Visual Arts City Dwellers: Contemporary Art From India Photography, sculpture, and video

Published 8:32 am Saturday, February 14, 2015

Visual Arts

City Dwellers: Contemporary Art From India Photography, sculpture, and video art branch far from the usual peasant and Hindu themes. Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 NA Ongoing through Sunday, February 15, 2015

25 Alumni To celebrate Gage Academy of Art’s 25th anniversary, 25 alumni from the school will show their recent work. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Thurs. Ends Feb. 27. AXIS Pioneer Square, 308 1st Ave SouthSeattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

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Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases Ai has a contentious relationship with traditional ceramics, having famously-or infamously, depending on your perspective-dropped and shattered a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn for a 1995 photo series. It was a shocking and still controversial act, a rupture and repudiation of officially sanctioned history and taste, a slap at the canon and an insistence on the value of the new. (Look what we’re doing now, Ai is saying; new and important Chinese art is being made today.) These vases aren’t inherently precious. They’re old, yes, but Ai was able to buy these earthenware vessels in bulk because there are so many of them, because China has so much history. Our nine vases were sloppily dipped in various bright shades of inexpensive industrial paint. The new has been crudely overlaid upon the old; history is erased, and the action forces you to consider what exactly was there to begin with. Ai’s concealing is also revealing, a kind of emperor-has-no-clothes provocation. How many ordinary Chinese factory workers would want such an old, unpainted urn? And how many Chinese billionaires, plus rich Western collectors abroad, would want one of Ai’s signature works? Ever the shrewd appropriator of found materials, Ai is the one setting the price on objects both new and old. (10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sun., 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $7-$10 Friday, February 13, 2015

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Amanda Knowles The artist grew up with a scientist mother, and pays homage to her upbringing in Nescience by utilizing diagrams and a scanning electron microscope to create her works. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends Feb. 28. Davidson Galleries, 313 Occidental Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

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Annual Juried Exhibition Scott Lawrimore sorted through 1,500 submissions and picked his favorites for this exhibition. Noon-5 p.m. Wed.-Sat. Ends Feb. 28. Tashiro Kaplan Building, 115 Prefontaine Pl S, Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

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BAM Biennial: Knock on Wood Again, there’s a very materials-focused emphasis to this biannual group show. Clay and fiber art were featured in 2012 and 2010, respectively; now it’s the chisel-and-mallet set’s turn to display their creations. Some of the three dozen artists featured you know or have seen before at BAM (or local galleries), like Rick Araluce, Whiting Tennis, and W. Scott Trimble. The juried selection offers every variety of woodworking from the Northwest, ranging from indigenous Native American carvings to smartly modern furniture that might fit into your SLU condo. In addition to a juried award, which bestows a future solo show and a $5,000 prize (the winner to be announced this week), there’s a popular balloting system whereby visitors can select their own favorite pieces. Unlike the Frye’s current crowdsourced #SocialMedium show, here you cast your voting on regular old scraps of paper-appropriate, of course, since they were originally made of the same material the artists are using. (Through March 29; see bellevuearts.org for hours.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Friday, February 13, 2015

Bed Bath & Between Nine local and international artists display work in a “hand-painted wallpaper” environment. SOIL Gallery. Noon-5 p.m. Thu.-Sun. Ends Feb. 28. Tashiro Kaplan Building, 115 Prefontaine Pl S, Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

