Call to Artists: Lucid Jazz Lounge Sponsoring a Silent Auction to Benefit Haitian Earthquake Survivors

Via CBS News:

After 36 hours of desperate and unanswered calls to Port au Prince, 31-year-old David Pierre-Louis left the safety of Seattle for quake ravaged Haiti in hopes of finding his family.

“I’m just walking, trying to find my mom,” he said.

He walked through the skeletal remains of the neighborhoods he once knew, to the block where his mother’s house once stood – not knowing what he’d find.

A lucky survivor, Augusta Pierre-Louis had been sitting outside in her garden that afternoon when the devastating quake demolished her home.

“Thank God I’m here,” she said. “I not die.”

But the joy quickly faded as Pierre-Louis realized the magnitude of tragedy all around him. Facing a sea of injured, he quickly grabbed a bag of medical supplies he had brought in for his family. Doling out bandages, first aid creams and antibiotics, with the help of a neighborhood nurse, Pierre-Louis’ mission changed in an instant.

“For whatever reason, medical supplies are not getting to the country like they should,” David said.

David Pierre-Louis is the owner of Lucid Jazz Lounge in Seattle’s University District.  In order to raise funds for relief efforts, Lucid is hosting a silent auction on Wednesday, February 10th. If you are an artist interested in doing something to help the earthquake survivors in Haiti, I hope you will consider donating work to the auction. The dropoff date is Sunday, February 7. Please email Lucid’s curator Leilani Lehman for more information.

Francesca Lohmann: Home is Where the Art Is

In 2008, Francesca Lohmann graduated from RISD with a BFA in printmaking.  Since moving to Seattle in the spring of 2009, she has been making prints at Sev Shoon and in her bedroom, mostly based on her interest in texture, organic forms, and scientific imaging.  But her most ambitious project to date is a site-specific installation in her Ballard house.

Francesca Lohmann. 1766 NW 61st Street. Layers of old wallpaper, white paint, 2009. Approximately 36 x 90 inches.

From the artist’s website:

This spring I moved to Seattle, taking up residence in an old house with layers of patterned paper covering most of the interior. Since moving in, scraping off all those layers has been an ongoing project. This excavation process fascinated me: The wallpaper is almost 1/4″ thick, pasted layer upon layer over the underlying plaster… I began carving into it selectively to create an image of a cell structure that I love, inserting something of my own in the language of the environment where I am working to make a home.

Francesca Lohmann working on wallpaper carving, 2009.

Francesca Lohmann. Detail of wallpaper carving in progress.

Francesca Lohmann. Wallpaper Carving (full view)

By its very nature, a piece like this is impossible to commodify.  To see it in person, one must be an invited houseguest.  However for a recent exhibition at the soon-to-be defunct Cairo, the artist made a rubbing of the carved surface and installed a ghost version of her wall in the gallery—complete with baseboards and an ornamental electrical outlet.

Francesca Lohmann. Wall Rubbing, 2009. Graphite on paper, base board, power outlet and crown molding. Approx. 36 x 90 inches. Chair by Ana Mikolavich.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

This past weekend, David and I went to see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  While the film isn’t perfect, I am pleased to report that it manages to accomplish pretty much everything I want to see in a high-budget Hollywood blockbuster, which is saying something.  (If you know me, you are likely aware that I’m not the world’s most patient moviegoer).

Heath Ledger in "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus."

Of the press Imaginarium has received so far, much has focused on the apparent curse surrounding its making.  Heath Ledger’s death 2/3 of the way through filming forced director Terry Gilliam to improvise, hiring Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law to play Ledger’s character Tony. (These casting transitions are seamlessly explained by the fact that Tony’s face changes every time he passes through a magic mirror into the Imaginarium.)  Upon researching the film on Wikipedia, I also learned that producer William Vince died of cancer immediately following the filming and Gilliam himself was hit by a car during post-production.  Spooky.

