(Original post, announcing Betty Bowen Award finalists, here.) Finalists this year are Jovencio de la Paz and Josh Faught from Oregon; Jenny Heishman, Sean M. Johnson and Matthew Offenbacher from Seattle. The Northwest's oldest award for visual artists is now $15,000 with two runner-up awards of $2,500. Jen Graves wrote that she thought that Heishman and Offenbacher were the "ones to beat."I'm glad I'm not on the jury, because I'd want to give it to all of them. This is the strongest lineup of Bowen finalists in the history of the award. If I … [Read more...]

(Photo, Gretchen Bennett)During the day at Seattle's Dirty Shed, an exhibit conventional in format if not delivery hung on the walls. On one side were paintings by Jason Hirata. He made them by mixing with blue pigment the sweat he generated in cleaning out the space.Facing them were the tiny collages of Sol Hasemi. He made them using wood samples from a flooring shop with keepsake-tags for scrapbooks ordered online.One, in particular:At night, however, Hirata and Hashemi improvised with florescent tubes of light.Photo, Gretchen Bennett. Left … [Read more...]

Hoedown from Rodeo from Eleanor Stewart on Vimeo.Throw Momma From The Train reaches a satisfactory conclusion with the presentation of a pop-up book. In 1987, when the movie came out, such books were slender threads in the world of literature, and their childishness could be assumed as a plot device.The connective between pop-up and moving image is the flip book. Twenty-two years after momma got the boot, artists have managed to create a form of everything at once: drawings, pop-up books, flip books and videos. William Kentridge comes to mind … [Read more...]

From painter Joanne Mattera, here, including number one, which is, Don't Jump!Small world department: Edward Winkleman opened a thread this morning on the subject of dealing with bad reviews. I've written my share, even though if I've freely chosen the artist (as opposed to being assigned), I've rarely picked someone whose work I find to be without consequence. A review is an engagement, an examination of the specifics of a response written to evoke response in others. Who wants to dance with the dead? Nothing will come of nothing. As Grace … [Read more...]

Hyman Bloom died Wednesday at age 96. (Holland Cotter's obit here. Image via Art Critical.)Selma Waldman died last year in Seattle at age 78.(My obit here. Images via Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.)Although he enjoyed wide critical favor in the 1950s, both artists are essentially outsiders. They are center stage in a particular moment only in so far as their work is misunderstood in it. Where they find resonance is with each other. Even though he was mystical and she materialist, they are each best understood in the context of their … [Read more...]

Artists love Project Runway, but PR doesn't love them back. In the first two episodes, it managed to eliminate the two people whose aesthetic is way off-the-rack.Dave White on first episode: Verdict: LiLo took out her frustrations on the girl who looked like Sam Ronson. All the judges did. And I think that cheats us, the viewers. Because how many short-haired, pixie-ish, spaced-out-art-girls-who-could-very-easily-be-lesbians do we ever get on Runway? PRECIOUS FEW. THAT'S HOW MANY. This show has homos seeping from its pores. Boring, tacky, … [Read more...]

Via Heirloom American kitsch hasn't received the credit it deserves for its contribution to the idea of colors circling each or stacked in piles, sometimes as poles and occasionally planks.Bruce NaumanFrances Celentano Jun KanekoMatt Browning … [Read more...]

Therman Statom had the glass-house-as-sculpture field to himself, beginning in the 1970s.In the 1990s, Louise Bourgeois muscled her way in.(Cell (Glass spheres and hands), 1990-1993)Statom's houses are a solace and Bourgeois' suitable for involuntary confinement. Somewhere between these polarities are all later entries into what's becoming a crowded field.Deb Jones - (I'm being followed by a moon shadow.)Giles Bettison - House as a consumer product. Your life in your purse.Jane Bruce - Down the hatch.Rob Fisher - For those who prefer to hide as … [Read more...]

Bad news from Portland, via VSversus: There is an amazing auction happening right now, to benefit a dear friend of mine. Rachael Jensen, a dazzling member of the band Parenthetical Girls, has suffered a major tragedy. Four members of her immediate family were involved in a fatal car accident while traveling home from an annual family reunion. Her father and two brothers were rushed to an intensive care facility, and are now in the early stages of their recovery. Tragically, family matron Kris Jensen, 51, passed away at the scene. Kris' extreme … [Read more...]

From the department of great covers, Arcade Fire does Talking Heads, via CAUGHT UP INSANITY: … [Read more...]

Acclaimed in Europe and Asia, Shimamoto has not enjoyed the prominence he deserves in the United States. Suddenly, he's lighting up both coasts, in Target Practice at the Seattle Art Museum and Under Each Other's Spell: Gutai and New York at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center on Long Island.(Photo via) … [Read more...]

DWG, a look at contemporary mark making, opens 6-9 p.m. at OHGE, featuring Gala Bent, Timothy Cross, Linda Hutchins, Counsel Langley, Peter Foucault, Kevin Haas and Scott Kolbo.Good group.Bent: … [Read more...]

My capacity to appreciate arts elimination shows is ever increasing. I catch every episode of Project Runway, So You Think You Can Dance and American Idol. I hadn't seen America's Best Dance Crew till this season and only tuned in because Massive Monkees is on it. In Seattle, MM is hard to miss. I've seen its members in small clubs and large stadiums, during competitions and solitary star turns, but I've never seen them so flat as they are on America's Best Dance Crew.I blame the show. Its tight, brassy format kills what's best in its subject. … [Read more...]

The light looks as if it's crawling out of its skin. His Web site. … [Read more...]

