Impulse

It’s been a long time since I wrote about art­walk. Tonight’s was a blast. It also ham­mered home the trend that the most inter­est­ing stuff isn’t in the swank gal­leries on Occidental Ave any­more (Davidson excepted), but in the lit­tle off-beat places that you have to work a lit­tle to find. (Mirroring my musi­cal and cin­e­matic tastes exactly).

Ron Reeder’s show at Wall Space was a treat. The show is entirely pho­to­graphic nudes done in a vari­ety of inter­est­ing ways. Some are fan­ci­ful mon­tages that reminded me of Uelsmann’s work — winged angels, ghostly reflec­tions in pools of water, the birth of Venus, etc. (See pho­tos 14 – 20 on Wall Space’s site). Others are mys­te­ri­ous images printed as tin­types — yes, civil war era tech­nol­ogy. The process gives them a dark­ness that ampli­fies their mys­tery. The back room of the gallery holds more typ­i­cal nude stud­ies, which you can gloss over on your way to see the fun of the show: the “toys”. Throwing all typ­i­cal con­cepts of fram­ing to the wind, Reeder mounted his pho­tos in a num­ber of inter­est­ing, hand-made con­trap­tions. First is a series of stand­ing nudes mounted on a wheel, which was con­nected through a series of gears and pul­leys to a crank — giv­ing you a kind of kine­mato­scope. Continuing the Victorian riff, another photo — of a late 19th cen­tury pho­tog­ra­pher pho­tograph­ing a nude — is hung with a lace cur­tain over it. The cur­tain can be rolled up with a lit­tle crank at the top. Finally — and most allur­ing — is the nude of an asian woman lying down, mounted in a long wooden box with a japan­ese slid­ing screen in front (and every­one slid the screen back, gig­gling to them­selves). I liked how the toys invited par­tic­i­pa­tion in a way that mir­rored the com­plic­ity of the model with the pho­tog­ra­pher — like every­one was in on the game.
Following Yesler towards the water, our happy crew made a dis­cov­ery: the artists lofts at 619 Western. Five labyrinthine floors of artists lofts — many of them live-in. Every one was packed with great work. The diver­sity of work is over­whelm­ing — from clas­sic land­scapes, to fetish pho­tog­ra­phy (com­plete with impro­vised goth club), to stu­dent works, to paint­ings, etch­ings, graf­fiti, and water­color. Just about any­thing you could imag­ine on a wall, somebody’s got on a wall in this place. Happily, the build­ing was full of an equally diverse range of view­ers. This place makes the TK lofts up the street look like a side-show. There was a lot to see and it was well worth it. (My favorites were some of the work by Shawn Foote).

Related posts:

1. Seatle Artwalk: 2/06
2. Seattle Artwalk: 3/06