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Changing Form The most popular viewpoint in the city is often a bore for kids. Whenever I walk up to Kerry Park, on the south prow of Queen Anne Hill, shutterbugs, wedding parties, and sightseers are intent on the panoramic view. Watch what the children do, however, when they squirm free of parental grasp or out of the camera’s frame. Installed in 1971 as a bequest from the same family that gave us the priceless strip park, Changing Form is one of those large Henry Moore-influenced abstract steel sculptures that don’t always wear their age so well. There’s nothing fun or frivolous about the two stacked cutout forms, pure geometry, yet kids flock to the 15-foot-high structure. It’s shaped a bit like building blocks from childhood, and the lower portion forms an eminently climbable cradle. Not many visitors bother to read the brass plaque identifying the artist. Would you be surprised to learn it’s a woman? Very little public art in Seattle-or at least that from the pure commission, pre-public-funding era-comes from female hands. Born here, Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) studied architecture at the UW, then turned to painting in the late ‘40s. By that time she was a wife and mother of two kids-not some kind of beatnik, not an outrageous headline-grabber like the celebrated (male) artists of the day. An early-’70s divorce freed her to move to Manhattan, where she worked in film and video and lived a thoroughly avant-garde life at the Chelsea Hotel. Sometimes you gotta leave Seattle to find bohemia. Just don’t tell that to your kids while they’re playing. BRIAN MILLER Kerry Park, 211 W. Highland Drive, Seattle, WA 98119 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

Chris Berens Eerie, gothic paintings of pale, childlike figures in dark settings. Noon-5 p.m. Wed.-Sat. Ends Feb. 28. Roq La Rue Gallery, 532 First Ave. S., Seattle, WA, 98104 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

Christine Sharp Impressionistic landscape paintings of natural landmarks. 10 a.m.- 5:30 p.m. Mon.-Sat. Ends March 1. Lisa Harris Gallery, 1922 Pike Place, Seattle, WA 98101 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

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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. (Thurs: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Ends Feb. 15) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 $12.50-$19.50 Friday, February 13, 2015

Dale Chihuly The Tacoma native and glass artist has donated several works to TAM, now on permanent display. See museum website for hours. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Friday, February 13, 2015

David Alexander The artist, an avid environmentalist, portrays his landscapes in a highly fluid, melty paint style, prodding at the fact that the subjects are in danger of slipping away thanks to climate change. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends Feb. 28 Foster/White Gallery, 220 Third Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

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DuPen Fountain Seattle Center is in transition, yet again. Memorial Stadium is crumbling. The Fun Forest has closed. The Sonics may come back (briefly) to KeyArena, but then what? But in certain quiet corners of the civic campus, things are working just fine. Though briefly endangered by a skateboard park last summer, located northwest of the Key in a concrete box canyon, one such enduring element from the original 1962 World’s Fair design is DuPen Fountain. A UW professor and sculptor, Everett DuPen (1912-2005) worked in concert with prominent modernist architect Paul Thiry, who designed the old Seattle Center Coliseum and other Center sites, to establish the water garden (sometimes also called the Fountain of Creation). Local tots and moms use it as a wading pool in summer. When the splashing subsides in autumn, it’s a place for calm contemplation. The bronze forms within do suggest creation; poised over the waters and boulders, there’s a sense of nature struggling to take shape, emerging as if from tide pools. Unlike the Garden of Eden, life isn’t raised by a single divine touch. The inchoate organic and the human form are here linked together. In the fountain’s comparatively short history, two generations of mothers and children have waded in these waters. Those life cycles echo the longer path of evolution, perhaps giving hope for the grounds outside the fountain. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

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George Tsutakawa: Fountain of Wisdom Years have passed, and the downtown library designed by Rem Koolhaas has agreeably woven itself into the urban fabric. You may not like the ramps or shelving or noise inside, but tourists love to photograph the glassy, faceted exterior, and most architectural critics agree on its modernist merit. Still, walking past, I sometimes miss the small, rather cheap, but more intimate old International Style stack of boxes. Built in 1960, demolished in 2001, the prior library had a reader-friendly scale-nooks and crannies, and a courtyard containing Fountain of Wisdom by sculptor George Tsutakawa. The late local artist (1910-1997) didn’t live long enough to see his work-the city’s first public art commission of note-relocated to the corner of Fourth and Madison, where it now sits next to the new library entrance. But where is the plaque? The abstract bronze flanged structure developed from a series Tsutakawa modeled on the obo-in Japanese, a pile or cairn of rounded stones left by travelers-a shape you’ll find echoed in his many other subsequent fountains designed around the Northwest. But Fountain of Wisdom also rests in the postwar visual vocabulary of Brancusi and Jim Flora. It’s not just traditional; there’s something a little Jetsons about it-like a metal flower on a distant planet. It’s all wrong for the aesthetic of Koolhaas, who probably hates flowers or anything curved and organic that defies his rigid geometry. For that reason, I like the plucky little footnote to the big new building looming over it. Now about that plaque… BRIAN MILLER Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

