Art Access Articles

Edie Whitsett: A Survey of Theatrical Design

Debbi Lester — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:24:17 GMT

So Right by Mary Lou Sanelli

Debbi Lester — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:14:36 GMT

I don't know how much longer I can live in a condo. Seriously. I'm looking at houses again.

And there is this one house. The first time I parked in front of it, I was more than a little taken with it.

The second time I parked a block away. I wanted to stroll up to the house more slowly, view it as a passerby would, rather than a woman in love. And I began to think about it not only as a more spacious way of living, but as a reflection of my inner life. I long for a house again the way some women long for children.

Perhaps I peered in too closely, interpreted the house as a mirror more than I should have, but, suddenly, it was as if no other house would do.

I rely on this feeling, this sense that something is precisely right, the way others rely on tools that are specific, like, oh, I don't know, an omelet pan when an ordinary frying pan won't do.

By the third visit, I'd read all the information I could find at the library about affordable restoration of a frilly old Mini-Victorian, considered a little shabby, even kitschy, by some of the neighbors.

But their houses are more, well, the word "established" comes to mind. It's the kind of neighborhood where a house may boast a few clay flower pots leading up the front steps or a hot tub off the back, but, by and large, they are basically all the same house. And in such reserved company, "my" house must prevail on her own, head held high.

Not to say the house isn’t admired, she is, just not readily accepted as a "local."

"Whatever that word means by now," said my librarian, handing over another book.

"It's hard not to think about how much work owning a house will be again," I told her.

"How can you not think of it?"

"My husband is trying to talk me out of it BIG time," I said.

"Of course he is. Larry is a sensible man."

For the rest of the day, I thought about what she said.

And I thought about how my conversations with her had begun years ago, in a low register at the counter of the library, how she would always give me a little gift of knowledge to take home along with my books.

The friendship we developed never went beyond the walls of the Carnegie, but it was continually a lesson it how much easier it is to be yourself when you don’t feel yourself trying, how much better we get at being ourselves in certain company. I have her to thank for that.

My earliest memory of adoring her was the day I overheard her tell a particularly ornery man who spent his afternoons in the library to stop pestering unsuspecting walk-ins with his political views. Obama was up for his first election and tempers were flaring even at the library. "I don’t care," she said in a loud whisper, "if you are a Democrat or a Republican, old age is not an excuse to be rude."

Who knows if we would have become better friends if we were closer in age, or lived next door to each other, or if I wasn’t so preoccupied with work, with other friendships, with life?

But it felt like an honor, a miracle-of-an-honor, to chance upon my librarian admonishing a man close to ninety, like seeing a flower open. It hardly matters when we came to trust each other.

All that matters is that, in the end, there she is, an easy friend. So wise. So right.

________________________________________________________

Sanelli's latest book is Among Friends. She'll be presenting her staged version of The Immigrant's Table at Nash's Organic Farm in Sequim, Washington on April 20th. For more information, www.marylousanelli.com.

Lyle Silver: A Life in Art by Saylor Jones

Debbi Lester — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 18:52:27 GMT

Patricia Rovzar, whose gallery has been representing Lyle Silver since 1997, recalls meeting the artist: "When he first came to me for representation he was skillfully immersed in working as a courtroom artist. He was getting out of that mode and wanted to focus on his fine art. Since I have been representing him he has gone from making pretty straightforward landscapes to those that are a lot more gestural and less refined, less confined by the landscape itself."

Lyle Silver does make the world seem fresh.

For instance, in an oil bar on board painting entitled "5th Street Alley in Winter," cobalt and turquoise blues churn atop snow while a structure beyond could be mistaken for a quilt built of colors. The painting has an intimacy-in-public feel of a Charles Burchfield, a sense that you are waking from a deep sleep to find this scene materialize before your eyes.

Using traditional subject matter has allowed viewers to trust Silver enough to fall completely into his abstract visions. In his most loose renderings of figures, land and cityscapes marigold yellows, persimmon reds, lavenders, bottle greens, deep browns, and coldblue pigments hover in streaks and daubs like space aliens attempting to spell out to their home planet what Earth has in store.

Rovzar says, she is "not calling this exhibit a retrospective because we are not going all the way back sixty years. Instead I am calling it 'A Life in Art.'"

The title aptly describes what Silver's life has been.

The artist had a studio loft in downtown Seattle for 25 years where he and his wife Lois, also a painter, hosted weekly drawing sessions for artists. They lived there and were fully immersed in the art community. When that building came down he and Lois moved into a big house where they were able to have both of their studios – yet, they continued hosting life drawing sessions in the basement of Art Not Terminal Gallery for another thirteen years, a location just around the corner from their former loft space.

Of all the married Seattle-artist couples, Lyle and Lois Silver's works appear the most similar. Rovzar believes it is partly because of having studios in the same house. "His wife is an integral part of his process," says Rovzar, "and he with her. They are each others' critics. They work separately but together in their studio spaces and so are able to draw on each other for artistic nutrition. It's kind of an interesting balance - they both work with oil bar and they both have developed different techniques in terms of how they use oil bar. And every once in awhile they influence each other to the point that you're wondering, "Is that Lois Silver or Lyle Silver’?"

Silver got into using oil bars during his courtroom drawing days - a profession that his wife still partakes of. "We got into oil bars because they are pretty easy to pick up," says the artist; "If you had to go to the courtroom they were pretty handy."

