Impulse

This month’s Seattle art­walk was a good one. For those of you not in and around Seattle, art­walk takes place on the first thurs­day of every month; all the gal­leries and muse­ums down­town stay open late, which makes for a fun evening of strolling around the town and ogling art with friends. I try to go every month. My favorites this month: the stu­dent show at D’Adamo/Woltz, mez­zot­ints at Davidson, and Amanda Koster’s pho­tos in the Tashiro/Kaplan Artspace project. Here’s the roundup:

Street ven­dors — Usually there are sev­eral artists lin­ing Occidental Ave show­ing off all man­ner of art­work. This month, there were only three artists, hud­dling together, brav­ing the wind, rain, and cold. I com­mend them for their hero­ism, but I hope they weren’t out there long…
D’Adamo/Woltz Gallery had a very fun show: their annual exhi­bi­tion of stu­dent artists from Pratt Fine Art, Cornish College of the Arts, Northwest College of Art and the University of Washington. The show shakes things up nicely: being stu­dents, they’re a lit­tle more rough & adven­tur­ous than you nor­mally see in a gallery. Keeara Rhoades (UW) Gilliam-esque col­lages were intrigu­ing. Being a font geek, I really liked Casey Curran’s (Cornish) latin char­ac­ters over mechan­i­cal sketches. A few months back, I was com­mis­sioned to do a photo series of decayed food, but Derrick Jeffries (UW) pho­tos of trump any­thing I had shot. Derrick Nobbs’ (Northwest) creepy paint­ings kept draw­ing my atten­tion (and inspired my co-artwalker and I to think up sim­i­larly creepy fairy tales to go with them).
Grover Thurston Gallery had a series of paint­ings that my friend and I decided looked quite nice together, with peo­ple milling about look­ing at them, as seen through the win­dows from the street. Individually, well…
Continuing down Occidental, Davidson rocked with a great mez­zotint show by Carol Wax & Fred Mershimer. This show is very well curated: the artists work goes so well together that I didn’t real­ize it was two artists. Mershimer’s prints of a noc­tur­nal metrop­o­lis draw you into their gothic world. Wax’s prints of vin­tage mechan­i­cal objects — Underwood type­writ­ers, sewing machines, clocks — were my favorite. Being a pho­tog­ra­pher, I loved the film-noir light­ing she cre­ated as well as the gen­tle, smooth curves through­out. I have no idea how she cre­ates such detail by sand­ing a plate of cop­per… You can see the prints online, but it’s just not the same.
Global Art Venue — one of my favorite gal­leries — usu­ally has some­thing really inter­est­ing to see. Usually. The abstracts on the main floor this month didn’t move me to even write down the artist’s name. Downstairs, though, they had Stanislaw Zoladz’s fright­en­ingly real­is­tic water­col­ors that always astound and con­found me (they’re so metic­u­lously made, and the light so accu­rate, that I con­stantly have to check the plac­ard to remind myself that they are indeed water color). If you haven’t seen these, you should.
Another favorite — the Globe Gallery — is a tiny lit­tle pho­tog­ra­phy gallery mas­querad­ing as the foyer of the build­ing — or maybe a foyer mas­querad­ing as a gallery. Either way it’s cool and often has very inter­est­ing pho­tog­ra­phy. This month, they’re show­ing pho­tographs of Burma by Julie McMackin. This show con­fused me. The pho­tos on dis­play did not impress me. In the lit­tle ante­room, though, they had a cat­a­log of the entire series of work — it was full of inter­est­ing images! Maybe I’m just sim­ple, but I would’ve hung the best images on the walls & left oth­ers in the book.
Eastward, Greg Kucera was show­ing Tim Roda. I have mixed reac­tions to Roda — the more nar­ra­tive pho­tos I like. Others, like Untitled #41, leave me scratch­ing my head.
Doug Keyes show of mas­sively mul­ti­ply exposed prints at G. Gibson also didn’t move me. His print of Chinatown signs made me laugh as they matched my first impres­sion of Times Square in NYC last year, but 10 sec­onds later I was ready to move on. A sin­gle print or two, sure, but a whole series? Take a look online and let me know what you think.
Finally, the Trustee Building at 306 Washington is always a treat — this is the home of the Tashiro/Kaplan Artspace Project which filled the build­ing with artists lofts and stu­dios, brim­ming with curiosi­ties. During art­walk, most of the artists throw open their doors to allow us to wan­der about and see their works. It’s like a big artis­tic candy shop — I got so excited I for­got to take notes on the artists. One stu­dio had a creepy pic­ture I just loved: taken from inside a base­ment, a girl out­side stares across a police-tape bor­der, through a win­dow, right into our eyes as we lurk in the dark­ness. Another had an inter­est­ing tower of glass with emul­sion pho­tos of 9/11 ground zero inserted inside. I lin­gered in the Rock Editions gallery look­ing at Stephen Rock’s pen­cil sketches from “Pages from a Diary”.
In the hall­ways of the build­ing, I found an excel­lent exhi­bi­tion I wish were in a street-side gallery so that it could get more vis­i­bil­ity. Amanda Koster’s Aids Is Knocking project doc­u­ments the sto­ries of orphans and wid­ows of AIDS in Kenya. This show is a knock­out. The pho­tos are won­der­fully com­posed with avail­able light used to full advan­tage. The emo­tional ele­ment is much stronger than the tech­ni­cal: the sub­jects are relaxed and com­pletely open. Koster’s com­pas­sion radi­ates through­out. She fur­ther illus­trated the pho­tos by hang­ing, next to each photo, excerpts of her inter­views with that sub­ject (she also made a doc­u­men­tary film). Find a way to see this show. A few of the pho­tos are on her site, but they don’t com­pare to the actual prints.
Rounding out the evening, we adjourned to a bril­liant lit­tle cof­fee shop/bar who’s name I can never remem­ber, but is con­ve­niently located on the east­ern cor­ner east of the Trustee Building — great atmos­phere, drinks, and DJ Thalmer spin­ning some cool grooves that exactly fit the mood.

Related posts:

1. Artwalk: Pioneer Square
2. Seattle Artwalk: 3/06