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 Jason 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. (Closed Mondays; see bellevuearts.org for hours.) BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., Bellevue, WA 98004 $5-$10 Friday, February 13, 2015

Jodi Waltier She primarily works in intricately dyed and inked fabrics, here presented as flat, wall-mounted works. Noon-5 p.m. Fri.-Sat. Ends Feb. 28. Tashiro Kaplan Building, 115 Prefontaine Pl S, Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

John Radtke Minimalist sculptures and drawings created by the local artist during a recent residency in Wyoming. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri. Ends Feb. 26. Gallery4Culture, 101 Prefontaine Pl. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), Seattle, WA, 98104 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

Justin Martin Using materials that purposefully recall his rural upbringing, Martin creates “poetic sculptures” in his new show Windburnt. Noon-5 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. Ends Feb. 28. Tashiro Kaplan Building, 115 Prefontaine Pl S, Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

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Live On: Mr.’s Japanese Neo-Pop Mr. is his name, which makes the post-Takashi Murakami art of its creator sound more formal than it is. A candy-colored, anime-saturated explosion of shallow surfaces and Hello Kitty kawaii, the work on view here will mostly be paintings, some quite large. Video games and cartoon characters are obvious points of departure for Mr., yet they’re objects of nostalgia-not tokens of an optimistic, technology-augmented future. Mr. was born in 1969 and came of age during Japan’s 1980s economic boom. (Remember those American fears of the period, repeated in books and movies, that Japan would supplant our might?) Then Japan basically collapsed into its ongoing economic slump, giving rise to the no-hope generation known as otaku: depressed, geeky shut-ins with no prospects for real jobs, who live at home-even into their unmarried, asexual 30s-and find succor in comic books, cell phones, computer games, and the Internet. Live On isn’t necessarily a celebration of such malaise; it’s an expression of yearning for bygone times and childish pleasures. The movement is sometimes called moe (literally “budding,” or coming of age), and Mr. also creates assemblages from the talismans and scraps of his youth. His art is equal parts sugar and sadness. (See museum website for hours.) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), Seattle, WA 98112 $5-$7 Friday, February 13, 2015

Mark Callen and Rachel Dorn Yakima’s Dorn creates colorful, aquatic-looking ceramic sculpture. Callen paints saturated natural landscapes. Noon-6 p.m. Wed.-Sat. Ends Feb. 28. Core Gallery, 117 Prefontaine Place S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

Melinda Hannigan Oil paintings of unusually tight close-ups of portions of seafaring vessels. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sun. Ends March 1. Patricia Rovzar, 1225 Second AveSeattle, WA 98101 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

Northwest in the West: Exploring Our Roots On view are some 70 works by regional artists including Guy Anderson, Justin Colt Beckman, Fay Chong, Gaylen Hansen, Eirik Johnson, and Paul Horiuchi. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402 $8-$10 Friday, February 13, 2015

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POP! 3 The pop-culture-themed art gallery’s final show, featuring prints from all of its previous shows over its four year lifespan. 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Tue.-Sat. Ends Feb. 28. Ltd. Art Gallery – NEW LOCATION, 501 E. Pine St. Seattle, WA 98122 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

Ryoko Tajiri This Japanese artist specializes in pseudo-cubist portraiture, rendering subjects out of painted geometric planes. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends Feb. 28. Hall Spassov Gallery, 319 Third Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98104 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

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Skyspace James Turrell’s 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. (Weds., Sat., Sun., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Thurs., Fri., 11 a.m.-9 p.m.) DAVID STOESZ Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98195 $6-$10 Friday, February 13, 2015