The exhibit offers 25 or so sketches, drawings and paintings that represent a wide scope of the artist's oeuvre, including the large landscapes depicting rural areas in Washington state. When asked about the locations, Silver said, "I've gone all over. Skagit Valley, Cle Elum, and the Willamette Valley. You know, anywhere is okay." On Gage Academy of Fine Art's website Silver is quoted as saying, "Getting into the mountains from the city is always awe inspiring; I never get tired of it."

These landscapes are often seen from the point of view of the driver or passenger of a car; the road is out ahead or a guard rail peeks from a composition's corner. They also show visual echoes of one of Silver's influences, landscape painter Wolf Kahn.

It is fantastic when an artist lives long enough to loosen all the way up. Sometimes this looseness results from a physical challenge such as Edgar Degas' blindness or Auguste Renoir's paintbrush tied to his arthritic hand. Yet, for some artists this freedom is due to mental release, like in the case of Lyle Silver.

Says Rovzar, "I think what happens [with age] is that you care less about selling the artwork as opposed to creating it. You come full circle. I think that in Lyle's heart of hearts the looser was always the better. I think he was always that way. But I think he felt that in order to make a living at this and become a commercial success he had to paint what he thought people would embrace and he didn't think that people would embrace the looseness of his larger pieces. He found out that was untrue in the end."

When asked if he had any advice for young artists, Silver replied, "Be focused. If you want to be an artist you need to focus. Keep working. Keep associating with other artists. And keep looking, keep looking."

Young artists, take heed.

Saylor Jones

Saylor Jones is a Northwest illustrator and writer. To view her work, visit www.saylorjones.com.

"Lyle Silver: 60 Years in Art" is on view January 3 through February 5 at Patricia Rovzar Gallery, located at 1225 Second Avenue in Seattle, Washington. The opening reception is Thursday, January 3, from 6 to 8 P.M. For more information visit www.rovzargallery.com.

The Greater Gift by Mary Lou Sanelli

Debbi Lester — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 18:40:14 GMT

New Year's. It's always a Big Deal. For a few days, it's all anyone can talk about. Next, it will be all about little red hearts. It all comes around so quickly.

February means something else, to me anyway. First, I have a deep affection for those sugary pastel hearts set out in crystal bowls all around the city. I pinch one at a time, of course, but in my mind's eye I see a woman scooping the entire medley up and filling her pockets.

Who knows why we connect with some candies and not with others. Love is really something, isn't it?

Secondly, it makes me step back and question a few real things about love between people, like who is there for you no matter what, who isn't any longer and, for the love of Pete, why not?

And I thought my fingers would fly over the keyboard with some sweet little story about romantic love, a.k.a. my Larry. But, no.

Instead, another man fills my thoughts. . .

I visit my father annually on Long Island Sound, but he hasn’t returned to Seattle since Larry and I married, referring to Puget Sound as "God's country," and that is just about the highest compliment my father can extend.

On the morning of our wedding, the clouds we'd hoped would burn off only swelled, the day becoming more and more May-like, restless, sprinkly, spring. The kind of weather that can make pulling off a wedding on a shoestring budget feel even more overwhelming. I was fidgety, worried that the clouds would turn into a downpour or, even worse, drizzle all day.

My father took one look at me staring up at the sky, and a longer look at who Larry and I were together, both of us a little frayed and scruffy to someone from the more formal East Coast school of wedding appropriateness. And when his eyes spanned the little wood-floored room we'd rented for our reception, a schoolhouse in the tiny town of Dungeness on the Olympic Peninsula, he spied the keg of beer in the corner.

He looked at me as if he might want to say something, but he never did. He just crossed the room, stepped outside, closed the door behind him, got into his rental car, and disappeared.

If it hadn't been my wedding day, I might have found it disconcerting, even scary. Instead, I could feel the sides of my cheeks expand into an even wider smile.

An hour later he was back, his arms around a case of liquor, plenty more where that came from, until vodka, gin, scotch, and brandy bottles, plus every mixer imaginable, were perfectly aligned next to the cake. "You think an Italian can have a wedding without the real stuff?," he asked.

But it wasn't a question. And he winked after he said it, and that was unquestionably the greater gift. I will remember the satisfied look his face until the day I die.

As a second present, bless him, he gave us enough money to, in his words, "get started," wisely neither too much as to make Larry uncomfortable, nor too little to make me so, because an Italian father's generosity is legendary and I'd grown up with it, my legend, my superstar, my Valentine, my dad.

February. It's all about love.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Sanelli's latest book is "Among Friends". She works as a writer and speaker. For more information about her work, visit www.marylousanelli.com

The Sign

Debbi Lester — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 06:02:11 GMT

I write this because of someone I witnessed earlier today. Or maybe all the other long-forgotten incidents flashed through my mind because of her, I don't know. Either way, I just have to get it down.

I've been teaching a series of dance workshops, from Seattle to Poulsbo to Port Angeles to Olympia, and many towns in between. This morning, one mother insisted on watching her daughter take my class. I don't allow this and promptly said so. "I just thought I could help my daughter remember what she learns today," is what she said, indignantly, on her way out the door.

If help of this nature is supposed to make kids apply themselves more, I can say from experience it doesn't work.

When I owned a dance studio and wanted, more than anything else, to teach young students how to trust their own perfect minds and bodies, I had to put my foot down: "Parents are allowed to watch only the first class of the month." read the sign on my door.

Because some of the mothers? You would not believe (only now there is a reality show, so you would). No self control. Absolutely none. Their own insecurities rose right up, landing on their child's self-esteem. I could see how they really did struggle with it, knowing they were over the top, but it rarely stopped them for long.

