A gay day at SOIL

It was a hot, sweaty Saturday Talk at SOIL last week when we new members talked briefly about our work. I could be wrong, but I think SOIL might have been all hetero before this round of homos joined this year.  It was nice/interesting to see common yearnings in our work. All three of the gay members present for the talk (one bear couldn’t make it) are making work about our sexual identities, histories, and relationships. And, all three of us are using somewhat abstract means to do this. Also, I think talking comfortably about these things in a gallery setting is relatively new to all of us.

Chris Buening talked about how Mad Dog is a kind of abstract “portrait” of his fifteen-year-old self drunk on a date with his much older boyfriend.

Derrick Jefferies found the body for Anatomy in cinnamon and mint chewing gum, stretched and and molded together to shape sinews and nakedness.

I’m using The Song of Songs from the Bible as a way to paint the trajectory of my love song to my wife and son.

Related: Erin Shafkind’s take on the Saturday Talk.

A Fond Art Memory: IMMA

In 2005 I was an artist-in-residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. For four months, Anna and I lived on the grounds of the museum with eight other international artists. The museum was formerly a veteran’s hospital, built in the 1600′s; the carriage houses in the back were converted into artists studios and apartments.

I have never felt so fortunate as an artist as I did at IMMA.

I had just graduated from grad school, where all of my professors warned (just as my undergrad professors had) that once we all graduated no one would care about our work. (They didn’t word it so dreadfully, but basically that’s what they were saying.) No one would be knocking on our studio doors demanding to ponder with us the details of our projects for two hours straight, engaging in heated debate with colleagues over the intent of our work.  Also, I suspected that this probably was not a degree that would earn much money.

But then there we were at IMMA. In short, we resident artists felt like rock stars. We were living in a museum. They were giving us money, studios, and apartments. Museum curators were visiting our studios, genuinely interested in what we were doing. Perhaps most thrillingly, there were giant iron gates that opened for us when we came home at night, and then closed behind us. Once, a few guys trailed us home from a pub. We cackled with delight when the giant gates closed in their faces. I thought, Our teachers were wrong! THIS is what it’s like to be an artist!

(HA!)

And then we came home (well, after another residency that is another Fond Art Memory), or rather to my parents’ house, where we would then live for four months, before we moved to a friend’s lightless basement in the dead of winter to sleep on an air mattress on the floor for three months, jobless, in much debt, and warding off depression with many episodes of Alias.

I guess one of the advantages and disadvantages of being an artist is that there isn’t just one reality. IMMA was real (I have pictures to prove it, in times of doubt), and so was the subsequent reality of being homeless (though thankfully not shelter-less), moneyless, prospect-less.

Anyway, there’s no moral to this story. Except that if you’re an artist, you should apply.

Undeclared Goods

Ilona Hakvoort

It seems that when one is trying to communicate something in a language that isn’t one’s own, the words are pared down to what is absolutely essential.  Crafty banter is left out, and the resulting message is more like a plea or a recipe than an essay.

The very short statement by Dutch artists Ilona Hakvoort, Matthijs Hendriks, and Tanja Isbarn reads this way. It is simple, direct, and necessary to experiencing their show at SOIL the way they’re hoping you will:

“The show Undeclared Goods allows the viewer to see the works in the expanded domain of painting. Ordinarily painting is defined as an image on a flat surface.  The third dimension, however, transforms painting into a total, physical experience.  [The observer is invited] to perceive the whole gallery space as a landscape, which also applies to each individual work.”

I think if I hadn’t read this, I would have directed my attention to the rather modernist art objects and assumed it was some tribute to minimalism. Knowing their intent, though, I let myself fall into the individual “paintings” as though floating in a pool. Each of the paintings, drawings, and resin pieces has the effect of pulling you in and getting you lost, if you let them.

Tanja Isbarn  {This is one drawing in a series that lies in a little cardboard box in the gallery. Visitors are invited to put on white gloves and pick up, handle, and put down each drawing, enabling an elaborate act of looking.}

While Hakvoort, Hendriks and Isbarn value the physical work they’ve made, equally important is the distance between the objects and their viewers. What process connects the two, and what methods are used?  These artists want us to look at their work, and they want us to experience the act of looking at it. It is a complicated, quiet request, and they traveled across oceans and continents (and an active volcano) to make it. I’m grateful for it.

Matthijs Hendriks

Rainbow Bears

I took my parents and Grandma to see the Soil in Residence show yesterday and had yet another fulfilling experience with Joey Veltkamp‘s Rainbow Bears.  I am totally pleased that they’re luxuriously spread across this giant wall. They bring humor, sex, and possibly dismay to a building that is predominantly filled with lamps. (The strangeness of this show has not left me.)

Some of the bears seem to be smiling sheepishly, some growling, and I’m not sure if it is a wrestle of love or war between the man-bear and bear-bear.  The not-knowing makes for an unsettling feeling that floats delicately with the rainbow parade.

I think it is the combination of the medium (paint on paper), the tacks holding them to the wall, the curiosity of emotion, the vast space they traverse, and the resulting odd staccato rainbow that makes me certain that these bears need to be here.

Ariana Page Russell at Platform

Using temporary tattoos that she made from photographs of her own skin, Ariana Page Russell is changing her face.

In most of the larger-than-life photographs, the artist seems to be toying with the temporary tattoos, aware of the camera’s gaze. In this one, the tattoo has changed her, and the camera has caught her changed.

Soil in Residence (reception Saturday April 24th!)

