Articles

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. 

"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.

“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

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.

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.

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.

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.