It got so I could spot these parents on registration day. Visually, they were more and more like a warning, a manifestation, what unrealized and/or unattempted goals and dreams can become. How people can age, then age some more, without ever accomplishing something of their own to be proud of. Maybe they woke up one morning and found they were no longer able to focus on their career and couldn't adjust to the reality. Or maybe they never attempted a creative one and feel cheated somehow. I knew these outbursts were hungers that, on another level, weren't directed at their kids so much as at life at large. Pent up, they had no where else to pop but in my studio. I think this is what's really going on.

I also think these women would stop interfering if they were able to get past seeing their kids as a chance they had been given. No kid wants to be their parent's way of reaching for more, of gaining something else.

It seems I've described the worst case dance-parent. There were others, lots of others, who were encouraging, supportive, positive. But my signboard couldn't be selective or the meanies would have come down on me, I was pretty sure of that.

"Your child may be learning a few dance steps here, but you are keeping your child from taking a huge leap forward if you comment from the sidelines. What does your child want from class? The opposite of everything you want, just like when you shop for clothes together."

This is the sign I should have hung. Never mind the objections. Why didn't I? What we'd do over if only we could, right?

Mary Lou Sanelli

Sanelli's works as a writer and speaker. Her latest book is Among Friends. www.marylousanelli.com

Elles: Pompidou at the Seattle Art Museum

Debbi Lester — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 05:53:33 GMT

Ladies' Choice

Debbi Lester — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 22:57:04 GMT

In tandem with Seattle Art Museum's "Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou" exhibit, Greg Kucera Gallery is featuring "Ladies' Choice," a show wherein every female gallery artist has chosen a female artist from outside the gallery to exhibit alongside them.

Ross Palmer Beecher chose Marita Dingus, Loretta Bennett chose Qunnie Peltway, Claudia Fitch chose Sheila Klein, Victoria Haven chose Dawn Cerny, Susan Skilling chose Claire Cowie, Katy Stone chose Leona Christie while Lynne Woods Turner chose work by Leonie Guyer, Deborah Butterfield chose Mary Ann Kelly.

There seems to be a spirit of patronage and admiration between women artists that didn't exist even a few decades ago when there were still such few slots for females in the art world.

"I remember not even that long ago," says photographer Alice Wheeler who is represented by Kucera, "Guerrilla Girls came to Seattle and there were less than 10% women artists being represented by major art galleries. Greg Kucera has always been very forward, he has almost always had like about a fifty-fifty ratio between men and women artists in his galley. When I first started hanging art almost all of the people I showed with were guys. Previous to Greg Kucera people often said that they were including me because they needed a woman in their show. So at least now I’m known for my work instead of my gender."

Wheeler, recognized for her images of what she calls "street stuff," is submitting a large photograph of an all-pink woman she saw and shot in Pioneer Square named Princess Bubble Gum. Her artist of choice is photographer Kelly O., who The Stranger newspaper describes as their "staff photographer, music writer, Drunk of the Week columnist, and more!"

Kucera artist Deborah Butterfield enthused about her choice of Montana artist Mary Ann Kelly via telephone after driving 10 hours from Bozeman, Montana to the Walla Walla Foundry where she is preparing for a show at LA Louver Gallery.

"We've known Mary Ann for 37 years and have been together through lives and deaths and births and forest fires," says Butterfield; "I think what draws me to her work. . . you know, we live in Montana in the mountains and so for us nature really is what we deal with every day. . .things like shoveling snow and dealing with large predators. . .we really do address that every day and I think the gestural quality in both of our works kind of addresses the human scale within that huge context. The gesture for me is what I can pick up and stuff into a horse (laughs) and the gesture for Mary Ann is really more within her arms reach. I feel that we're struggling, excited, and responsive to both the structure of nature and then the gesture within that structure. I think her use of color is so strong; the works are lyrical and they’re sensual. She hasn’t had much exposure out of Montana."

Gallery artist Sherry Markovitz chose one of Allison Manch's embroidered works on cloth.

"I like Allison's attitude and use of materials," writes Markovitz; "I like her choice of subject matter and how she weaves her history into her work. . .her imagery has evolved. She has been embroidering images of the Southwest and text from songs."

Markovitz is represented by "Warm Up," a large gouache on cotton. She uses images of both traditional western dolls, dolls that represent folk traditions, and dolls with profound expressions which she animates. Her most recent paintings are of traditional Mexican paper mache dolls in various acrobatic postures.

"I feel," writes Markovitz, "that as long as women are oppressed in some way around the world there is a need to highlight women's work. It can only be empowering."

Kucera Gallery artist Margie Livingston chose work by Seattle's witty Debra Baxter.

"Debra's work hits me with a sense of longing that feels fresh," says Livingston; "I also like the way she works with an extensive range of materials without feeling gimmicky. From paint to powder puffs and everything in between including quartz, alabaster, words, video, mirrors, and cypress knees."

Debra has described her use of crystals as "a way to transform vulnerability into power and also to embrace vulnerability as a type of power."

When did Livingston first see Baxter’s work?

"In 2003, Debra was sewing powder puffs together to make clouds. I don't remember where it was, but at over three feet long they were stunning, memorable, funny, sad, and feminine," says Livingston.

Currently, Livingston is "finishing up several objects made out of paint that blur the line between painting and sculpture. These include a block of paint that weighs over 50 pounds, a grid of 90 color tests, a log of paint that was cut into an 8-foot post, and a folded painting. You’ll be able to see some of them at Greg Kucera in October, in the Bellevue Arts Museum Biennial, and in Miami Beach for the December art fairs."