{Timea Tihanyi, Chauney Peck, Susanna Bluhm}

The Seattle Design Center is its own planet.  It is vast and strange, a land of furniture showrooms and interior designers. Do you wonder what SOIL is doing there?

Once upon a few months ago, the previous tenant of this 11,000 square foot space within the Center removed himself and all of his furniture in the middle of the night, so as to exit his rent contract. The SDC had several big Interior Design World events coming up (complete with Interior Design celebrities) which they did not want to host in a hugely empty, depressing space. So they asked SOIL to fill it with art. We had only a few weeks to mount this show, which will be up through the end of May. It is truly a vast museum-like space, with furniture store quirks and cubbies. Our residence there is an opportunity for SOIL to blossom in a way that is not normally possible in our tiny gallery in Pioneer Square.

{Ben Hirschkoff, Saya Moriyasu, Cable Griffith}

Most members have work included, some of which has not yet been shown. The grandness of the space, and the quantity and diversity of work, allows for gentle connections to be made.  Sometimes there’s an echo of something across the way, or the sense of an improvisational response, that’s allowed to just be in the open space without being forced.

{Randy Wood, Joey Veltkamp}

Also, we are engaged in an ongoing drawing project near the front of the exhibition space. We’re drawing together and assembling stuff on the walls. It is messy and fun. This Saturday (April 24th) Saya Moriyasu and I will be drawing together from 2-6pm. Please stop by and say hello! Then from 6-9pm is the opening reception, where we will have light-colored wine and foods that will not stain the carpet.

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Seattle Design Center (in Georgetown)
5701 Sixth Avenue South
Seattle, WA  98108
Enter the “Plaza Building” on Orcas between 5th and 6th under the skybridge. Take the elevator to the first floor main lobby. Then go to the second floor, Suite 288.

Show runs through May 28th 2010.

Reception April 24th 6-9pm (music by the Phantom Sons at 8pm)

open hours: Monday – Friday  9-5pm
SOIL members present on Thursdays 11-4pm and on April 24th 10-9pm

Participating artists: Iole Alessandrini, Nola Avienne, Susanna Bluhm, Christopher Buening, Chris Engman, Curtis Erlinger, Cable Griffith, Ben Hirschkoff, Claire Johnson, Derrick Jefferies, Kirk Lang, Margie Livingston, Kiki MacInnis, Philip Miner, Saya Moriyasu, Nicholas Nyland, Chauney Peck, Adam Satushek, Timea Tihanyi, Joey Veltkamp, Randy Wood, Ellen Ziegler, Jennifer Zwick.

I wrote about my paintings here.

Magic, Chance, Gifts (Bang, Universe, Everything)

Decoy, 2010

Chauney Peck’s solo show at SOIL is lovely with its titling. Bang, Universe, Everything pays homage to the special object, which may be given as a gift. It attempts to measure the incomprehension of a nuclear bomb. It grants shelter to a duck, cozy with chopped colored wood in its abdomen, perched on battered wood with toxic orange markings.

To create the sculptural works in the show, Chauney followed directions given to her by chance cards that she made. Drawn and collaged upon playing cards, they say things like “thin bricks” or “cardboard or “NOT CENTER.”

The works on paper are based on the USA’s atom bomb test sites in the 1940′s and 50′s. Inhabitants of islands in the South Pacific were told to leave because the U.S. government was going to blow up their home. {By the way, U.S. government (as I’m sure you read this blog), what is the point of “testing” a nuclear bomb? What’s the worst thing that could happen? That it might not work? That the destruction wouldn’t be complete enough?} Not comprehending this undeniable force threatening to wipe out their universe, the people appropriately concluded “A powerful new god is coming.”

A Powerful New God is Coming, 2010

Chauney has let magic into her show by offering some of her work as gifts. (If you would like a gift from her show, you can contact her. At the end of the show, she’ll randomly select a recipient for each of the sculpture “offerings.”) In Bang, Universe, Everything, fourteen of the thirty pieces are offerings and the remaining sixteen are for sale.

Here, she talks about gift-giving: “I’ve recently received gifts made of wood, like driftwood carved into the shape of a gun.  Those interactions have a power and energy that is vastly different than going out and buying a something made of wood.  I’m a reading a book called ‘the gift’ by lewis hyde where he talks about the hunters that go out and kill ten birds.  They take eight to their families and give two to the priest.  The priest eats one and prepares the other as a talisman or an offering.  He gives it back to the forest to make the birds come back next time they go hunting.  It’s a humble gesture and a reflection of their gratitude towards nature. Similarly, it makes me happy to give an offering, and if you receive one hopefully, you will give something to someone else.  You don’t expect anything in return except a vague karmic return from the universe.  It’s about giving thanks and moving energy around continually. Giving my chance sculptures as offerings is a formal gesture that reflects my belief that art is gift that can keep returning.”

It was interesting to notice that the way I looked at the work actually changed when I realized I might actually get to have one. The object, and its possible transference to me, already felt magical. I’ve long struggled with the retail identity of the art objects I make, and I love the solution Chauney created for this show. It’s not a senseless free-for-all; rather, she thoughtfully measures randomness and decisiveness to counteract some of the inherent power of commerce in art. People’s wishes are noted and the work is then randomly dispersed. In the end, Chauney will have actually had more control over who will own her work than the artist in the typical commercial transaction. Likewise, the offerings themselves, which were created within a prescribed vocabulary of chance, emanate a calm control. Their precise, tender arrangements make a quiet space where one might wait for a powerful new God that is coming.