Openings & Events
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Ongoing
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AHTSIK’NUK (Good with the Hands) A collection of “rare and unusual” carvings from the Nuu-cha-nulth Nations of BC and Washington. Steinbrueck Native Gallery, 2030 Western Ave., 441-3821, steinbruecknativegallery.com. Mon.-Sun., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Through December.
Julie Blackmon and Heidi Kirkpatrick Two photographers show their series side-by-side, one focusing on newly born humans and their growth, the other attempting to give new life to old found objects. G. Gibson Gallery, 300 S. Washington St. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), 587-4033, ggibsongallery.com. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sat. Ends Nov. 29.
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City Dwellers A dozen contemporary Indian artists are represented in this show organized by SAM and originating entirely from the private local collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy (a Microsoft millionaire) and wife Malini Balakrishnan. Scenes and icons from Mumbai to New Delhi are represented via photography and sculpture, from an all-native perspective. As tourists know, India is ridiculously photogenic, from its colorful idols and deities to the slums and beggars. It all depends on what you want to see. Photographer Dhruv Malhotra, for instance, takes large color images of people sleeping in public places—some because they’re poor, others because they simply feel like taking a nap. Nandini Valli Muthiah opts for more stage-managed scenes, posing a costumed actor as the blue-skinned Hindu god Krishna in contemporary settings; in one shot I love, he sits in a hotel suite, like a tired business traveler awaiting a conference call on Skype. Sculptor Debanjan Roby even dares to appropriate the revered figure of Gandhi, rendering him in bright red fiberglass and listening to a white iPod. Apple never made such an ad, of course, but this impudent figure tweaks both India’s postcolonial history and the relentless consumerism that now links us all, from Seattle to Srinagar. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $12–$19. Weds.-Sun.
Ends Feb. 15.
John Economaki and Bridge City Tool Works After suddenly developing a severe allergy to wood dust, woodworker John Economaki had to shift his lifelong practice. He now makes tools for woodworkers—which this exhibit showcases. Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., 425-519-0770, bellevuearts.org. $5-$10. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Ends Feb 1.
Scott Erickson In Alliance = Rebellion, he fuses Indigenous art styles with iconography from the Star Wars series. “How am I not just another white guy stealing from the native tribes for my own benefit?” Erickson asks in his artist statement for the show. Bombsheller Art Labs, 424 Queen Anne Ave., bombshellerartlabs.com. Ends Nov. 10
M.C. Escher, TOMIYUKI SAKUTA, & TYNA ONTKO Surrealism is the name of the game at Davidson this month—prints from the optical madman Escher will tessellate alongside Sakuta’s 100 portraits of bizarre faces and Ontko’s morhping, paper-cut installations. Davidson Galleries, 313 Occidental Ave. S., 624-7684, davidsongalleries.com. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tues-Sat. Ends Nov. 14.
Joy Garnett
Being There is the first solo exhibition from the New York artist, whose paintings meditate on the modern state of the media. Platform Gallery, 114 Third Ave. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), 323-2808, platformgallery.com. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sat. Ends Nov. 29.
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Yumiko Glover This artist left Japan as young college graduate and never went back. After working in business and as a simultaneous translator, she settled in Hawaii, trained as a painter, married an American, and began her second career. Moe: Elements of the Floating World is her first solo show, one that will nicely overlap with SAAM’s Japanese Neo-Pop show by the artist known as Mr. (opening Nov. 22). Glover, by virtue of her sex, wouldn’t receive such acceptance in the Japanese academy; like other educated, independent women, she’s found more freedom outside her homeland. Her bright acrylic paintings look back uneasily on a native culture saturated with anime imagery, sex, video games, schoolgirl fetishes, naive folklore, and the whole kawaii industry. (Moe is a slang shorthand for idealized youth and femininity, where the creepy meets the innocent—usually from a male perspective.) There are gestures toward the languorous old “Floating World” of the Edo period, but they’re mostly overlaid with tokens of the present: cellphone bangles, Sega video-game creatures, jet liners, and nighttime cityscapes. The orb-eyed cuties and too-short plaid skirts are all familiar from manga, only they feel wrenched out of context. Glover’s frames are crowded, not settled, with some areas of the canvas even degrading into pixels—as if the source code has been corrupted. BRIAN MILLER Bryan Ohno Gallery, 521 S. Main St., 459-6857, bryanohno.com. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends December TBD.
