2003 - David Eckard: Tournament (lumens)

Title: David Eckard: Tournament (lumens)

Dates: May 9 - June 22, 2003

Location: Consolidated Works, 500 Boren Ave. N., Seattle, WA

Accompanying the exhibition Wrapture will be a solo installation by Portland sculptor and performance artist David Eckard. Tournament (lumens) is an environment reminiscent of a sporting arena containing large-scale wood, metal and fabric sculptures evoking game equipment and a victor’s throne. Eckard has long explored the realms of sexual and body politics by creating works that reference bondage paraphernalia, Victorian-era corsetry, and theatrical props and costumes. Eckard will perform throughout opening night, actually entering into the Tournament stage, interacting with and wearing his creations.

2003 - Wrapture

Title: Wrapture

Dates:May 9 - June 22, 2003

Location: Consolidated Works, 500 Boren Ave. N., Seattle, WA

Co-curated with Lisa Favero

Artists: Jacey Dunaway (Seattle), Stacey Greene (New York), Euan Macdonald (Los Angeles), Jennifer McNeely (Seattle), Jason Moer (Seattle), David Reed (New York), Susan Robb (Seattle), Beverly Semmes (New York), Jennifer West (Los Angeles)

Wrapture

Love. Lust. Entanglement. Transcendence.
An exhibition about the sensual play of surfaces.

In the gallery co-curators Meg Shiffler, Con Works director of Visual Art and independent curator Lisa Favero present Wrapture. Rather than offering a political or graphic dialogue about sexuality in visual art, Wrapture explores the erotic, sensual encounter at the level of seemingly unsexed, ungendered material, when two surfaces meet. As they respond to one another they become entangled, undulating in and out and around each other. Their two bodies no longer separate and distinct -- each completely lost in the other -- they are able to achieve a moment of ecstasy, of pure rapture in which the distractions and consequences of the external world have no bearing. Artwork included in the show demonstrates this type of encounter and in some instances also offers the genuine experience by inviting or directly enlisting viewer participation.

Internationally exhibited artists Beverly Semmes and David Reed, whose work has been collected here in the Northwest, provide the starting point for the exhibition. Both use the fold as the consequence of the meeting of two surfaces and as a metaphor for sensual encounter. The fabric of Semmes’s dress sculptures floods the gallery space with an infinite pool of folds as it meets the floor and soaks up the viewer’s space, while Reed’s illusionistic folds expand and unfurl off the picture plane only to entwine the viewer in an intimate exchange. If one disregards the viewer‘s presence, Reed’s large horizontal paintings instead present a notational account of intimacy between otherwise distinct planes. These two artists also address the expansive, seemingly limitless and consuming nature of sensual experience through their use of an excess of surface material.

Several Pacific Northwest artists, who have in the past dealt with an erotic theme in their work and have further developed their ideas, provide a foundation for the exhibition. New or newly commissioned pieces by them will be included. Among this group is a video installation by Jennifer West, a sound sculpture by Susan Robb and a large-scale sculpture by Jennifer McNeely. Rounding out the exhibit is a series of 20 photographs of lipstick by emerging New York artist Stacy Greene.

2003 - Sorta

Title: Sorta

Dates: February 14 – March 23, 2003

Location: Consolidated Works, 500 Boren Ave. N., Seattle, WA

Co-curated with Brian Wallace

Artists: Pat Boas (Portland), Jeremy Boyle (Pittsburgh), Larry Cwik (Portland), Carl Fudge (New York), Kyla Mallett (Vancouver, BC), Jesse Paul Miller (Seattle), Sarah Morris (Seattle) Phil Roach (Seattle), Edie Tsong (Portland)

Statement

I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.
Isaac Newton

This exhibition presumes a culture defined, increasingly, by our ability to gather, categorize, and disseminate immense amounts of information. The artists in this exhibition use a range of media—photography, installation, sculpture, painting, video, and emerging technologies—to investigate two distinct aspects of this emergent cultural impetus.

The artworks in Sorta have been conceived as responses to, models of, or results from this ongoing filtration of cultural information; the exhibition includes works by artists who address the technological, the social, and the deeply personal ways to filter wide ranging and infinitely varied sets of information.

