last year's Bumbershoot show, Softly Threatening, was a layered wedding cake decorated in Nazi symbols. (The bakery that did it pleaded anonymity. At the show, a guy spit on it and ran.)

Has it gotten harder over the years to piss people off? Hell yes, Krafft says. So he has to work harder. His latest reward for his efforts is the $15,000 Neddy Fellowship in ceramics (Whiting Tennis won for painting).

No interview with Krafft could possibly be dull. He recounts his days negotiating with Slovenian arms dealers, talks about the state of the Mystic Sons of Morris Graves (a Northwest art "brotherhood" that once held a legendary Chihuly-smashing and that's still gathering members�check out who the newest and most famous are on this podcast), and describes what happens when he breaks into a shack on the side of the road in Skagit Valley. Krafft also explains why he's a "bad" gallery artist.

Do listen.

^{Charlie Krafft's Sal Mineo Bunny, on display with several of Krafft's other works at the Tacoma Art Museum.}

In/Visible: Blue Tarp and Bovine

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 12:16:55 -0800

This episode is one of the best artist interviews this podcast has seen�from the slightly heartbreaking story of the sterilization of an animalistic sculpture to a blow-by-blow account of Whiting Tennis trying to figure out how to make his newest work, Blue Tarp, a giant collage painting mounted on canvas that looks like a blue tarp.

Blue Tarp is on display at Tacoma Art Museum, where last Saturday night, Whiting Tennis walked away with the $15,000 Neddy Fellowship for painting. (Charlie Krafft won for ceramics, and we're hoping he'll be on In/Visible next week.)

It has been a banner year for Tennis. In October, he had a well-loved show at Greg Kucera Gallery, from which Seattle Art Museum bought for its permanent collection a massive sculpture called Bovine: The Oregon Trail Reversed.

Two years ago, Tennis moved back to Seattle (his hometown) from New York, where he'd spent more than a decade. He bought a house, after a lifetime of being a hobo, and fell in love with the handmade objects the elderly couple that had formerly lived there left behind.

Meanwhile, over the past five years, he's begun making not just paintings, drawings, and low-reliefs, but standalone architectural figures. His work is stronger than ever, as if at 47 years old he's hit some kind of stride, and you can hear it in the easy way he talks.

Listen in.

Below are Bovine (2006) and Blue Tarp (2007). See more of Tennis's paintings, drawings, and sculpture.

In/Visible: Empty Rooms Full of Sound

Thu, 31 May 2007 18:39:46 -0800

Bill Fontana was a pioneer of sound art in the 1970s, and since then he has made installations all around the world, using objects as resonators and moving immobile landmarks around by transferring their sounds ("taking" Big Ben into a London gallery, for instance).

Seattle collectors William and Ruth True commissioned a full-scale installation from Fontana for this summer, and the piece occupies the entire building of Western Bridge, their private gallery space. In town for the installation recently, the San Francisco-based artist took a few minutes to talk about what he was doing:

In/Visible: Video of Bill Fontana and His New Installation at Western Bridge�Coming Friday!

Wed, 30 May 2007 16:56:32 -0800

In/Visible: City of Film

Wed, 23 May 2007 11:57:42 -0800

^{A still from Marie Jager's 12-minute 2006 collage film The Purple Cloud.}

Coinciding with the first week of the Seattle International Film Festival is a visit from contemporary film artist Marie Jager, who talks to The Stranger's Jen Graves about impoverished mediums, fondling camera parts, and the 1901 Victorian science-fiction novel The Purple Cloud, by M.P Shiel. Jager's 2006 collage film based on the novel and named after it, which made its debut at the California Biennial last fall, and Machines Also Die, her film starring the shiny pieces of the Cameflex �clair that Jean-Luc Godard used to shoot Breathless in 1960, are on display at the Henry Art Gallery through June 21.

At 8:00 p.m. tonight, Wednesday, May 23, as part of the Henry's "Artist's Cinema" series at Northwest Film Forum, the L.A. artist offers a glimpse of her influences by choosing historic films and contemporary works for a two-hour program of short films that share "a profound wonder of both nature and absurd fictional premises" (the roster includes Dudley Murphy's The Soul of the Cypress [1920], Jean Painleve's The Love Life of the Octopus [1965], Jack Goldstein's 46-second film Butterflies [1975], Dr. Jean Comandon's The Movement of Plants [1927], At the Winter Sea Ice Camp [part of the National Film Board of Canada's Netsilik Eskimo series], and Jean Rouch's Mad Masters from 1956).