Ann Hamilton The famed artist has created new commissioned art for the Henry that she invites viewers to interact with through touch—elements of the show can be ripped off the wall and kept for later. Henry Art Gallery (UW campus), 543-2280, henryart.org. $6-$10. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Weds., Sat. & Sun. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Thurs. & Sat. Ends April 26.
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Inflorescence Six stylistically distinct Washington artists present work all stemming from a common theme: the world of plants. Kirkland Arts Center, 620 Market St., 822-7161, kirklandartscenter.org. 11 a.m.- 6 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends Nov. 25.
Aaron Jasinski and Augie Pagan In Gods and Monsters, the artists deconstruct the concept of good and evil in pop culture. Ltd. Gallery, 501 E. Pine St., 457-2970, ltdartgallery.com. 11 a.m.- 7 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. Ends. Nov. 9.
Lineage: UW Faculty & Students This retrospective takes a look at the work of the heavy-hitting artists who have graduated from UW’s hallowed halls, including Chuck Close, Jacob Lawrence, Roger Shimomura, and Doris Chase. Seattle artREsource, 625 First Ave., 838-2695, seattleartresource.com. 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends Nov. 22.
Nick Mount A showcase from the leading figure in the Australian studio glass movement since the early 1970s. Bellevue Arts Museum, Ends Feb 1.
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Never Finished This new sculptural installation by local artists Etta Lilienthal and Ben Zamora presents a tangle of old-school fluorescent bulbs—not those fancy, efficient, newfangled LEDs—suspended from the ceiling like a mobile. (It doesn’t move, however.) Never Finished is always plugged in, always on, though many of the tubes (of about three dozen) appear to have been painted black. The cluster is hung like an airborne game of pick-up sticks, the tubes pointing this way and that, gradually rising in the atrium like a glowing, fractal cloud. There’s seemingly no order or direction to the piece, which has an almost haphazard construction—until you look at all those precisely aligned black power cords. The curse of good lighting design is the cabling and wiring, what to do with all those blocky plugs and transformers. Part of what I like about Never Finished is its somewhat naked, unfinished dressing of the power bricks, which lie in a snake pit on the floor. Nothing is being concealed here for prim art’s sake, though I suspect the passing architects from Suyama Peterson Deguchi must hate the untidy jumble. But the cords above have been painstakingly aligned. They fall on a precise vertical axis, like rain or drapery, contrasting with the unruly tubes. They make you appreciate how light, apart from lasers, is omnidirectional—radiating outward and unconstrained, unaffected by gravity. (Apart from black holes, of course.) The light’s intensity falls off with distance, too, as you walk around the installation to view it from different angles. There’s no correct perspective on the piece, no final sense of proper lighting design (think of James Turrell’s fastidious, numinous Skyspace at the Henry). The only possible order or finality will come when all the bulbs burn out; then darkness will impose its aesthetic. BRIAN MILLER. Suyama Space, 256-0809, 2324 Second Ave., suyamaspace.org. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri. Ends Dec. 19.