Deborah Butterfield sums up the sentimentof the show: "There's strength, you know, in being female. I mean, having babies and stuff - it's scary. It's life and death and I think that comes through in our work."

Saylor Jones

Saylor Jones is a Seattle writer and illustrator. Her floral watercolors are exhibited at Mioposto Restaurant from October 3 to December 3. To view her work, visit www.saylorjones.com.

"Ladies' Choice" is on view November 15 through December 29 at the Greg Kucera Gallery, located at 212 Third Avenue South in Seattle, Washington. The opening reception is on November 15, from 6 to 8 P.M. and the First Thursday reception is on December 6, from 6 to 8 P.M. For more information visit www.gregkucera.com.

"Ladies' Choice," is shown in conjunction with "Elles: SAM" exhibit at Seattle Art Museum. Visit Seattle Art Museum's website for list of all the exhibits and events.

Keith & Mike

Debbi Lester — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 04:11:22 GMT

"The way I see it," Keith says, "if you have a wedding to plan, you shouldn't have to do any other work for months!"

I've seen Keith in action. He's a professional choreographer. I'm pretty sure he'll compose his wedding much like he would a dance. He's not going to measure the stage, he's not going spend big on costuming, he's not going to mark the lines of sight with stage tape. He's going to choose the most amazing music and believe!

"And you know how Mike is." (Mike is Keith's partner of twenty years.) I nod.

Mike is a lot like my husband. Can't remember a thing. My three ways of asking him to do something are voice, triple emails, followed by threats.

"I can't leave any of the details up to Mike other than he better find a pair of acceptable earrings. Preferably, two 14 karet balls." Keith winks.

Again I nod, a little more eagerly this time because I, too, married a fourth-generation WASP. Always the writer, I think of our coupling like so: I am the exclamation point, Larry is the comma. Unless a tragedy occurs, then, for whatever reason, we switch. But normally, you should not expect too much emotion from a comma. (Oh, the words I've used over the years to distinguish between us. Does the whole world, gay or straight, fall in love with their opposite?)

Keith and Mike are off to their home state of New York to wed.

Keith and Mike, two men that are part of something much larger than themselves, making history through acceptance, moving on, refusing to conceal their love. Maybe it's because I've watched them work it out for so many years that their marriage feels more like the great BIG check mark for our country that it is.

"Why does it even feel so important to say the two silly words: I do?" Keith asks. "Because if you've been together long as we have, everyone knows it’s more like I do NOT. Especially when it comes to yard work." We clink glasses.

When Keith is finished telling me all about the wedding, I hold his two hands safely in my own and kiss him on the cheek. He kisses me back and gives me another wink. "Bella." Every time he calls me this, I fill with the most satisfying sense of well-being and I'm grateful this kind of intimacy is easy between us, part of our whole splendid package.

After two decades together, Keith and Mike still hold hands.

Even at the grocery.

Keith and Mike. They don't have a lot of money. Love is the thing they have, and they have plenty.

Everyone else, in fact, should be so lucky.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Mary Lou Sanelli’s latest book is Among Friends. Check out Sanelli's website http://www.marylousanelli.com for upcoming spring appearances by the author.

National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts 46th Annual Conference

Debbi Lester — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:36:17 GMT

Jini Dellaccio: Rock & Roll in the Northwest

Debbi Lester — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:52:24 GMT

The Way Things Are

Debbi Lester — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:23:47 GMT

“A lot of the work in this show is very loosely a reaction to the whole BP oil spill. It brought up feelings of helplessness and ‘what’s going to happen’? So many ambivalent feelings undefined not necessarily stuff I haven’t thought about before, but it just kind of brought those feelings and concerns to the surface,” says John Feodorov.

We laugh at his unintentional pun.

A painting 72 by 72 inch entitled “Emergence #3” depicts three heads rising from pipes and fish that in turn emerge from a black slick of oil. The heads have their mouths open much like that guy in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” These folks could well be BP executives making up excuses as to why their Deepwater Horizon off shore drilling rig failed.

When I ask about his wide use of mediums he replies, “It just depends on the best media for the idea. Sometimes I do video. I also do music so it really kind of depends on the best format. Right now what I’m thinking and doing seems to come out better as paintings.”

In a large acrylic and photo collage on unstretched canvas entitled “The Way Things Are,” getting ideas across appears more important than getting all fussy with paint. This honest quality adds urgency, as if a consciousness is trying to warn us about ourselves pronto. The painting could be saying with images that every living thing across this land is only a target for ego-driven, greedy brains undefined a truth many of us keep our selves too ‘busy’ to do much about.

Part Native American, Feodorov grew up in a California suburb and spent summers at his grandparent’s homestead in the Navajo Nation of New Mexico. What a mind-bender to have traveled between two such disparate worlds that our country, even after a few hundred years, has yet to mingle.

Feodorov was featured in the famous “Art21: Art for the Twenty-First Century” series on PBS in the Spirituality episode. Although his art in the documentary comments directly on Native traditions, the artist resists being pigeonholed.

“I don’t really think of it as Native American work. . .it’s certainly part of me and part of who I am and my experience and my world view. I am coming to that world view not so much as an adherent of those traditional values because the cat’s kind of out of the bag in terms of assimilation and all that. I was raised in the suburbs of California not on the reservation so my sense of the world is pretty much shaped by Gilligan’s Island.”