This also is your chance to see Jager's Purple Cloud on a big screen in a dark room (the little screen at the entryway to the Henry is slightly window-addled). It's a three-part work presenting fragments of the book's narrative, moving from gemstones in deserts to tomb boats at sea to a city of doomed survivors who've only escaped the stalking of the toxic purple cloud temporarily.

^{Another still from The Purple Cloud.}
^{A still from Marie Jager's 3-minute 2001 film Machines Also Die.}

In/Visible: Operation Enduring Freedom

Wed, 16 May 2007 09:35:23 -0800

Elizabeth Jameson's latest show at Ballard Fetherston Gallery�her first in about five years�is called Nurses and Queens: Drawings, Sculptures, and Frosting.

In it are the tiny uniforms of nurses and queens, each with her own battlefield specialty: loss of limbs, K.I.A., last rites. They're adorably small but surprisingly dignified, made from the aged, dirty, world-weary skin of a used fur coat.

And there are only nurses here, not doctors. It is past the point of doctors. A child nurse after the infanta in Velazquez's Las Meninas wears a gas mask, embodying help, terror, and vulnerability all.

A larger-than-life-sized queen in a gas mask stands in a forest of layer cakes in a reprise of Jameson's sculpture for Bumbershoot last year, Keeping Up Appearances. It is covered in 300 pounds of white fondant icing.

Jameson talks to Jen Graves on In/Visible about watching her late father dress for military life, about whether she's more afraid than she used to be, about the mysterious new costumes she's making for her band the Buttersprites, and about trailing 40 feet of sleeves behind her on the streets of Vienna. Will she do an art performance in Seattle?

In/Visible: The Past Is Back

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:32:58 -0800

Launch Slide Show »

For almost a year and a half, Seattle has been seriously starved for pre-20th-century art. When the newly expanded Seattle Art Museum opens, you might be surprised at how refreshing it is to see centuries-old European paintings, Islamic and Egyptian artifacts, and ancient Asian masterpieces.

SAM curator Chiyo Ishikawa leads a tour connecting five paintings across time and across Europe�paintings by a Renaissance Florentine; a 16th-century Flemish mannerist; Lucas Cranach the Elder; and two 17th-century Spaniards, one being Bartolom� Esteb�n Murillo.

Most of these have never been seen before publicly in Seattle. They're new acquisitions, or loans, or part of that sad species often trapped in too-small buildings like the former SAM�the gems that almost never come out of storage.

In addition to Ishikawa's podcast tour, here's a slide show of the five works she selected to feature. You'll see them in person when the museum opens May 5.

In/Visible: Happy Ending Machine

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:57:33 -0800

Listen.

Paul Rucker has spent the last four months in a dark room at McLeod Residence. Showing in January was his installation called Eleven Conversations, in which a video of him performing a musical number on the cello was manipulatable by visitors who could control the sound�and, it appeared, his movements on the video�by waving hands over a glowing orange sensor in the middle of the room.

Now comes Happy Ending Machine, a sweet-hearted, playful, interactive piece that drew a huge crowd at the opening. People still call ahead when they're coming to the gallery to make sure it's on when they get there (it is). It pairs footage borrowed from a Louisiana butterfly enthusiast with a clear Plexiglas console that Rucker built.

Four red lasers shoot out from inside the console. Each one corresponds to an instrument, or a group of instruments, and the four tracks are synced up in a single recording by Rucker and a saxophonist. Running a hand across one of the lasers turns the track on; running a hand the other direction turns the track off.

Smoke pumped into the machine has the same effect. It blocks the laser, which plays a track continuously. In fact, during this podcast, the saxophone, under the influence of excess smoke and a laser weakened with time, absolutely will not quit. Then the drums refuse to stop. The machine takes over. (The laser has since been fixed.)