Pan Gongkai As we see in Withered Lotus Cast in Iron, his first U.S. show, Pan is very much a safe, state-sanctioned Chinese artist with academy positions and institutional laurels. He’s no dissident, no innovator, and his large ink-on-paper paintings have a comfortable heft and solidity. They’d look good on the walls of bankers’ high-rise conference rooms in Shanghai or Hong Kong. Organic forms are paramount; there’s even one landscape (a moonlit lake from 2005); and the recent Frye-commissioned works are studies of the richly symbolic lotus flower. Pan, born two years prior to the 1949 birth of Communist China, lived through the Cultural Revolution (when his father, a political prisoner, was persecuted to death). But to succeed in the modern Chinese state, he’s learned to paint around such unpleasant things. The patient lotus endures muddy tumult; the flower can survive 1,000 years and even seemingly resurrect itself from death. If not a symbol of overt resistance, it remains aloof from man’s petty, short-term squabbling. A century’s political upheaval means nothing to such delicate fortitude, which Pan presents on a near-monumental scale. BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., 622-9250, fryemuseum.org. Free. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sun. (Open to 7 p.m. Thurs.) Ends Jan. 18.
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Pop Departures This exhibit takes a look at the Pop Art explosion of the ’60s, tracing its influence from Warhol and Lichtenstein to those whose work can be considered direct descendents, like Lynn Hershman Leeson and Jeff Koons. Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $12–$19. Weds.-Sun.
Ends Jan. 11
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Skyspace James Turrell’ Skyspace stands on two concrete pillars in the Henry’s erstwhile sculpture courtyard. On the exterior, thousands of LED fixtures under the structure’s frosted glass skin create slowly shifting colors, making the pavilion a spectacular piece of public art every night. Inside, the ellipse of sky seen through the chamber’s ceiling suddenly appears to be very, very close, a thin membrane bulging into the room. Wispy bits of cirrus clouds passing by appear to be features on the slowly rotating surface of a luminous, egg-shaped blue planet suspended just overhead. Emerging from the Skyspace, I find the night wind and the light in the clouds come to me through freshly awakened senses. A dreamy, happy feeling follows me home like the moon outside my car window. DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery
#Social Medium The Frye is proudly calling this its first “crowd-curated” exhibit, selected in August from 232 museum-nominated paintings by 4,468 online voters. Now 41 works are on view through January 4, with their likes tallied and selected online comments appended. The top five vote-getters are displayed up front, with the following 35 bridesmaids arrayed more by curator’s eye. The elect group is led by the obscure—to me, anyway—Julius Scheuerer and his 1907 Peacock, which earned 3,525 likes on Tumblr. It’s no great painting, but it’s got an easy, Audubon-style accessibility. Plus there are animals involved (as with #4, Moulting Ducks), and there’s a landscape aspect to it (like #5, The Shepherdess). I would’ve placed my money on the Frye’s signature Franz von Stuck nude Sin to win, but it ended up #2. Plumage trumps sex? Go figure. The danger here is the trivialization of art as clickbait. (“You’ll be shocked by this one weird painting the Frye curators don’t want you to see!”) Moreover, the show’s conceit is better and broader than the art it actually contains. The Frye’s crowdsourcing experiment is another example of the leaderless quantification of taste, like The New York Times’ list of most-e-mailed articles. If other people think it’s good, you’re more likely to turn in that direction. Peacock won by a wide plurality over the next four paintings not because it’s better but because it was trending upward, like a penny stock or a Taylor Swift song. BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, ends Jan. 4.
Jason Walker A giant deer towers over the city, like all those Amazon construction cranes above South Lake Union. An elevated roadway turns to a river, pouring commuters over the brink of a waterfall. Aberrant chickens lay coins instead of eggs. Welcome to the fanciful urban menagerie of Bellingham’s Walker, whose solo show On the River, Down the Road has been specially created for BAM. The local artist works mainly in ceramics, combining whimsy and satire, “exploring American ideas of nature and how technology has changed our perceptions of it.” That notion of transmogrification seems apt in our booming, post-recession Northwest (Bellevue is sprouting as fast as Seattle, after all). There’s a woodsy surrealism to Walker’s work, as if unfathomable forces—hatched almost from dreams—are burrowing into our conscious cityscape. With Bertha slumbering underground, almost like a dormant monster, his fairy-tale phantasmagoria may be closer to reality than we think. BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, ends March 1.