The plot revolves around a thousand-year-old mystic and storyteller named Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), who operates a traveling sideshow, which he uses to win souls  in order to settle an ongoing series of wagers with a Mephistophelian devil named Mr. Nick (Tom Waits).  The action is dreamlike, wrapping itself around a sometimes forced, yet consistently entertaining narrative that supports the real story: a shape-shifting morality play about the loss of the importance of “storytelling” (that is, psychologically constructive myth-making) in a society whose primary values are convenience and complacency.  All of this is accomplished through a series of lush explorations of identity, desire, and the act of confronting one’s fear of death.

Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) and Mr. Nick (Tom Waits)

Visually, the film is full of psychedelic/shamanic imagery—occult emblems, mirrors, black and white patterned surfaces, loaded symmetries, a girl who is identical with her own mother, a hero whose identity is fluid and must be sacrificed—all indicating that the plane on which these events unfold is an archetypal one.  The relationship between the story and the real-life events surrounding the filming further embeds the film in a multifaceted matrix of self-similarity.

All in all, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is one of the more spiritually astute movies I’ve seen lately, with a visual impact that must be viewed on the big screen to be fully appreciated.  If you find your interests and tastes aligned with mine, I recommend it!

Nothing is Original

My Heroes Have Always Been Syphilitic Vaginas

New work by Seattle artist Amanda Manitach:

Amanda Manitach. Petite Variation of the Genitalia of a Female Syphilitic. Watercolor, 2009/10. 10 x 12. in.

This image is one of four new “petite variations” posted this week on Amanda’s excellent new blog, My Heroes Died of Syphilis, where she regularly delivers babbling, brilliant blogolalia befitting of her charismatic Pentecostal upbringing (geographically not far from my own in North Texas).  Recently honored as the featured artist at the December 2009 New Guard Dinner, Amanda generates images of florid, transcendent beauty rooted in the pithy and macabre.  Bookmark her, if you haven’t already!

Sharon Arnold’s Chimaera: A Process in Progress

Seattle artist Sharon Arnold recently posted some new images of her current work on Facebook and the City Arts Magazine blog.  Coming off several months of drawings and paper constructions based in the excecution of rules set out for herself at the beginning at the project, Sharon’s new work has taken a more intuitive turn.  Her work-in-progress Chimaera explodes in an ecstatic rush of cut paper contours that presumably won’t stop until she reaches the end of a paper roll.

Sharon Arnold. Chimaera. Cut paper (detail of unfinished work). 48 x 108 in. and growing.

At a certain point, I came to realise I wasn’t actually looking at the paper in order to see it better. I had removed my glasses and my eyes had slipped out of focus; and, almost by not looking, I could see more clearly. I’m more than certain this opens the door to a slew of metaphors, but in a sense it’s more literally true – if the lines or cuts are too sharp I’m probably thinking too hard about it, because everything seems to work better when I can find a more intuitive and less tactical approach. Perhaps all these rules in the beginning are what opened up a path to circumnavigate around them, since I’m constantly setting them up, only to break them all over again. —Sharon Arnold, via City Arts.

Olivia Britt at Francine Seders

I’ve been so busy in the studio working on our record that I totally dropped the ball on announcing the opening to the group show at Francine Seders Gallery this month, but I really hope to see it.  The exhibition includes work by a number of gallery artists including Juan Alonso (who just auctioned off a beautiful drawing to benefit the earthquake victims in Haiti),  Gail Grinnell, and Olivia Britt, my friend and sincerely one of my favorite local visual artists.  Olivia’s work dwells in a realm of pure abstraction that is at once intuitive and deliberate.  Here are some lovely images of one of her watercolor and paper “drawing constructions” from her last show at Francine Seders.

Olivia Britt. Drawing Construction III. Watercolor and paper on panel, 2006/7. 11-1/4 x 42 inches.

Olivia Britt. Drawing Construction III (detail). Watercolor and paper on panel, 2006/7.

The current exhibition features two of Britt’s brand new paintings and runs through February 14th at Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle.