We compare our favorite Gilligan’s Island episodes. Mine is the one where radiated vegetable seeds wash up in the lagoon and are planted and eaten to extreme effect, whereas Feodorov’s favorite is when Gilligan as Hamlet sings “To be or not to be” to Carmen’s Habenera.

Feodorov would dig a television show that deals with Shakespeare, an artist who created his own mythology.

“A lot of my work for so many years,” says Feodorov, “has been about what sort of mythology the contemporary world requires if there is going to be any mythology at all? I mean do we just count on the same old nostalgic kind of classical examples? And in many ways I am not proposing a mythology so much as showing how trying to do that just kind of fails. I don’t know the answer to my own question and so everything I do is sort of pre-determined to fail (laughs).”

Speaking of the new paintings and lithographs in the exhibit, curator Jean Benhke says, “I respond to [John’s] inventive process, using what is at hand, both in terms of material and iconography, finding origins in his own personal history. John’s work makes no apologies and in a refreshing way gets in the face of the viewer and asks real questions about ‘the way things are’.”

With so many people out of work, doesn’t right now seem like the ideal time for a multi-medium revolution?

Saylor Jones

Saylor Jones is an illustrator and writer living in the Northwest.

“The Way Things Are” is on view October 7 through November 19 at Anchor Art Space which is located at 216 Commerical Avenue in Anacortes, Washington. A Reception for the Artist is being held on Friday, October 7, from 6 to 9 P.M. Feodorov is presenting an an Artist’s Talk on Saturday, November 5, call for details. The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday from 11 A.M. to 4 P.M. and by appointment. For more information please call (206) 919-3893, email info@anchorartspace.org, or visit the website www.anchorartspace.org.

View Feodorov’s artwork at his website:

www.johnfeodorov.com

Listen to his music:

www.myspace.com/johnfeodorov#!/johnfeodorov

Watch the Art21 episode he is in:

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/feodorov/clip1.html

Blackberry Picking

Debbi Lester — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:23:23 GMT

Late August came with wet skin, rain, and heavy sun.

This being the last times of many firsts for us,

We plucked the glossy berry from the stem.

You told me not to eat the first one, savor it for later’s pie.

We envied the berries color, like the thickness of wine,

Leaving stains on our own skin, tongues: the lust of picking.

Our mother’s good bowls ran with juice and using our skirts as baskets,

We searched and gathered even when the tins were full.

While picking we talked about boys.

The rain ran down our skin, August showers forgave us.

The thorns of lovers, past, present, or distance, peppered

Our skin as we plucked the darkest of the fruit.

The nectar was sticky sweet, our conversation never turned sour.

Unturned berries in the bowls; red, green, hard ones, left behind.

The lust in these berries is jealous of you. The fullness of your hips.

Purple blooms across our hands and lips as we gather.

Beautiful, rich fruit, with August’s sun divided between you too.

Summer’s blood. Soaked into our flesh.

Roseanne McAleese

Roseanne McAleese is a celebrated poet, spoken-word artist, actress and filmmaker whose first and upcoming book is called, Strong. Female. Character.

The Strange Alliance between Art and Science

Debbi Lester — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:50:29 GMT

Some time around the turn of the 20th century, Art and Physics began having a race to see which one was more bizarre. Up until then, those two never ran in the same neighborhood, much less on the same track. Weirder still is the fact that for the past few decades, they have been running neck and neck. Lucy Pullen, happily, is playing for both teams.

As any Weird Science and Art Project should do, Pullen’s show at the Henry Art Gallery takes place in two places at once, like a pair of parallel universes singing to each other across separate floors of the museum. The first one, "Spark Chamber," is just inside the front entrance in the small space on the right of the front desk. The other, "Cloud Chamber and Related Works," lives two floors below.

Cosmic rays are not simply Pullen's primary subject matter, they’re her collaborators as well. Just like ideas, cosmic rays are invisible. And they also have a tendency to go off in their own random directions, wherever they please, refusing to acknowledge what we consider impassable boundaries. But just as ideas reveal themselves in the works of art they inspire, the cosmic rays that visit Pullen’s cloud chamber reveal themselves in spectacular little contrails that appear out of nowhere and spiral off out of control, like tiny spaceships, unpiloted and perhaps disabled after an epic star battle. Or maybe they're just joyriding.

I vividly remember the first time I saw a cloud chamber, in a scratchy black and white movie in my fifth-grade science class. After first learning that the subatomic world was infinitely tiny and invisible I was delighted to discover that their movements could be detected in the contrails they made in the enclosed and frozen mists of a cloud chamber. That delight and euphoria returned in a great rush as I gazed down into her beautiful but slightly forbidding aluminum, steel, and glass polyhedron chamber, past the six-sided rings of eerily blue UFO-style lights into the bottomless and infinite darkness where the cosmic rays came to play. Wow. Like all consciousness-altering experiences, this one is really hard to quit. I’m not sure how long I stayed there lost in space, but in relative terms, it was a kind of eon.

When I finally did tear myself away, I spent some time in the so-called real world, looking at "Architecture of the Atmosphere," a series of prints done with non-reprographic blue pigment, that encircles the "Cloud Chamber." These many versions of the view outside Pullen's apartment are no less mysterious and strange than "Cloud Chamber," especially in the way they break down trees, sea, sky, clouds, rain, and the distant landscape into their component parts, revealing what was once invisible. I even spotted the Loch Ness monster, an invisible object that's exists somewhat more on the macro side of things. Go look yourself if you don’t believe me, but go look at it all in any case. Pullen's work is revealing and breathtaking on every level.