Rucker, a self-taught musician and a trained composer, talks about his early days in Seattle almost a decade ago, when he stopped playing music for a while and worked as a janitor at the Seattle Art Museum. That's where he first got interested in combining music and visual art. In the last three years, he's shown at Consolidated Works and the McLeod Residence, and he's building a piece for a show next month at Jack Straw, in addition to working as a professional composer, in the multimedia department at SAM, and keeping up with his solo writing and performing career.

Sure he's busy, but what will this room at McLeod Residence do without him?

In/Visible: Even the Dreadful Martyrdom

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 12:38:06 -0800

Listen.

^{Five Capital Executions in China: Drawing and Quartering, 2007.}

^{Five Capital Executions in China: Flaying, 1993.}

^{Five Capital Executions in China: Starvation, 1999.}

Looking at Zhi Lin's cycle of brutal, vivid death-penalty paintings, you might not expect the calm-voiced professor who appears on this podcast. Lin left his native China for art school in London in 1987. He continued school at the University of Delaware and got a job teaching in John Ashcroft's hometown in Missouri before coming to the University of Washington in 2001. For 14 years, Lin has quietly and tirelessly devoted himself to painting five giant scenes of violence. At Howard House this month, they have their first completed exhibition.

Each 12-by-7-foot canvas�surrounded by black fabric and topped with a ribbon, like a ceremonial object�depicts one of five executions: death by starvation, firing squad, decapitation, flaying, and drawing and quartering.

The scenes are packed with onlookers who seem to move the fatal action forward by pressing in, mob-style, on it-�or onlookers who go about their lives, eating or biking in tacit agreement with the killing. Lin cites W. H. Auden's poem "Musee des Beaux Arts":

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters;
how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

In each painting, the long vertical scene spills downward on the canvas, the violent action laid virtually at the feet of the viewer. Though Lin's inspiration to turn from abstraction to social realism was the quashing of the 1989 Chinese student uprisings, it is important to him that these scenes are not specific to any one country. They're about all government killings.

Lin's next project is a series of paintings�horizontal this time, so that he doesn't have to live on ladders any longer�depicting the Chinese workers who built the railroad from Sacramento to Promontory, Utah, from 1866 to 1869. On display in the front room at Howard House are poignant Chinese ink studies for this series of paintings, titled Unwelcomed: Invisible People, sketched from historical photographs and from Lin's own travels "following the footsteps" of the workers, including going to the annual Golden Spike reenactments in Utah, where he's one of very few Chinese attendees.

The ink studies on paper are bereft of the workers themselves; the Chinese, unlike the Irish workers, were systematically left out of the railroad festivities that occasioned the photographs, and their presence was documented almost not at all. Lin plans to bring them back, on canvas.

^{Site of the Golden Spike Celebrations, 2006.}

^{19th Century Chinese Graves, 2007.}

^{A Scene off Highway 83, 2006.}

In/Visible: Touching the Tiepolo

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:09:09 -0800

Sometime around 1757, the renowned fresco painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo took to a ceiling in the Palazzo Porto in Vicenza to create The Triumph of Valor Over Time--the scene pictured above, which now is being feverishly restored in the conservation studio at Seattle Art Museum.

When SAM acquired the roughly 17-by-10-foot Tiepolo from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1961, the museum had to knock down walls to get it inside at the Volunteer Park location (now the Seattle Asian Art Museum). But once there, it "sort of became part of the furniture," said SAM conservator Nicholas Dorman. "People tended to walk past it."

Now that the museum will be reopening in an expanded facility on May 5, the Tiepolo is being thoroughly restored and rehung on a higher ceiling in a brighter room, one lined with sparkling cases of hundreds of pieces of porcelain.

Dorman recently took time out from restoring the painting--something he's doing with three other full-time conservators--to tell its story.

Originally made in fresco, The Triumph was removed around 1900 by a technique called strappo, which entails pasting a gauzelike material to the wall, waiting for it to dry, and then ripping the painting off the wall before reattaching it to canvas. (Funny thing is, when that's done, scant marks and indentations remain on the wall and the piece can be rebuilt. This is what happened with the Tiepolo at the palazzo, where another, similar but largely overpainted Triumph of Valor Over Time hangs--Dorman and SAM curator Chiyo Ishikawa saw it when they visited Vicenza last year.)

After leaving the palazzo and before arriving at SAM, the Tiepolo changed hands a few times, once ending up as the centerpiece in the living room of a German collector who tore a hole and thrust a chandelier through its center. (The marks from the tear remain.)

