The Seattle Art Fair Was So Successful, the City Literally Applauded ...
Read moreArtist Victoria Haven has shown her abstract paintings, drawings and multimedia pieces in galleries from Seattle Art Museum to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But her current exhibit may be the biggest yet — at least in terms of audience. Clearly visible to anyone commuting to and from downtown via Highway 99 (as well as brave souls taking Mercer Avenue eastbound), “Banner Year” consists of regularly changing signs facing out from two windows in Haven’s fourth-floor studio in South Lake Union...
Read moreThe show makes a strong argument for photojournalism’s interacting with art. In the context of Nina Berman’s photo series depicting a soldier disfigured by a suicide bomber in Iraq and Stephanie Sinclair’s gruesome shots of Afghan women who have self-immolated as a form of protest, the stained, splotchy faces in Storm Tharp’s washy gouache portraits begin to evoke abrasions or burns. The theme of bodily disfigurement is continued elsewhere in the juxtaposition of Thomas Houseago’s hulking, seemingly hacked-at sculpture of a crouching figure with David Adamo’s installation comprising an ax, its wooden handle cracked and eroded, stuck into the wall and surrounded by whittled-down canes. Adamo’s ax appears to have done a number on Houseago’s statue, while the canes evoke missing limbs.
Not that "2010" doesn’t make missteps. I wanted to like the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s installation: a hearse, headlights ablaze, playing on its windshield clips from various TV shows and movies to a soundtrack ranging from "A Whiter Shade of Pale" to the "Star-Spangled Banner" and including a voice-over recounting an aborted love affair with the U.S. ("We fucked America to make America disappear"). But the work comes off as juvenile, bathetic, too tongue-in-cheeky by half. One marvels that light fare can be so heavy-handed; Josephine Meckseper displays a far more nuanced take on capitalism’s ills in her brooding video meditation on Minnesota’s sprawling Mall of America. And although Lorraine O’Grady’s sepia-tinged photographs of Michael Jackson and Charles Baudelaire convey something ineffable about the romantic nature of celebrity and America’s worship of it, their pairing with the Bruces’ piece feels ponderous. Still, O’Grady’s photos beat out by miles Daniel McDonald’s kitschy sculpture in the museum’s lobby of Jackson with Uncle Sam being rowed across the river Styx by Charon, which has all the subtly of Beetlejuice-era Tim Burton.CLICK FOR FULL REVIEW
Tacoma Art Museum announces artists to create outdoor artwork. . .
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