After Betty Bowen's funeral, a friend remembered her rousing him from a deep sleep in the early a.m. After his grumpy hello, her melodious voice came through the phone line. What have you done for the polar bear today? Bowen died in 1977 at age 58. Although chiefly remembered for prodigious cheerleading on behalf of Northwest artists, she was also a fashion-forward supporter of civil rights, ecology and education for everybody. In 1978, a group of her friends approached the Seattle Art Museum with the idea of an annual award in her name … [Read more...]

Paul Bogaers is a master of ambiguity. … [Read more...]

Land(s)cape at Soil. Featuring Julie Albert, Lise Graham and Cable Griffith.Beloved by grade-school art teachers, cut-out paper on paper collage can easily be overworked and inert, especially the way Alpert makes them, which is stuffed to the gills. And yet, hers work. It's easy to see the ghost of Romare Bearden in her rough-hewed shapes. She's going for similar territory too, the crumbling walls and make-do repairs of a rundown urban core. She hasn't hitched her wagon to his star, however. His tonalities are dark and tightly orchestrated. … [Read more...]

During a drought in Orange County in the 1990s, there were wide dead lawns spray-painted green and signs nailed to trees saying, "Armed Response." Some people were pretty successful with their faux-nature plots, but others upped the yellow and threw in a bit of neon for a probably unintentional Flash-Gordon-on-the-moon look. Nearly 20 years later, the latter is the shade increasingly showing up in landscapes.(Alice Wheeler, Homeless Camp, Seattle)Barney Kulok, Crescent Street, Queens, New YorkEzra Johnson, still from The Time of Tall … [Read more...]

Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.Song of SolomonArtists threading the scarlet tend to color within the lines. Man RayMan Ray againAnd again, when his favorite erogenous zone became weather.When we're talking about erogenous, however, nobody beats Marilyn Minter's Green Pink Caviar, trailer below and on the link.  For coloring outside the lines, credit goes first to Irving Penn, 1986, ...and second to Ariana Page Russell, whose photos of her … [Read more...]

In response to this post, about a traffic-sign-subverted chair by Amy Pruzan, Ries Niemi wrote:Sorry, I just can't let this one slide- this chair is an almost direct copy, right down to bends, shapes, and construction techniques, of the chairs that my friend (and I say that because I am honored he calls me a friend) Boris Bally has been making for close to 15 years now.Boris has been making all kinds of objects from street signs for longer than Amy Pruzan has been out of 9th grade. Ms. Pruzan may be a great artist, and other works of hers … [Read more...]

According to the BBC, two-thirds of all transplanted organs in China come from executed prisoners.Remember Bodies...The Exhibition? When it was in Seattle in 2006, a PI reporter, gazing at a flayed corpse, noted that no one knew his individual identity. What is known is that he was from China, and when he died his body went unclaimed -- unclaimed, that is, until the dissectors at a Chinese university took him into their care and the show's promoters took him on the road.What is known? Sorry, Charlie. How the government got hold of these bodies … [Read more...]

Experiences vibrating on the same frequency tend to fuse. Below, the mystical, mad end of 21st-century Medievalism.The heart has its reasons which reason does not know. PascalRoberto KusterleOdd NerdrumRoger Ballen … [Read more...]

A few years ago, Seattle's Robert Zverina papered the floor, ceiling and walls of a small space with snapshots of his life. Walking inside was like walking into Zverina's brain and looking around. It was a great place to be. For Zverina, reality is an exalted state. Because he focuses his praises of it with the deceptively casual force of his economy, he makes videos the way John Ashbery Ashberry writes poems: free associating within a theme, one image suggesting a variation on the next. Six of his three-minute pocket videos here, funded by … [Read more...]

Leeman, via My Love for You is a Stampede of Horses, a fabulous face. … [Read more...]

Amy Pruzan: Signs stripped of their authority and distorted into service. … [Read more...]

Each panel of an Anne Appleby painting is covered in primer and as many as 40 coats of oil paint, with wax paste worked into the final layer. Color shimmers at the edges and across the field in a range of astringent shades, nearly but not quite identical. Years went by before I could see her paintings as anything but early Brice Marden also-rans. Maybe she just wore me down. Today I appreciate their specific evocations of the natural world. A grouping of small paintings, for instance, explores a dogwood in her parents' backyard. It's all there, … [Read more...]

ViaSpeaking at The Drawing Center last July, Boris Groys claimed that the contemporary situation is the opposite of the one described by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle.There are no longer any spectators, or even an audience. 'We are all on stage', he argued from the stage, as we watched from the audience, and wrote down what he said. Reflecting on the profusion of the blogs and the mysteries of the readership, Groys mused, 'I am convinced they are being written for God,' later clarifying, 'who, of course, is dead.' … [Read more...]

Via … [Read more...]

Everything Mark Calderon makes, no matter how odd, has a languid beauty. Although drawn to Christian symbols of sacrifice, in his hands the final product is gorgeous. He puts a top hat on his influences, which he describes as: African sculpture, Japanese aesthetics, Mexican folk arts, nature, personal experience and relationships, family, music, Christian art (both Gothic and Medieval) and other artist's creations, are some major influences I draw from. I do not like to create images that read as only one thing, but try to create works that … [Read more...]

Jamel Shabazz's Shabezz's image of a leaping dog, teeth bared, has ambiguous roots. It evokes Andy Warhol's many permutations of Race Riot, after Charles Moore, but might reveal no more than a man playing Frisbee with a tough competitor in the middle of a New York street, bracketed by stop signs. Warhol: … [Read more...]