At SAM, it was handled delicately but began naturally to sag over time in its oddly shaped wooden stretcher. In preparation for SAM's new building, the museum contracted with an Italian framer who made a new, superior aluminum stretcher. The conservators transferred the painting, cleaned it with swabs and distilled water, and now they are in-painting where the color has flaked away, or where previous in-painting by other restorers has discolored.

This is the crowning project in the studio's job before the reopening in May, but there are other works under examination, too, including a painting by Uccello and a sculpture by Donald Judd. Dorman gives a tour of all the art currently being prepared for its turn in the limelight.

Listen.

Or watch:

In/Visible: Roots & Branches

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 09:40:34 -0800

Margie Livingston brings craggy branches into her studio, hangs them from the ceiling, and traps them by building grids of soft string and wood around them. Then, she paints. The results look like quiet, almost sedate geometric abstractions, but are also impressionistic representations of her grid-and-branch sculptures interacting with whatever light hits them and the air in and around them.

Last year, Livingston won Seattle Art Museum's Betty Bowen Award; her work will be on display at the new SAM when it opens in May. This month, she has an exhibition of large, medium, and small paintings at Greg Kucera Gallery. And late last year, she displayed one of her studio sculptures at SOIL, which got me interested in her work in the first place.

In a conversation at the gallery, Livingston talks about her beginnings as a bad expressionist painter, her ongoing love affair with the German romantic Caspar David Friedrich, and her turning point with hair balls.

It's well worth a listen.

^{Structure (thin violet) (2006) by Margie Livingston}

^{Structure (blue over blue) (2005) by Margie Livingston}

^{Structure (end of summer) (2006) by Margie Livingston}

In/Visible: That Glow in the Basement

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 14:47:32 -0800

Bruce Nauman's 100 Live and Die is a spectacle. It's 100 phrases of double-layered neon words paired with either "live" or "die" ("eat and die," "red and live," "come and die," for example).

And it's hard to shoot on film. Which is actually reassuring.

We did try. This video from the lowest level of the Henry Art Gallery testifies to the piece's flashing, dislocating effect, but you can't actually make out any of the words�until the end. Henry chief curator Liz Brown and I talk about Nauman, James Joyce, history painting, and 4:20, and then you get the money shots.

For more about the Nauman retrospective (at the Henry through May 6), my review is here.

In/Visible: Love and Loss

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:16:44 -0800

To celebrate Valentine's Day, Seattle visual artists Roy McMakin and Jeffry Mitchell, and New York performing artist Suzzy Roche, a member of the Wooster Group, a solo artist, and one-third of the band the Roches, will perform in the pavilion at Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park at 7:00 pm February 14.

They've never performed together before, and the event came about when SAM asked McMakin to give a standard artist's talk about his sculpture near the water's edge in the park, Love & Loss. The piece consists of cast concrete benches, a sidewalk-like pathway, a small, circular reflecting pool, and a double-trunked crabapple tree that spell out the words "love" and "loss." Jutting up from the middle is a red neon ampersand.

McMakin told the museum he had about 90 seconds of interesting commentary to deliver about the piece�but in this conversation at the chilly site of Love & Loss with Stranger art writer Jen Graves, McMakin, Mitchell, and Roche reveal quite a lot, even when they're being guarded, about their attempts to be vulnerable, to balance romanticism and naturally occurring cynicism, to make art that "wears its heart on its sleeve," McMakin says.

This is a conversation you might expect to hear from Mitchell and Roche. But listen for the McMakin surprises.

^{A mockup of Roy McMakin's Love & Loss (2005-2006) at the Olympic Sculpture Park. The installation is still unfinished but can be seen through a fence near the water.}

^{Jeffry Mitchell's Tulips (1989), engraving with china colle and watercolor}

^{Suzzy Roche (rightside up) performing the Wooster Group's House/Lights with Ari Fliakos (upside down) and Kate Valk.}

Hear the Roches' songs for free on their MySpace page, including music from Moonswept, their album coming out in March.

In/Visible: Low Resolution

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 15:04:35 -0800

^{The Second Attack in Three Months at the Same Falafel Stand in Tel Aviv (2006) by Josh Weintraub}

How does a single artist respond to a distant war unjustly perpetrated in his name? Or a series of disasters?

