There is a lot of good art to see in Seattle right now. The work that I like is strong work with integrity and intention. Feel free to click on the links to the right to go to the gallery web-pages and see the art. Even better, you should get out and go see this art, because it is good.
My take-away lesson of the evening was that art can be successful if it is simple and is moved forward. If you start with a simple idea and keep going deeper with it, it gives the idea a chance to live. If you try and make something simple more complicated then the integrity of the idea becomes muddled. Seeing this in writing, it seems a little vague, but I believe it to be true.
G. Gibson has a champion photographer?s work on display. Andrea Modica shares twenty years of photographic work and collaboration. I read in a book out on a table that early in her photographic career Modica stopped at a farm and took some pictures of a girl there. She returned again and again and developed a relationship, both photographic and personal with this chubby girl. As she got older, they became collaborators for this series. Somewhere around 10 years later, she went back to take pictures of the girl when she became bedridden with child onset diabetes. My favorite photo is the one where the girl holds a maleable cat. This show is a must see!
Randy Wood is brilliant. For this show he has made long landscapes of rocks that are very well executed. He has integrated performance art into his gallery show at Soil. Two gerbils are munching on one of his paintings. The gerbils are beautiful and are doing a good job of chewing up his art. One of his paintings will be up for auction to benifit homealive.org.
Judy Blanco has her show ?Marine Layers? up at the Gallery4Culture. This is a very nice show with photographs and cyanotypes that describe puddle ripples, vague airplanes and diagrams. Her use of cyanotype is very nice in her huge peice on the back wall.
At Gallery 110 David Taylor presents ceramic sculptures that I overheard someone in the gallery describe as giant goth buttplugs. In his artist statement, Taylor says that ?They present naratives that are implied but are not explicit.? I spent some time watching passers by look in and smile. I also smiled a lot in this exhibit.
Margie Livingston is showing over at Greg Kucera. I saw her work down at the Tacoma Art Museum Bienial and loved it. I wrote in my notes in the gallery that ?If you played pickup sticks with telephone poles and graphed the results, you?d have this work.? Actually my description does no justice to the paintings which are simple, but have depth.
Marcelino Goncalves shows his new paintings over at James Harris Gallery. These paintings have the atmosphere of an east coast camp for nice boys in nice families. The style of the paintings is like a trained artist creating work for a thrift store. I liked the way that green was used in the flesh tones.
Saya Moriyasu showed at Platform Gallery. Moriyasu?s sculptures have become functional as lamps in this show. I have to admit that I like her sculptures of people best, but that didn?t stop me from finding 3 or 4 peices that I could consider buying. The way she portrays people in her sculpture reminds me of when people took photographs of people who weren?t smiling because they had to stand still for so long. Moriyasu?s work is compassionate and gentle and sweet.