2003 - Binocular Parallax: Recent Projects from Seattle and Vancouver

Title: Binocular Parallax: Recent Projects from Seattle and Vancouver, BC
Dates: September 13 – November 23, 2003
Locations: Consolidated Works, 500 Boren Ave. N., Seattle, WA, and Western Front, Vancouver, BC
Co-Curated with: Jonathan Middleton, Curator, Western Front, Vancouver, BC

Artists:
Vancouver, BC

Fiona Bowie, Hadley Howes & Mawell Stephens, Evan Lee & Mohamed Somani, Tim Lee

Seattle

Leiv Fagereng. Jenny Heishman, Bret Marion, John Seal, Dan Webb

20x20 Polaroid Project
Polaroids by 20 Seattle artists and 20 Vancouver artists

Press release text:
Consolidated Works’ Director of Visual Art Meg Shiffler has joined forces with Vancouver’s Western Front curator Jonathan Middleton to co-curate this large-scale exhibition marking the grand opening of Consolidated Works’ new 6000 sq. ft. visual art space. The curators have chosen recent projects ranging from painting, installation, photography, sculpture and video work by emerging and mid-career artists instrumental in defining the current cultural identity and visual art landscape of each city. This exhibition will attempt to begin to bridge the distance between Vancouver and Seattle, providing visitors the chance to see what is currently being created in each city.

Vancouver and Seattle are separated by 117 miles (or 189 kilometers), and an ever tightening border. It is fair to say that the two visual art communities have never related much with each other – we are fairly out of touch with our international neighbor. To create an effective dialogue between Seattle and Vancouver, it seems necessary to examine the similarities and differences in the way art has evolved, and continues to be produce in both places. What links, for example, can be made due to the close proximity of our two cities? Is there a West Coast sensibility when it comes to art production? Likewise, how have conditions such as government funding, marketplace and political similarities/differences affected the way the art scenes in the two cities have grown?

For this sort of dialogue it seemed logical to select a younger group of emerging and mid-career artists, who themselves are contending with recent local histories. In Seattle, emerging artists of ten embrace the regions’ figurative, narrative tradition but many shy away from paint on canvas in favor of the use of new media and bold graphic formats to tell their stories. In Vancouver, media such as photography and video still command a great deal of attention. This is partly due to the international success of earlier practitioners, and partly because high real estate prices have made studio-space untenable. Thus studio-based practices such as painting and sculpture are oddly marginalized in Vancouver.

Meg and Jonathan also asked 20 artists from each community to take a series of nine Polaroid’s on any subject they chose. The result is a look at the vibrant energy of young artists shaping each community, working with an inexpensive, immediate medium.

A co-curated exhibition of the same title was presented at Western Front six month later.

2001 - DREAM

Title: DREAM (for the Imagined Landscape series)

Dates: October 27 - December 17, 2001

Location: Consolidated Works, Seattle

Artists: James Barsness (Athens, GA), Nan Curtis (Portland, OR), Henry Darger (previously of Chicago, IL), Peter Drake (New York), MK Guth (Portland, OR), Jacci den Hartog (Los Angeles), Malia Jensen (Portland, OR), Din Q. Le (Los Angeles), Mariko Mori (Japan/New York), Cynthia Pachikora (Portland, OR)

Curatorial Statement

Each night in our sleep and in the moments we free our waking minds, we experience moments of sheer fantasy and of deep-seated yearning. We move beyond the consciousness of our daily lives and into the imagined landscape of our subconscious. Art is the product of such dreaming, and artistic gesture not only renders a dream real, it can also unveil the fantasy that constitutes reality.