Kathleen Cain

Kathleen Cain is a Seattle-based writer and bibliophile who follows art and routinely defies gravity.

"The Cloud Chamber and Related Works" by Lucy Pullen is on view through June 26 at the Henry Art Gallery, located at 15th Avenue NE & NE 41st Street in Seattle, Washington. For more information, please visit the website www.henryart.org or call (206) 543-2280.

619 Building

Debbi Lester — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:44:12 GMT

We're All in There Somewhere

Debbi Lester — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:02:47 GMT

Thanks to Nick Cave, from now until June 5th, you can stroll into the Seattle Art Museum and ask the people at the front desk "How do I get to the Center of the Earth," and they will smile and tell direct you to the fourth floor. Who knew it was so easy? Really, you should try it.

Nick Cave is an artist, a dancer, a black American, a recycler of abandoned, overlooked and temporarily invisible objects, and an incredibly gifted and exacting craftsman. Working with small army of dedicated cohorts, he has revealed, by creating it, the world that exists at the center of not just the earth but everything that matters, or should matter, to human beings. In spite of the fact that this is a ridiculously ambitious undertaking, he seems to have pulled it off with this impressive body of work. And then put it on again.

Listening to people's reactions to this exhibit is almost as much fun as looking at it all. And there's a lot to look at. In the space of just ten minutes spent hanging around the entrance to the exhibit, I heard two different people say "Holy cow!" Since one of the things that Cave wants us to think about is the connection between the human and animal worlds, that’s a pretty wonderful comment. But he also wants us to think about the power and freedom that disguise and anonymity offers to people who were born on the wrong side of the color, gender, and identity divides.

A growing awareness of the ravages of identity politics does inevitably start to sneak up on you the longer you look around. But after a while, the sheer joy you feel with prolonged exposure to the extraordinary depth and breadth of Cave’s inventiveness creates a tidal wave of euphoria that washes over you and tends to overwhelm the more sinister content. And then one more walk around the "Sound Suits" made of twigs or some time spent with the photographs of Cave wearing the pieces that don’t hide his identity or another look at the contrast between the suits made of homemade bits of kitsch where the buttons are attached by those creepy plastic doohickeys that keep the price tags on the clothes at discount stores and the couture-style costumes over in their own private and privileged gallery with their carefully hand-sewn embellishments will bring your feet right back to the ground. And speaking of feet, check out all those fabulous socks. I have a thing about socks and that part of the show took me completely by surprise

There’s so much to see that everyone will have a different list of favorites. The big bear upholstered with cast-off sweaters includes a working zipper down the left leg that I really could have used when I had surgery for a broken leg two years ago. There’s a beaded and spangled space-princess suit complete with a fabulous headpiece/shield/carapace that Cave wears in one of the little gallery of photographs. I named one of the pieces that was made of crocheted headgear "The Bad Hat" because it reminded me of the Madeleine book of the same name. But hey, go find your own.

The only thing I found disappointing was that I couldn’t actually get into and walk around in one of the "Sound Suits" made of twigs. Cave's description of how surprised he was when he first tried it on and discovered the noises it made was so compelling that I really, really wanted to try it myself. Yes, I understand that allowing anyone - and there would be plenty of us - to climb inside one is impractical but I’m still feeling deprived.

Still, there is much satisfaction and some kinetic consolation in watching the film loops that are playing on the walls at the very back of the exhibit. One of them is a never-ending parade of Cave-clad dancers striding, floating, flailing, leaping, billowing, and shape-shifting through a white seamless world that seems to have no up, down, or gravity. And the best one shows Cave engaged in a frenzied wrestling match with a suit that looks like a big piece of black-and-white knitted coral. The sped-up action combined with Cave's brilliant choreography is comical and frightening at the same time.

If you know any fellow humans, young or old, hip or square, sentient or clueless, who have always thought (sometimes with good reason) that there is nothing in an art museum that might engage, delight, or amaze them, you should invite them to "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth." It's a show for doubters, refuseniks, and outsiders who will recognize themselves looking back out from the center of at least one and probably several of these little worlds that Nick Cave has imagined and built from scratch and inspiration.

Kathleen Cain

Kathleen Cain is a Seattle-based writer and bibliophile who follows art, collects buttons, and has a sock fetish.

"Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" by Nick Cave is on view through June 5 at the Seattle Art Musuem, located at 1300 First Avenue in Seattle, Washington. For more information, please visit the website www.seattleartmuseum.org or call (206) 654-3100.

Aesthetic Engineering: The Imagination Cycle

Debbi Lester — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:20:40 GMT

If you’d like to treat your hearts and minds to a new body of work by an internationally renowned artist in an almost ideal setting, don’t miss this new show of Ginny Ruffner’s latest work at the Bellevue Art Museum. Artistic Director Stefano Catalani and his staff have done a masterful job of re-staging and designing this exhibit that was originally developed by the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner where it was first shown in 2008.

Like all great art, this show is difficult to describe but it’s an exuberant and wildly imaginative exploration of what would happen if entities that possess neither genes nor the ability to reproduce (at least as far as we know) were able to cross-pollinate, exchange DNA and merge into each other. Among other things, you see “The Gene for the Grace of Falling Leaves,” “Floral Splashing,” “The Force That Shapes Seashells,” and what happens “When Lightning Blooms.” You’ve been warned; be sure to arrive with your mind wide open.

