Zen and Dick's

Sound Transit

Details

124 Broadway, www.soundtransit.org. Scheduled to end Oct. 31.

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More About

• David Attenborough
• Jell-O Desserts
• Religion
• Buddhism

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A shaggy, faux-fur couch, a pair of dancing dresses, and a video seen through a foot-wide cardboard tube now appear in several vacant storefronts just north of Broadway and John. This block is slated for demolition to make way for the Capitol Hill Sound Transit Station, but until then, art will fill the windows. The piece that literally speaks to me features a voice reminiscent of David Attenborough's amplified (from above) into a tiny doorway, speaking about the search for spiritual enlightenment. "It becomes more and more obvious that this world is a floating world," he says. Standing in a doorway across from Dick's Drive-In, you hear the afterlife described as a sort of Jell-O. This piece is by Christian French, a former artist-in-residence with Sound Transit and the curator of this series, entitled STart on Broadway. In the adjacent window French has set up a number of trophies, perhaps 50 in all: bowling, baseball, diving—cheap, gold-colored figurines mounted on gilded bases, many with meditative phrases engraved on the plaques where a sports team's name would go. Inspired by his study of Zen Buddhism in Japan, French has engraved a pair of identical diving trophies with the words "Mind is Buddha" and conversely "No mind is Buddha." In the center of this windowful of faux valuables sits a retro football helmet, near spherical in shape, covered in squares of mirror, dangling an ancient leather strap where you would buckle it tight across your chin. I imagine a head within a disco ball, perhaps a nod to some sort of shining thinking. Maybe the worn metal hinges connecting the earflaps to the helmet are meant to shut out all distracting noise, as the wearer ventures toward, as the voiceover puts it, "mystical illumination."