“The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow stronger.” Eden Phillpotts

Fantastic creatures in dimensions similar to those Gulliver encountered on his travels are present in Malia Jensens’s Beaver Story and in James Barsness’ The Trash Heap. Jensen’s eight-foot beaver sculpture is constructed of layers of plywood cut and stacked according to CAT scans of a life-size model beaver. The animal is not a cartoon caricature, but rather an accurate oversized topographical map. Beaver Story and her shiny fiberglass foxes in Knotty Situation tackle sexual themes, the Northwest timber industry and humanity’s ongoing quest to control nature. On a single canvas Barsness constructs a world that teems with tiny inhabitants. In The Trash Heap a myriad of characters both comical and grotesque are inked in ballpoint pen over a rich collage of comic books, maps, stickers, old newspapers and, to complete a boyish fantasy, pictures of sexy women. Barsness’ work is complex in conception and composition, but visually reads like notebook doodles derived from the dream life of an adolescent boy. His work writhes with activity. Naughtiness abounds in a nightmare reminiscent of scenes from a Heironymous Bosch painting, but unlike Bosch, Barsness exudes joyousness free from authoritative restraints.

Henry Darger spent most of his adult life coming home after work to spend the evenings alone in his tiny Chicago apartment. He was able to escape his routine existence by creating another world. Darger authored the longest piece of continuous fiction ever written. The Realms of the Unreal, which is over 15,000 typewritten pages, tells the story of a group of little girls, the Vivian Sisters, who travel the universe encountering wild creatures and wars of incredible violence. To illustrate his epic tale he produced a series of double-sided watercolor and collage drawings on joined sheets of paper, some that span over ten feet. The narrative of each drawing is nonlinear. Within each composition events are staggered sporadically. The viewer’s eye darts from foreground to background as well as along the length of the drawing to grasp a sequence of the adventure. Darger kept his dream close to him, never sharing it with anyone, only setting it free on paper to be discovered after his death in 1972. Darger’s madness was given structure through an obsessive lifetime commitment and devotion to recording his waking fantasy.

“I had dreamed once (that) I came to a small wayside chapel…. On the floor in front of the altar facing me, sat a yogi – in lotus posture, in deep mediation. When I looked at him more closely, I realized that he had my face. I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought: “Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.” I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.” C.G. Jung

In Kumano, Mariko Mori’s 1998 video, the artist is the central character who journeys through a series of four different oneiric landscapes. The viewer follows the artist through an ancient forest, to a sacred temple and eventually to outer space. The video gives the impression that we are participating in the artists’ dream, and that it is perhaps a lucid dream in which she is in control of the flow of events on her path to enlightenment. At each location there is a profound sense of searching for personal definition and spiritual enrichment through ritual. Kumano’s pace is at times rapid and out of control, and at other moments the central character forces a slowdown in the narrative with deliberate, precise ceremonial behavior. Mori uses ritual as the touchstone to create her fantasy of the future.

“The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In architecture, as in all our other arts – indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole – ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.” Robert A.M. Stern, Pride of Place

The American dream is at the forefront of work by New York painter Peter Drake. His naked suburbanites seem to have found the ultimate lifestyle freedom can afford. They are fully possessed of their bodies and the suburban environment in which they conduct their activities. The act of celebrating ownership of body and property becomes highly comical as Drakes’ middle aged, sagging subjects play tennis in the open air and shoot slingshots in front of a typical Leave it to Beaver house completely and contentedly in the buff.

In M.K. Guth’s sculpture/video installation Sara, go down in the hole and get some potatoes… the sculptural environment is the ghost of dated American kitchen. On one of the kitchen walls a fuzzy projection of a life-size woman peeling potatoes shocks the sleepy setting to life. In an article in the New York Times entitled “Dream House” (April 1997) the author says that “to be an American is to aspire to a room of one’s own.” The character in the video declares the space as her own; the space traditionally relegated to the female sex. The refrigerator, sink, table and chairs that make up the room are still and silent, heavy in form, but transparent in appearance. Despite familiarity with the interior setting Sara’s presence makes it difficult for the viewer to feel at home.

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.” Anais Nin, The Diaries of Anais Nin

Dinh Q. Le, a Vietnamese artist now living part-time in Los Angeles, has created a new body of work in which he weaves photojournalistic images with stills from Hollywood Vietnam movies. In one piece Le combines Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo of a napalmed girl with an image of Tom Cruise from the movie Born on the Fourth of July. The latter image assumes dominance but it’s the underlying image of the burned girl that catalyzed anti-Vietnam sentiment. In turn it fueled the desire for a rethinking of America’s involvement in Vietnam. The sentiment that Ut’s very real photograph sparked can be seen in the artifice of Oliver Stone’s movie, which focuses on the tragedy of Vietnam in the American context. Le presents a forceful play on memory and media and ultimately how they effect our view of reality; he presents a space where fantasy and reality merge to create a powerful and emotional mix.