In case the title of this show doesn’t make it completely clear, you should know that although Ginny Ruffner is an artist, deep down inside, she’s really a geek. It all started in high school when she was president of the Science Club and it has been seeping into her art ever since. Her current circle of friends and regular correspondents includes an impressive assortment of distinguished scientists and mathematicians. She is fascinated by all the cool sciences and she finds them no less mystical, mutable, and mysterious than the so-called arts. In other words, Ginny has never believed in sorting things into separate piles of what does or does not constitute the realm of artistic endeavor; no matter what kind of information her muse sends, she uses it.

Although Ruffner’s titles and concepts are fantastical and outrageous, her work is more intellectual than emotional. Inspired by rigorous and challenging ideas -- evolution, the expression of DNA, the origin and nature of consciousness -- she applies her own personal torque and tension to them. The result is a kind of corkscrew logic that merges the solid and the uncanny and makes you suspect that these strange genetic connections have always existed but we never realized that they were there until she showed them to us. When asked where these ideas come from, she shrugs and demurs: “Who knows? I’m just an output device for these messages from the cosmos.”

Captured in mid-contortion, Ruffner’s creations look like they’re trying to do the Fibonacci, to swing and sway or twist and turn into something entirely new and improbable. Although they are beautiful, warm, and ethereal, they also harbor a shimmering undercurrent of darkness, mystery and secret intentions They sometimes seem as curious about you as you are about them, ready to stretch out a tentative tendril (or is that a tentacle) and pull you closer for a little friendly mind meld.

My favorite piece, full of magnificence and menace, is the towering double helix called, “Tall Artistic Creativity Gene.” Elegantly suspended from the high ceiling of the BAM lobby and trailing a bower of glass flowers at its feet, this delicate but imposing structure of metal and glass seems as if it might suddenly break free and begin spinning and spiraling toward you, bent on gently rearranging your polypeptide chains. It’s a fitting introduction to an exhibition that gradually unveils the unbridled spookiness and audacity of this artist’s imagination.

While she was still working on the pieces in this show, Ruffner asked her friend and Nobel laureate, the biochemist Kary Mullis, if he thought it was arrogant of her to create her own model of the DNA molecule. He wrote back: “None of the existing images can even come close to capturing this snapping, glowing, sizzling, writhing, freaking King of Molecules. There are no humanly conceivable images. It’s up to you to look at these things and imagine something yourself.” Which is exactly what she’s done.

So leave your slide rule at home, forget everything you know about the boundaries between art and science, and go catch a glimpse of what the world might look like if evolution began making stuff just for the fun of it. Or maybe, with a little nudge from Ruffner, it already has.

And if you’re interested in learning more about the life and work of this remarkable artist, check out the new documentary, “Ginny Ruffner: A Not So Still Life,” directed by Karen Stanton and produced and released this year by the Seattle-based film company, ShadowCatcher Entertainment. It won the Golden Space Needle award at the Seattle International Film Festival this summer and is being screened at several other film features around the country. You can find out more about it online at www.ginnyruffnerthemovie.com.

Kathleen Cain
Kathleen Cain is a Seattle-based freelance writer and bibliophile who follows art and is a big fan of the double helix.

Ginny Ruffner’s exhibit, “The Aesthetic Engineering: The Imagination Cycle,” is on view through Febraury 6 at the Bellevue Arts Museum which is located at 510 Bellevue Way NE in Bellevue, Washington. For more information please call (425) 519-0770 or visit the website www.bellevuearts.org.

Letter to Rose

Debbi Lester — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:14:31 GMT

Rose, your email came at just the right time!

Because here it is, a new year. And I’ve been at a loss. What can I possibly write that captures its essence? Everything “new year” has been written before. I have my doubts as to whether I can find a fresh angle to any of it. When you become a writer, you’ll understand this dilemma, I promise.

Your saying you read my work is the finest compliment, believe me. Sure, your mom and I know each other. Still, knowing her, knowing you, I infer no female in your home is deciding what the other female reads, period.

What I need to tell you, readers, is that Rose wants to be a writer. When she shared this information with her guidance counselor, she didn’t get quite the reaction she’d hoped for. In Rose’s words, “My counselor thinks I need a back up plan. But I really want to be a writer.”

Rose, trying to do the jigsaw of maturing is no easy feat. But, trust me, if you have already found work that makes you happy, a huge piece of you will not go missing. I will go so far as to say your passion for writing may turn out to be your truest friend in life. This might not be an easy thing to hear in your BGF world, but no friend, especially no boyfriend (doubly hard to hear, sorry), will be able to fill that place inside you that longs for so much. Only you can fill it. And writing will help.

I was thrown into a tizzy with all the remembering that came gushing up. See, in the seventh grade, I once called my Home-Ec teacher by my English teacher’s name and, humiliating me in front of my classmates, she yelled, “PAY ATTENTION, Mary Lou!”

I was mortified. I know how important names are. I’m just so bad at remembering them. But ask me anything, anything at all about what she was wearing, the ever-changing color of her hair, and I knew. I knew.

Even then, I could enumerate, interpret, elaborate. But retrieve someone’s name, I go blank. I soak up the visual but I’m resistant to names the way some people are to colds. In this area, I have what my mother would call “a strong constitution.” Until I get to know someone, I’m porous to their name. It leaves me.

Just think how much time I could have saved if my guidance counselor had picked up on my wordy, descriptive babbles (I had quite the reputation for them) and leaned me toward writing instead of laying the secretary/nurse option on pretty thick. Vulnerable me might have left high school with hey, I’m going to be a writer! Instead of a vague I have no clue how to fit in.

