Dusty Blog


Posted by Amanda M. Vail

Oh, this blog is getting dusty! Too many side projects going on lately. And speaking of which, the latest is a love ode… to Government!

What, you say?

Bleeding heart liberal I may be, but this is also practical. I love my roads, rails, and the mail. And I think that others should, too. To that end, I’m working with a small collective on a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a series of three small documentaries, each one about a specific government service. So far, we’ve got the VA and the Post Office, but we’re looking for a third. If you also love your government services, click on over to Kickstarter and help us spread the word!

Happy Valentine’s Day, Uncle Sam!


Down the Rabbit Hole at the Bellevue Arts Museum


Posted by Amanda M. Vail

"Chthonic Tent," Janice Arnold, 2011.

Of course I’m going to be tempted by an exhibition on dreams and travelling; you can’t say they’re not seductive subjects, especially when put together. It’s a good time of year for it, too. Winter is the time for settling in with stories and dreams. Many of these stories involve travel of some kind, moving from one space to another, whether that space is physical, mental, or spiritual. And I don’t know about you, but I often dream when I travel, even if it’s just during the daily traffic commute. There’s something about the motion that frees a part of my mind to drift and dream.

Now wait, first things first: if you’re in the Seattle area, and are at all interested in art or craft, then you need to visit the Bellevue Arts Museum regularly. And if you’ve never been, then go posthaste. I won’t wax on about this, but they have a beautiful museum, intelligent didactics, and thoughtful exhibitions that explore art, craft, and design. There, now that that’s out of the way, back to the show.

BAM’s exhibition Travelers is subtitled “Objects of Dream and Revelation.” The large installations and sculptural objects are scattered around the second floor of the museum. They’re often disparate (as you would likely expect), but that doesn’t interrupt the viewer’s pace at all. The pieces that are visually stunning draw the viewer into the exhibition quickly, after which she or he can take a slower stroll through the installations that require more investigation and interaction.

The sometimes playful, sometimes intimidating, sometimes scary, sometimes obscure pieces in Travelers have quite the presence. Walking through the exhibition is indeed dreamlike; it’s hard not to feel that reality has tilted when you’re surrounded by things like overly large floppy dogs made from cast-off fabric, snow globes that showcase tragic scenes, and unexpectedly soft mechanisms of transportation. Each of the pieces has its own depth, but echoes a theme from one or more of its neighbors. I won’t go into each piece (although it’s tempting!), but here are some highlights.

 Timothy Horn, Mother-Load

One of the showcase pieces of the exhibition is this attention-grabbing carriage by Timothy Horn. Well, fancy carriages are meant to be the center of attention, right? Particularly fairy tale princess carriages. Mother-Load is all that and more. This child-size carriage, which looks functional but for a miniature horse, has French Rococo fillips and delicate wheels. It is also entirely encrusted in rust-colored crystals. A matched piece, Diadem, dangles in the museum lobby. It’s a large, functional, encrusted chandelier. The symbols of wealth are all there, but as you might guess, there’s a bit of chicanery involved. The precious-seeming crystals are, in fact, sugar. If you were riding in that carriage, and a sudden rainstorm were to come along, all of your status would simply melt away. So where does wealth truly lie, anyway?

Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz, Travelers series

When I was a kid, I was temporarily fascinated by snow globes, as I’m sure many children are. My parents had a few of the cheap plastic kind that were less likely to be broken by young, energetic hands, and when I was a bit older, I got some of the nicer glass pieces to set among my collection of ceramic horses and unicorns. (Yes, I was a girl-child in the ‘80s.) Those snow globes were heavy—read breakable to a clumsy youngster—and precious, yet somehow the weight of them gave more wonder to the images inside. I feel the same way about the snow globes crafted by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz.

The gallery display for these is beautiful. The snow globes are gathered around the edges of a dark room, each one gently lit. At the center of the room is Janice Arnold’s Chthonic Tent (see image above), which radiates a beautiful, butterfly-wing red glow. The atmosphere is hushed, and in this quiet the viewers tiptoe around and bend down to peer into the unfortunate arctic scenes depicted by Martin and Muñoz. Triumphant displays of mountain vacations or holiday splendor these are not. Wistful, bizarrely tragic, or tragically humorous events occur in each globe, set down in a snowy landscape that looks like nothing so much as a remote mountain top or glacier.