Jacci Den Hartog’s polyurethane waterfalls are inspired by Chinese landscape paintings, but reek of the kitchy plastic displays in Chinese restaurants. The humor of the latter association is clearly outweighed by the anodyne seriousness Den Hartog’s work achieves. The graceful flow of the medium and careful choice of delicate, pale blues and greens gives the work dignity and an ethereal quality. Den Hartog offers a dream of an exotic distant land that is interpreted and juxtaposed through a Western aesthetic.

Cynthia Pachikara’s XYZ video installation depicts a never-ending road trip. It’s nighttime, raining, with nothing in front of the moving camera except lines on a highway. The highway is only seen in the shadow of a swinging pendulum. The dark tone of the piece suggests running from rather than to something, but there is a sense of excitement and anticipation of what lies ahead. It is within the nature of everyone to fall into the trap of believing that things could be better somewhere else. Escaping and looking forward to a new beginning. As the daughter if immigrants from India, Pachikara has a personal connection with the story of rebirth in a new land.

Vacations too are in the realm of fantasy, and tourist destinations are constructed to meet the visitors’ expectations. Nan Curtis’ new installation Archipelago Paradise Lost fabricates a vacation dream spot. Bits of metal on a series of tiny pedestals represent the string of islands, and glossy, surreal photos of the islands at dawn and at sunset line the walls. Viewers are encouraged to take a travel brochure outlining what experience awaits them on Archipelago Paradise Found. There is even a coupon for 11 dollars off a day trip package that boasts that the islands are “a place where dreams come true.”

Artists are dreamers by nature and artwork is the product of such dreaming. Dozens, if not hundreds, of different dream interpretation theories exist. But the one unifying notion that binds such varied opinions together is that dreams reveal ultimate truths and insight into the reason things happen as they do. Artists, therefore, are in the business of both questioning and revealing truths.

2001 - Notice of Proposed Land Use Action

Title: Notice of Proposed Land Use Action
Dates: May 18 – July 8, 2001

Location: Consolidated Works, Seattle, WA
Artists: Dan Corson (Seattle), Patrick Holderfield (Seattle), Shannon Kennedy (New York), Bret Marion (Seattle), Jennifer McNeely (Seattle), Brad Miller (Seattle), Jesse Paul Miller (Seattle), David Nechak (Seattle), Matthew Picton (Ashland, OR), Susan Robb (Seattle)

Curatorial Statement

In August of 1998 Consolidated Works moved into an empty 30,000 sq. ft. warehouse at 410 Terry Ave. N. to launch Seattle’s only multi-disciplinary contemporary art center. At the time we had a six month lease in our hands and we were thrilled to inhabit such a vast space that perfectly suited our needs: clear-span in the theater and cinema, and 35 ft. ceilings in the 4,000 sq. ft. gallery. Much to our surprise six months has turned into two years. The Negative Space series marks the final round of programming for Consolidated Works at 410 Terry Ave. N. as the wrecking ball will strike in the early Fall.

This architecturally insignificant wooden structure has remained active for 72 years, originally housing Rich Lumber, and more recently, Seattle Auto Glass, storage for Sur La Table and a recumbent bicycle manufacturer. Consolidated Works sits firmly in the middle of one of Seattle’s enduring industrial areas that is currently being carefully molded into a more diverse urban neighborhood. There are Notice of Proposed Land Use Action signs on every other building in the Cascade area, including ours, invoking both wariness and anticipation in those invested in urban development. The title of the show references not just the end of our time in this building, but the notice of something new on the horizon for Consolidated Works.