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Stronghold The original UW campus downtown was once covered with old-growth timber, as was its present location when the school moved north in 1895. Now, as that institution continues its inexorable sprawl south of Pacific Street toward Portage Bay, New York artist Brian Tolle reminds us of that arboreal past with his recently installed Stronghold. It is at first glance nothing more than a stump on a manicured lawn. Walk closer (sprinklers permitting) and you’ll see it’s a constructed stump, an invented artifact made of inexpensive cedar slats. Measuring about 23 feet in diameter-with a seating area within, possibly for picnics-Stronghold suggests the enormous tree trunks that once drove this region’s economy, that helped establish the city and our state’s first university (founded in 1861). But such towering cedars and firs are all gone, of course, and Tolle’s materials are of the size and grade you could buy at any lumberyard. This neo-stump stands next to a new UW bioengineering building (near 15th Avenue Northeast and Pacific)-appropriate, since technology is the new timber of the Northwest. In shape, the irregular ring also echoes our skyline of ancient, crumbling volcanoes (Mount St. Helens in particular) that were formed in violence. The installation recreates local history before it met the crosscut saw. BRIAN MILLER University of Washington Campus, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., Seattle,WA 98105 Free Friday, February 13, 2015

Water Mover Unbuilt lots, even sloped blackberry patches sitting on unstable soil, are fast disappearing in Seattle. Particularly in Fremont, where townhouses sprout like mushrooms, any real-estate resistance is appreciated. Sitting next to the Fremont Branch Library, A.B. Ernst Park was completed four years ago with a spiral ramp and stair maze leading down to the alley behind the old P.C.C. Designed by Bend, Oregon landscape architect J.T. Atkins, it seemed a perfect place to sit and read in the south-facing light, but-D’oh!-a guard rail was deemed necessary to keep kids and other visitors from toppling off the textured concrete seats and into the sage. Thus, Seattle sculptor Jenny Heishman was commissioned by the city and Fremont Neighborhood Council to build a fence that didn’t look like a fence. Water Mover is anything but. Its scalloped orange half-pipes are like an aquaduct to nowhere. The broken ring of solid yet irregularly situated water chutes playfully suggests some irrigation scheme where none is needed (the plants are all indigenous). Here the runoff is simply directed into a bucket, or onto the porous concrete and into the ground. Summer may be the best time to enjoy the park, but to better appreciate Heishman’s contribution, take your umbrella during a November downpour and see how the contraption works. BRIAN MILLER Ernst Park, 723 N. 35th St., Seattle, WA 98103 FREE Friday, February 13, 2015

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Wawona At the center of the atrium at MOHAI, newly relocated to the Naval Reserve Armory in South Lake Union, is a permanent new sculptural installation that helps anchor the museum to our maritime past. From 1897 into the ‘40s, the schooner Wawona carried cargo on Puget Sound. Then it was moored for decades, rotting, near the Center for Wooden Boats (now MOHAI’s neighbor). The upkeep wasn’t worth it, and the hull was dry-docked for salvage four years ago. That’s where artist John Grade comes in. As part of MOHAI’s $60 million renovation, Grade was commissioned to create something from the old Douglas fir timbers that had been preserved below the waterline. They’ve been dried and sanded, carefully drilled with little round fissures (suggesting both ship’s portals and worm holes), then bolted and hung from the ceiling in a hollow, tapered tower that recalls both a ship’s mast and a tree. The five-and-a-half-ton Wawona is intended to be kinetic, Grade told me at its unveiling: “I want kids to bang on it.” Enter the enclosure at its base, and you can push and sway the whole structure, the loose metal fittings creaking like a ship rocking in its berth. Look up through the 65-foot tower, and it pierces the roof. Below (viewed through a Plexiglas window), it almost touches the water. Both ends are intended to decay over time, says Grade: “I’m interested in how things change. Nothing’s permanent.” The fate of the old Wawona bears him out, yet this recycled new Wawona is a prime example of regionally sourced art. “It’s about as local as you can do it,” Grade adds. “It’s definitely my most ambitious piece.” BRIAN MILLER Museum of History and Industry, 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle WA 98109 $12-$14 Friday, February 13, 2015

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Visual Arts City Dwellers: Contemporary Art From India Photography, sculpture, and video

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