I look back at the two of us sitting face to face in her office trying to come up with what I should do, who I should be, with fifteen minutes for her to study my file, and all that she was able to help me with was…absolutely nothing, that’s what.

Here’s what she said to me: You can make more money as a secretary. But if you go to nursing school the benefits for your family are better.

Benefits? Family? Death to a seventeen year old.

She certainly said nothing that helped me perceive my peculiarities as the very traits a writer needs. Gradually, through the years, I learned this on my own. There are amazing guidance counselors, I’m sure of it. Just as I’m sure the word “guidance” affixes the word “counselor” for a good reason. But I knew, even then, that the woman before me was going to be of no help to me whatsoever.

High school, for me, bristles with so many of these memories.

Luckily, in time, all the lost little parts of me came together, together enough anyway (there are still plenty of holes), to make me see how I really had no choice about what I was meant to do in this world because I was already doing it.

Just as you are, Rose. And it’s terrific, isn’t it?

So keep following the swerving stretch of road onto the next page. And more than anything, insist on passion.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Sanelli’s latest book is Among Friends. She is a featured speaker at the 2011 Northwest Flower and Garden Show. For more information, visit Mary Lou Sanelli’s website at www.marylousanelli.com

INS becomes INSCAPE

Debbi Lester — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 01:37:37 GMT

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service Federal Building located at 815 Airport Way South in Seattle, Washington, becomes Inscape Art Studios. Opening events are to be held on Saturday and Sunday, October 16 to 17 and include bands, art, and more! For information, please go to www.inscapearts.org.

Hands

Debbi Lester — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:39:04 GMT

I’ve been around the neighborhood long enough to bore people with my “used to be” stories: the art gallery that used to be a hardware store, the New Age Bookshop that used to be a video store, the video store that used to sell gourmet food.

Honestly, if not one new “it used to be” ever popped into mind again, I could write the past tense, happily forever, just by reliving the basics: the kitsch shop that used to sell flowers, the leaf-blowers that used to be rakes.

There’s a subtext here, of course, and I’m at the mercy of it: I found a photograph of my husband. Or, Larry how he “used to be.”

I thought about shoving the photo back into the book it fell out of. I don’t want too much history backing up on me, which will surely happen if I stare at Larry too long. After all, I fell in love with him when I was twenty. Larry—so self-directed, so handsome.

I wind up focusing on the photo until my thoughts find their way into the deepest, most stunning places, kindling the most tender feelings I’ve felt in a long time. From my ears to my knees, a thunderbolt of nostalgia. One memory after another. I see love in the photo as clearly as I see my own hand holding it.

I stash it. Unlike most of my friends, I don’t have dozens of framed photographs adorning the shelves of my home. I will one day again, surely. But right now, my work requires I be a tad nomadic, and too many photos sort of short circuits my flow.

I remember when I tried letting all the photos on my hard drive revolve as my screen saver. One by one, my entire past came at me in two second intervals. It drove me bonkers. I’m quite proud of my achievements, the lives I’ve lived. But, I swear, every time I passed my monitor, I had a little heart attack. All that emotion really slowed me down.

Anyway, I’ll forget half of what I saw in the photo if I don’t get on with it: Larry. His hands, specifically. How swollen his knuckles were from building the boat we were to live in. A dory. Our first home. His fingers were the color of wood. New skin grew right over the dirt. His callouses were so thick they added a good half-inch to his palms. If he nicked them, they drew no blood.

And look at that mess of curly hair! No wonder my dad said he looked like Charles Manson.

About a year before the photo was taken, Larry picked me up hitchhiking to the Olympic Hot Springs. I moved in with him a week later. We lived in an old barn in Sequim. It was the eighties.

My most vivid memory of his hands then, in total-lust stage, was how he couldn’t let his hands rub my legs covered in nylon tights without making a crackling sound, or lay in the dark with me on a double sleeping bag, unzipped and opened flat, with hands that prowled easily, without catching on each lofty seam.

That’s how Larry’s hands used to be. I study such things.

Which brings me to Larry’s hands now: Smooth, nick-less as a slab of marble. Around the age of forty, like many the boatbuilder before him, he left the “sail around the world” dream to find work that 1) paid, and 2) let him use his mind as much as his hands.

Larry’s hands are so clean now I call them white-collar-pink.

Either way, in boat building or business, then or now, Larry never wavered from being the kind of man who would never, ever drive a bent nail deeper into the grain of wood just to get the job done.

Rare, huh?

And why, I believe, there is more at work in our marriage than two people trying their best.

Hands. I know you know what I mean.

Mary Lou Sanelli

Mary Lou Sanelli’s latest book is Among Friends.
www.marylousanelli.com

Meditation on Solitude

Debbi Lester — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:35:12 GMT

Here, the night is yours.

No one lurking in its dark folds.

Marvel in the journey.

Rest your head against a tree bole,

slide onto a dilapidated bench,

or march into Green Lake.

No one will ask where you’ve been.

Enter night’s quietude, pull it inside you.

You are beholden to the Milky Way,

the maples, and stones tripping feet.

You don’t grow more balanced,

but find ease with being unbalanced.

Even in solitude, you aren’t.

The crows, the caterpillars,

the squirrels in their dreys.

The ground you traverse

will not mislead you.

It will hold you up.

Janée J. Baugher
Seattle, Washington

Janée J. Baugher, originally from Renton, is the author of the collection of poems, Coördinates of Yes (Ahadada Books, 2010). She teaches Creative Writing at Richard Hugo House. Visit: http://JaneeJBaugher.wordpress.com