The surreal happenings may be dreams, they may be vacations gone horribly wrong, or they may be metaphorical displays of dysfunctional interpersonal relationships. Or they could very easily be all of the above. What you think of when you see them will depend entirely on you. But they will sink into your consciousness, and I can almost guarantee that you’ll remember them at some random time and think, “Am I that woman on an ice flow right now?”

Cal Lane, Filigree Car Bombing

My jaw dropped a bit when I saw this one. Beauty and terror both wrapped into hunks of steel thrown into a seeming heap against a gallery wall. Yep, there’s the hood of a car, there’s the fender. They’re crumpled, disassembled, and laid bare of paint. The dark color and scattering of dirt around the piece give the immediate impression that something awful has happened. A closer inspection reveals that these steel car parts have been elegantly cut into a filigree lace pattern. The dirt on the floor isn’t scattered at all, but is laid down in the same lace forms as the steel. Technically speaking, this is just wow.

Cal Lane knows her lace forms, too. I’m no expert, but I can see that. Many of us probably can; lace is one of those things that’s just recognizable. It’s detailed and expensive, beautiful, wide-spread, and has a long history that is at times problematic. This piece calls so many preconceptions into question: the “masculine” nature of cars and metal; the “feminine” nature of fabric; the “base” nature of dirt. The form of something that has become a symbol of wealth imposed on a scene of violence. As in so many dreams, opposites blend together into something new, something that isn’t as surprising as you thought it would be.

—

I could go on. And on. Each piece in the Travelers exhibition deserves commentary. If I get the chance, I’ll return to this show in future posts and provide some additional thoughts. In the meanwhile, get over there and see the show; you have until December 31.

Images courtesy of the Bellevue Arts Museum.


Christopher Martin Hoff


Posted by Amanda M. Vail

Well, this post might be late, but I just have to write it anyway. I can’t get the show out of my head. Luminous paintings of city streets, silent urban gardens, and colorful graffiti walls. The locations depicted by Christopher Martin Hoff are tantalizingly familiar. They have landmarks, but they’re not immediately recognizable. I visited the show with several other Seattleites, and we ended up debating, “Doesn’t that one look like that intersection on Capitol Hill? No, maybe that other intersection,” or “Isn’t this one somewhere in the International District? No?”

As it turns out, his paintings are of locations around Seattle. So, for those familiar with the city, Hoff’s cityscapes are certainly interesting. What makes them particularly interesting, though, even for those who have never visited Seattle, are the small changes he makes that turn reality into surreality. For instance, a piece entitled Ukiyo shows a cluster of garbage dumpsters in an empty lot. Power lines soar above them into a wide, cloud-covered sky, and a church steeple and skyscrapers poke over the crest of the hill behind them. Abandoned, wet mattresses lean forlornly in the back.

I liked this piece almost immediately, but it wasn’t until I’d circled back to look at it a second time in more detail that I noticed that the dumpsters are missing something: wheels.  A label on the lower right of one of the dumpsters reads “HOVER.” I don’t know if Hoff inserted that, or if he read the graffiti at the scene and took his cue from there. Either way, they’re floating. Ukiyo means just that—floating—in Japanese, so I probably should have clued in a bit sooner. It’s just so beautifully seamless that there’s no impetus to look for anything unusual until you notice some quirky things in some of the other pieces.

And that’s one of Hoff’s strengths. His paintings are multidimensional; they invite repeated viewing and investigation. His technical painting skills are very strong; like many surrealists, he captures reality so well that he can manipulate it. He also manages to showcase that perfect Seattle grey. I’m a Midwestern transplant, mind, but I’ve fallen in love with the post-rainy or pre-rainy days in this city. (Thank goodness, because there are many of them.) On one of these days, the sky is hung with low clouds, but they’re thin enough that sunlight leaks through—not in rays, but in particles. Everything that is green in the city seems to glow against the moisture-slicked streets and shifting shades of cloudy grey. And then, sometimes, when the sky is just so, the city seems to become quiet.

That’s what Hoff has captured in his Niwa (“Gardens”) series, which focuses on sacred spaces.

His Totems series focuses on messages or connections, with an emphasis on graffiti. Unlike the Niwa series, which are each on a single canvas, the Totem pieces are diptychs (with the exception of one of them—but I actually think that’s the least successful of the series). The canvases are hung with careful wall space between them, sometimes not completely on the same level, but the break is more of a pause. It’s almost like looking through a window pane.