Richard Serra scratched out a hooded Abu Ghraib figure with the words "STOP BUSH." Manet obsessively painted and repainted the execution of an Austrian archduke who was installed as the emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III in a failed power grab. Gerhard Richter made a book pairing news articles from the first days of the Iraq War with photographic details of one of his abstract paintings. Teams of photographers flew south to document Katrina, including Seattle's Chris Jordan. Josh Azzarrella of Chicago (showing now at Lawrimore Project) remade video footage of September 11 painstakingly, frame by frame, so that the plane flies right by the tower and on into the sunny sky.

Josh Weintraub, a painter who grew up in Seattle and now lives in New York, made a series of abstracted paintings of newspaper photographs of disasters, now showing at William Traver Gallery. Their titles are the headlines that accompanied the stories.

Weintraub expected that painting these scenes would bring him closer to the events, but in fact he felt more dissociated than ever. He found himself documenting his isolation from them, leaving sections of the primed canvases empty. The areas he did paint are stylistically voracious, with marks ranging from drips and dots and impressionist hatchmarks to spray paint, and in bright, metallic colors with plenty of contrast.

As a result, the best of these paintings attract and repel, with an effect similar to Walid Raad's photographs of the siege of Beirut shown recently at the Henry, in that both artists aestheticize their surfaces while their imagery, and the possibility of "relating" to it, recedes almost completely.

Standing in front of his paintings at the gallery, Weintraub talks about their dilemma.

Listen in.

^{Car Bomb Kills 13 (2006) by Josh Weintraub}

^{Israel Bombs Downtown Beirut (2006) by Josh Weintraub}

^{Hurricane Katrina Victims Suffer Primitive Conditions in the New Orleans Superdome (2006) by Josh Weintraub}

In/Visible: Making the Scene

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 15:31:37 -0800

^{Louise Lawler's cibachrome, crystal, and felt paperweight Untitled (Martin and Mike) (1992), from the exhibition Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne.}

With great art come great cults of personality, whether it's the boozy abstract expressionists at the Cedar bar, the waifish weirdos at Warhol's Factory, or the "non-productive" iconoclasts of Cologne in the 1980s and early 1990s, as Josef Strau calls them in Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne, the show currently at the Henry Art Gallery. The artists in Make Your Own Life�Martin Kippenberger, Mike Kelley, Jutta Koether, and Andrea Fraser, among others�often referred to each other in their work, or to earlier figures like Joseph Beuys and Eva Hesse.

So where are the cults of personality in Seattle art? Where is Seattle's scene?

Anne Mathern and Chad Wentzel are best friends and artists at Crawl Space. They've been accused of being scenesters (and they are ever so young and attractive, true), but they say that's not possible. Because Seattle doesn't have a scene!

Does it? Mathern, Wentzel, and The Stranger's Jen Graves discover it's awkward to talk about scenes. It seems embarrassing to want one and dull not to have one. And what's the effect on the art?

Listen in.

^{Hans-J�rg Mayer's photograph The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1991) (l-r Charlene von Heyl, Michaela Eichwald, Jutta Koether, Cosima von Bonin, Isabelle Graw), from the exhibition Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne}

^{Anne Mathern's photograph Plaid (2006)}

^{Anne Mathern's photograph Yacht (2004) (she's also the model)}

^{An installation view of Chad Wentzel's last exhibition at Crawl Space, Everything I've Ever Wanted All At the Same Time (2006)}

In/Visible: Why the Usual Suspects

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:10:15 -0800

The lineup of artists for Tacoma Art Museum's biennial, opening February 10, reads like a who's-who of the gallery scene regionally, with a few exceptions and a few omissions. Of nearly 900 artists submitting to the museum's open call, TAM curator Rock Hushka and David Kiehl, curator of prints at the Whitney (famous for its own biennial) selected 41�mostly based not on the images they'd sent, but on their track record.

Why not just curate the show? Hushka talks to Jen Graves about his philosophy for this biennial, his hopes for future ones, his ambivalence about regionalism, his attraction to cheesy-looking landscapes, and what SuttonBeresCuller are making for the show that requires a construction crane.