Portrait of the Artist as an Old-Timey Woman

Last Sunday, I felt like I spent the afternoon in the laboratory of a mad scientist.  But this mad scientist happens to be one of the nicest, most grounded guys you could meet.  Daniel Carrillo, known to many Seattlites as the curator and co-founder of Some Space Gallery, as well as the creator of a surreal body of mezzotints, has recently taken to producing photographic portraits using an arcane and labor-intensive process known as wet-plate collodion ambrotype.  The process, which requires its subjects to remain motionless under extremely bright lighting conditions for extremely long exposure times—some of mine took over thirty seconds!—produces photographic images directly onto glass plates. The images themselves look like something out of the nineteenth century, but the way Carrillo captures his subjects is entirely his own.

Daniel Carrillo. Portrait of Emily Pothast. Wet-plate collodion ambrotype, 2010.

So far, Dan has been honing his skills by photographing a growing cross-section of the Seattle visual art community at his Georgetown studio—Sharon Arnold, Robert Hardgrave, Shaun Kardinal, Brian Lane, Steven Miller and Erin Frost have all watched new sides of themselves emerge under Carrillo’s lens.  Check out his Flicker Photostream to keep tabs on this project.

This Entrance is for the Band!

Moskowitz with The United States of America, 1968.

Dorothy Moskowitz on being a female rock musician in the 1960s and 70s:

I worked as keyboardist/backup singer for Country Joe MacDonald’s All Star Band. The women in the group (drummer, saxophone/flute player and myself) typically got grief from the doormen and stage managers. At the stage door of one beer hall in the Midwest, we were warned, “This entrance is for the band!” “But we’re with the band!” We’d argue. “No! No groupies here!” It was worse in Europe, especially France, where they actually heckled our saxophonist because she was young and wispy looking, but played pretty funky. Somehow this was a deadly affront to the Parisian male ego. While I was never wispy, I still got ordered away from the piano at this same gig. “You don’t play now. This is for the keyboard player.” “But I am the keyboard player.”

- D.M., interview in Rockrgrl, 2005. (full interview here)

Opening Last Night

Ha!  Thanks, Joey, for tagging me in your post about yesterday’s First Thursday openings.  As most of you have noticed, my posts have been infrequent of late.  This time I’m gearing up to go into the studio to record Midday Veil’s first full-length studio album, as well as working on drawings for an upcoming group show at the Seattle Art Museum Rental and Sales Gallery.  But I actually did manage to make it out to some openings last night.  So what have we got?

Iole Alessandrini. Photograph from Hidden Spaces laser installation, 2007.

At SOIL, there’s a show of work by three new member artists: Iole Alessandrini, Julie Alpert, and Ellen Ziegler, whose work intrigues me.  Materially, I don’t think it’s completely resolved yet (can you really rely on a sign on the wall that says “If you can still read this, you haven’t poked your eye out on the edge of glass sticking out of the wall at eye level yet*” to stave off the inevitable lawsuit when someone actually DOES walk into it?) but conceptually and formally, Ziegler’s shadow-casting reflective glass drawings are at the top of their game.

Ellen Ziegler. Hypnagogue (detail). Mirrored glass, light and shadow, 2009.

Over at Lawrimore Project, recent RISD MFA graduate Caleb Larsen has an exhibition of conceptual works in the vein of his contributions to last year’s Patch Dynamics show (my post here), retooled for the recession mindset.  As in, one of his pieces is a contract for a collector willing to take over his art-related credit card debt (the artwork is the balance transfer, not the lovely letter-pressed receipt, mind you) and another piece consists of a vending machine bill acceptor promising nothing in return (guess where the money goes).  While the conceptual content of the work elicited plenty of snark from the viewers I was listening to, there was also a general consensus that the idea of “owning” a sculpture that continually tries to sell itself on eBay is actually kind of awesome.

Caleb Larsen. $10,000 Sculpture (in progress). Dollar bill acceptor, collected money.

Other highlights included the Susie J. Lee-curated post-ceramics show Wet and Leatherhard, also at Lawrimore project and a new show of characteristically endearing drawings and objects by Gretchen Bennett at Howard House.  Much more on the Slog and Best Of.

*Paraphrased.