What’s interesting to me about this series is that he’s doubling up on the artist/viewer dichotomy. He is both artist and viewer as he painstakingly re-creates the graffiti artist’s (or artists’) work. Viewers of his pieces form a secondhand audience for the graffiti. His re-creations are painstaking, although if he were to change something, I don’t think any of his viewers would know. I don’t know if Hoff found the totemic images he depicts, or if he inserted them into the landscape himself, or if it’s something of both. But there is something lovely about the way his hand interprets someone else’s hand.

Throughout this body of work, Hoff creates a conversation not just about Seattle, but about city spaces in general.  His streetscapes are empty and quiet with no sign of life other than the typical city flora (trees and weeds) and the handiwork of humanity. In some cases, street and building signs are covered over by ragged rectangles of painter’s tape blue—firm evidence of the artist’s hand in the piece, but still balanced in the composition in such a way that they don’t stick out. It was only when I felt that nagging sensation of almost recognizing the scene and started searching for identifying markers that I noticed the masking.

Hoff pushes his Seattle cityscapes out of direct representation and into the liminal space between spaces through the deliberate use of his hand upon the scene. His paintings are his vision enacted upon the creations of humanity. The spaces are not empty; they are filled with the echo of his presence and the presence of those who were there before him.

Even though you won’t be able to catch the “One to One” show at the Linda Hodges Gallery, Christopher Martin Hoff is still an artist worth watching. He’s represented by the gallery, so anyone who’s interested will surely be able to catch another show, which I highly recommend. I’ll be there.

All images courtesy of the Linda Hodges Gallery; photos by Richard Nicol.


Hiawatha Lofts Open House 2011


Posted by Amanda M. Vail

Need something to do on the evening of November 5th? Live in the Seattle area or feel like a drive? Feel like seeing some art of varying kinds and hanging out with a bunch of artists? Ever wondered how artists live? (The answer to that is: just like everyone else.)

Well, in response to these wants and more, the fabulous Artspace Hiawatha Lofts is opening its doors once again for the yearly building crawl of artists’ studios and living spaces. Details:

There are over sixty units in the building, and while I’m not sure exactly how many of those will be open for the evening, here are a few highlights (in no particular order, and with no particular selection process other than that they’ve said they’ll open their studios):

If I hear of more artists who are opening their studios, I’ll update the post.
For those interested, .pdf flyer here: Hiawatha Open House 2011

Etsuko Ichikawa – Pyrograph/Aquagraph


Posted by Amanda M. Vail

Walking into the Davidson Gallery at a time when they have arranged an exhibition of Etsuko Ichikawa’s work is not unlike walking into a temple. Don’t mistake me—they are not propagandistic, nor are they overtly religious in any way. What they are is peaceful. Silent. Contemplative. Still. I recently realized that in my memory, Ichikawa’s works are accompanied by the dying echoes of a solemn bell and the faint musk of incense.

Let me back up a bit here and tell you what these pieces are. Ichikawa uses the word pyrograph to describe her elegant works on paper. Rich brown shapes loop and arc across thick, crisp paper, sometimes overlapping, sometimes wandering off alone, sometimes simply fading away. And sometimes, when one of these strokes reaches the edge of the paper, it becomes immediately obvious that the lines are not made of ink or paint. They’re burn marks. Traces left behind by molten glass as it moved across the paper.

Once you know this, it is no surprise to learn that Ichikawa spent much of her early artistic career as a glass blower. She says that her leap into making pyrographs was the result of an accident. That may be, but it was a wonderful move The pieces are beautiful, every single one of them in the gallery. It’s tempting to call their beauty simple, because at first glance there doesn’t seem to be much to them. But that would be wrong; were their beauty truly simple, they would not hold one’s attention for so long. As for me, I can’t get them out of my head.

I think it has to do with the fact that they are memories. All artwork is, to a lesser or greater extent, a record of the artist’s hand or thought process at the time it was created. Ichikawa’s works are blatantly so—a direct pathway made by the movements of not just her hand, but her body. There’s a lovely short documentary that is shown in the exhibition, “2100° | 451°” by Alistair Banks Griffin, which showcases Ichikawa’s process. The making of her artwork is almost a dance. I feel as though the pieces, the pyrographs, are what is left behind when she does a performance for herself. The documentary generates an audience for one of these performances, but all that remains of the others are the burn marks across the paper.