Here's a sneak preview of what will be in the exhibition:

Accretion #34 (2006) by Daniel Attoe

California State Prison, Corcoran, California (2006) by Buddy Bunting

Recycled (2006) by Ellen Garvens

Ship in a Bottle (2007) by SuttonBeresCuller

Peaches with Buffalo (2006) by Sherrie Wolf

Promenade (doorknob) (2005) by Robert Yoder

In/Visible: Eric Fredericksen

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 11:12:46 -0800

Eric Fredericksen, former Stranger staffer, is a man who loves Highway 99, longs to live on Sesame Street, and who once, in the year 1999, laid out a list of punishable offenses, put on a suit, and posed for the photo you see of him here, with the warning "DON'T YOU DO IT!"

In short, he is worth clicking for.

And what did we discuss when we sat down earlier this week and turned on the recorder? Why, what else could we talk about this week? Sculpture. Western Bridge, the exhibition space where Fredericksen is now director, has a new show, called Kit Bashing. We agreed the show has at least two bona-fide sculptures in it: Steven Brekelmans's Kit Bashing, a drum set made of balsa wood and tissue paper, and the second is Ryan Gander's Phantom of Appropriation, which would spell out the words of the title in various fonts from other neon artworks, except most of the neon letters have been smashed to bits on the floor. (The show also has works by Gretchen Bennett�these sticker creations are incredible, almost entirely indescribable, and were commissioned by the Trues, so are brand new�Ben Rubin, Steve Roden, and Carsten H�ller.) Beyond that, we veered from Trisha Donnelly's mental sculpture of a solar eclipse to Frank Stella's inability to get his architecture career off the ground to clicheacute;s about rivers versus rocks. Rocks win.

^{Installation view at Western Bridge of Ryan Gander's A Phantom of Appropriation (2006), photograph by Mark Woods}

^{Detail from an installation view at Western Bridge of Ryan Gander's A Phantom of Appropriation (2006), photograph by Mark Woods}

^{Installation view at Western Bridge of Steven Brekelmans's Kit Bashing (2006), photograph by Mark Woods}

Next week on In/Visible: Anything, anything but sculpture.

In/Visible: Sculpture Study Group, Part 2

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 10:20:25 -0800

Ars longa, vita brevis, right? The common wisdom about art�especially sculpture built to live outdoors and withstand the elements, like the works at the soon-to-open Olympic Sculpture Park downtown�is that it will outlive its makers. But in a disposable culture saturated in rapidly obsolescent technologies, what is contemporary sculpture's relationship to time? Can an artwork ever die? If so, what does its death actually look like, who gets to declare it, and how long should it be kept on life support first? And what about sculptures, like Mark Dion's Seattle Vivarium at the park, made of a decaying nurse log housed in a greenhouse open for study?

The artists Tivon Rice, Susie Lee, and Mike Magrath (he of the recent salt-based, melting sculptures of Iraqi figures in Occidental Square), and writer/curator Suzanne Beal talk about their own works, their own desires for the lives of artworks, and Stranger art writer Jen Graves jumps in, too, in a follow-up to last week's In/Visible (Sculpture Study Group, Part I).

Next week on In/Visible: Eric Fredericksen and the new show at Western Bridge.

In/Visible: Sculpture Study Group, Part 1

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:30:00 -0800

Jen Graves Talks to Tivon Rice, Susie J. Lee, and Suzanne Beal

Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park opens in two weeks, providing essentially another entire outdoor museum to the city. It's a place Richard Serra has called "fucking magnificent," and he says it makes him happy "not only for myself, but for sculpture, and the culture of the country." All righty then. Let's start really talking about it. (To hear Serra, watch the PR-style documentary Art Without Walls: The Making of the Olympic Sculpture Park, which premiered last night on KCTS and is airing a bunch this month.)

In the first of at least two conversations on In/Visible about sculpture, The Stranger's art writer Jen Graves talks to the artists Tivon Rice and Susie J. Lee, and the writer/curator Suzanne Beal. The three of them took a UW class on the park, taught by former SAM curators Lisa Corrin and Susan Rosenberg, back in the spring of 2005, when the park was still just a glimmer in the museum's eye.

For the class, they toured the art-spangled homes of the Wrights and the Shirleys, the two major donors to the sculpture park, and as the earliest students of the park, these three have thoughts, observations, wishes, interpretations, and complaints on what's going in on the waterfront.

Next week on In/Visible: Permanence in sculpture. Should it be everlasting, like Calder's Eagle? How can it change and still stick around?

In/Visible: SOIL Goes to Miami

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 14:47:58 -0800

Miami makes a spectacle of itself every December during Art Basel Miami Beach, a contemporary art fair that has enough satellite fairs (what will Aqua do for a photograph next year unless Ben Beres comes up with an even better costume?) and events to take over the entire city. Selling, networking, looking, and drinking: in which order? Artists and SOIL Art Gallery members Jennifer Zwick, Deb Baxter, and Randy Wood reminisce about last year's red dots and Parisian curators, and fantasize about what's to come, days before they leave Seattle.

In/Visible: Jen Graves talks to Mary Simpson and Fionn Meade

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 15:45:53 -0800

Billy in the Lowground is the first live-action film by artist Mary Simpson and writer-curator-musician Fionn Meade, and it's built around the haunting, centuries-old murder ballad "Pretty Polly," performed in the film by the Foghorn String Band. In a conversation that ranges from Alaska to Joan Didion and the Greek word nostos, Meade, and Simpson circumnavigate the dark heart of what they've made, which is on display at Punch Gallery.

Check out Jen Graves's short review of Billy in the Lowground here.

For more of Mary Simpson's work, see Graves's review of her show earlier this year at 4 Culture Gallery.

In/Visible: War Time

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 15:59:43 -0800

Walid Raad was 15 years old and toting around a telephoto lens in the summer of 1982 when he shot the photographs of the Israeli attack on Beirut that are currently on display at the Henry Art Gallery.

This week, Jen Graves spoke with him about the logic of hot wars, the legitimacy of counterfeits in the context of a "surpassing disaster," the hysterical symptoms of chronic violent attacks, and a rare neurological disorder�a perceptual talent?�in which sufferers view reality as a series of frames instead of a continuous and seamless fabric.

Click here to listen.

Jen Graves reviews Walid Raad's Henry show.

Walid Raad's The Atlas Group Archive, a multi-media project documenting the contemporary history of Lebanon.

In/Visible: Body Building

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 13:42:38 -0800

As the calmly fearless artist Alex Schweder talks about his "persistent obsessions," he wears Roman work pants that make him look a little like a fireman. He discusses Murmurs (his current show with Richard Barnes and Charles Mason at Howard House), ancient Roman toilets, A Sac of Three Rooms Three Times A Day coming up at Suyama Space in January, the messy way that "your body is a tube that the world flows through," biodegradable Milanese plastic, the Seagram building versus the Blur building, and the most transgressive piece of public art in Washington state�his Lovesick Walls at the Tacoma Convention and Trade Center. He jokes about his misunderstood intentions for the piece: "And then let's put some vaginas in there because who doesn't like a vagina!" What more could you want?

Click here to listen.

The Stranger's review of the show:HERE.

See more of Alex's work HERE.

In/Visible: Lawrimore Project

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 13:30:47 -0800

You've seen his project, now hear Scott Lawrimore's velvety voice as he talks to Stranger art critic Jen Graves about how size matters, his brief but spectacular history as a drawing prodigy, the pure questions his parents ask about art, and why he recently posted an "Open" sign.

Lawrimoreproject.com

More photos HERE.

In/Visible: Lead Pencil Studio

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:38:27 -0800

Listen now.

Lead Pencil Studio, AKA the artist-architect team of Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo, are the winners of this year's Genius Award for visual art. Their most recent project, Maryhill Double, funded in part by Creative Capital Foundation, included rejection, high winds, Queen Marie of Romania, crying like a girl, and a yellow bird�all of which they talk about in this interview, done October 17, with Stranger Visual Art Editor Jen Graves. The pair also are known for installations and sculptures that investigate spaces at the Henry Art Gallery (Minus Space, 2005), at Suyama Space (Linear Plenum, 2004), and outdoors at Sand Point Arts and Cultural Exchange (Stairway, 2003). In January, they'll make work in the derelict top floor of the former Woolworth building downtown (currently housing Ross Dress for Less).

Listen now.

Read a previous review of Han and Mihalyo's work.