I don’t think it is too much of a leap to say that Ichikawa’s pyrographs also have connections to classic feminism. It’s not blatant. Nevertheless, I cannot escape comparisons between her work and that of feminist artists such as Ana Mendieta (pieces like Body Tracks in particular) and their emphasis on the action of the body during the creative process. The impressions left behind by those actions become both artwork and proof of being.

As you might imagine with pieces that originate from a dance, the pyrographs are far from static. They are not the quiet of a zen garden, where flowing, parallel curves radiate out from organic elements. They are visual poetry—living, almost breathing, and enveloping the viewer in the memory of movement. And like any memory, they hold slightly different impressions each time they are revisited.

All images courtesy of Davidson Gallery

Derrick Jefferies


Posted by Amanda M. Vail

The new pieces by Derrick Jefferies are, in short, found objects covered in crystals. As with so many sparkly things, they’re fundamentally fascinating. On a recent outing to view them, I found myself surrounded by little glittery things scattered throughout the gallery. Each was delicate and strange enough that I had to bend, squint, circle, then walk away and return later just to slake my curiosity.

"Pillar," 2011. Porcelain, sugar.

On one pedestal, an oyster shell cradled pure white crystals, no pearls in sight. Stiffened, faintly shimmering fabric leaned in another corner, reminiscent of a Hellenistic marble fragment. A quartet of small pieces on a shelf in the back included a housefly trapped in a clear amber substance and a cluster of faux emeralds. In the center of the gallery floor, a tall column revealed its crystal interior like a breached geode. And round and round the exhibition went, from large piece to small, echoing various geological forms tied to human history.

It was during this, Jefferies’ recent group show Defornament at SOIL Collaborate Art Gallery, that my view of his work really crystallized. (Yes, pun intended. I couldn’t resist.) It wasn’t just my view of his work, however. I’d say his body of work as a whole has come together in a remarkably elegant manner.

Before I get into that, though, a bit of context: for the past three or so years, Jefferies has lived one floor down and several doors over. The art display outside his door rotated with time, and although the glaring florescent bulbs and forced proximity of hallway viewing do not create the most flattering of exhibition spaces, I’ve always enjoyed pausing by his apartment on my way from one end of the building to the other. It’s been fun to watch his art grow and change from the vantage point of a curious neighbor.

"Emerald," 2011. Glass, sugar.

Jefferies’ earlier work focused largely on photography and photographic manipulation, with an emphasis on forms that mimicked the construction of the body. This playful versimilitude, as he likes to call it, extends to the sculptural pieces he created for Defornament. The crystalline sculptures brought together Jefferies’ fascination with organic forms, growth, and change, and added an element of the geopolitical. Gems and other precious minerals, whether simply found upon or laboriously wrested from the planet’s crust, have no inherent value beyond what human history has granted to them (think the palace at Versailles here). In this new body of work, Jefferies granted various found objects the qualities of quality. They’re glittery, attractive, and seemingly valuable for reasons beyond their thought-provoking, artistic nature, but they’re made from a common, plant-based material. You could do the same thing in your kitchen; that’s exactly what Jefferies did.

When I spoke with Jefferies about his work, it was easy to get him going. He’s tall, dark-haired, lean, inherently energetic, and an absolute pleasure to talk to. He’d been experimenting with growing crystals in his kitchen for quite some time, inspired by a return visit to the gem collection at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, one of his favorite childhood haunts. (Pair that with his recent trip to the palace at Versailles, and you get a fair idea of the foundation of this body of work.) However, at the time he began formulating the show with other SOIL members, he found himself in need of far more pieces than he had on hand. And so he began testing out various crystallization techniques on whatever objects he could locate. “It’s auto-generative,” he said. “I just introduce things to each other, and they make themselves.”

"Homage," 2011. Marble, cloth, sugar, wood, glitter, bone.

That may be the case, but Jefferies’ interests and sensibilities have ably informed the pieces. For instance, his “opalized” deer vertebrae (wrapped in shimmering plastic or painted with nail polish) visually turn an organic element into a mineral over a much shorter timeline than that for naturally found fossils. Even now, though, the process isn’t exactly over. Jefferies is off to Goldsmiths in London this fall for his MFA, and from what he tells me, there will be big things. As in, large. The next time I see one of his crystalline “geodes,” I expect to be able to walk into it.

Lucky Brits. I’ll definitely have to make a sojourn to London for that. Can’t wait to see what you get up to, Derrick. Best of luck!

 All photos courtesy of the artist.