Ten regional and national artists were invited to create new works for Notice of Proposed Land Use Action considering our warehouse’s past, present and imminent demise. Some of the artists explored the literal negative space that will be left when our building is gone. Others dealt with the negative space of history, the businesses the structure housed and all the people that have crossed the threshold. Each artist’s work is radically different in materials and presentation, but all were concerned with the investment we have made in the Seattle arts community and the return investment of artists in Consolidated Works.

New York artist Shannon Kennedy uses endoscopic video equipment, similar to what is used to view the inside of the body, to shoot images of the most hidden parts of buildings. Kennedy came to Consolidated Works in January and spent 4 days in residence documenting what would be thought of as the guts of 410 Terry Ave. N.. The resulting video is a very fast journey through a completely magical landscape of beads of Styrofoam as large as balloons, feathery strands of fiberglass insulation, and expansive terrains of rusted metal. Seattle’s Susan Robb also deals with enlarging tiny environments. Robb identified the corners where dust accumulates and cracks where tiny objects get lost and then added her own materials, most notably Play-Do, to create installations usually measuring no more than three inches across. The resulting photographs burst with color and life as they gently glide in and out of focus.

To Seattle’s Patrick Holderfield it is important to remember that people have been touched by the presence of this structure. Holderfield has been working on a series entitled Dehiscence (the expulsion of materials from a container) since 1997,and has created his largest work to date for this exhibition. Instead of imbuing objects with foam, Holderfield decided to make the structure itself the container to interject a human or organic presence in the building. “The building is going to be demolished and this biological element is seeping out representing the human activity that took place during its history.” Responding to this seductive mass by recognizing both its beauty and its grotesqueness is precisely the immediate human response Holderfield is after.

Jennifer McNeely’s labor of love for this exhibition consists of 72 carefully wrapped and stitched pieces of drywall, one for each year of this structures past. The bundled objects are presented wrapped in plastic with accompanying tags that remain blank. The grid of pink, almost fleshy packages are meticulously laid out and made available for examination as if they are being prepared to enter deep archival storage with other “artifacts” from this significant site. This piece allows one to imagine that the past is not lost, and that when it is lovingly recognized we can carry it into the future with us.

Matthew Picton, a recent British transplant living in Oregon, spent a week in March on the roof of Consolidated Works drawing the details of a second story façade onto plastic sheeting. This sheeting was then taken back to his studio where Picton spent the next month in an oxygen supplied suit recreating the drawing in layers of acrylic glue. The glue shrinks and buckles as it dries, skewing the shapes giving them a watery appearance. Event though the final piece is sculptural, when combined with the shadow cast on the wall, the work still reads like a drawing. Because the work in true to scale it has a certain immediacy, but the etherealness of the medium invokes the past.

Another artist who worked directly with the structure in an intimate fashion is Seattle’s Jesse Paul Miller. Renowned as both a sculptor and painter, many of Miller’s close friends also know that Jesse draws – and draws – and draws… The quick sketches on past Consolidated Works’ promotional materials exude an almost childlike freedom and joy in lines that chop and glide and are even crossed out when a different line suits the situation better. Out of the 56 only a handful are recognizable locations, as Miller favored capturing only fragments of a chosen area. Miller has permanently marked the records of our activities here with the structure in which it all occurred.

Sculptor and installation artist David Nechak’s piece Looking Back provides the viewer with a new perception of the gallery environment, the other pieces in the show, and their own presence in the room. The convex mirrors are both vehicles for reflection and emotionally work to trigger feelings of surveillance, as if the building is watching the viewer.

Dan Corson and Bret Marion are most clearly dealing with the demolition of 410 Terry Ave. N. Corson’s piece provides an opportunity to participate in the destruction process knocking “wrecking balls” against a gallery wall. The pay off is a loud crashing sound effect. It is pure joy in the boyhood fantasy sense, and an ominous reminder that this structure will come down to the ground. Marion has chosen to add a dream to that blatant reminder by adding a paragraph at the bottom of a reproduction of our Notice of Proposed Land Use Action Sign that poetically references life on the frontier. We are moving forward, dreaming of the next phase for Consolidated Works and how the new structures on this land will shape the neighborhood. In a sense we are involved in pioneering a new urban community, and Marion piece lays the foundation for that forward momentum.

There is an installation in this exhibit that will take place after we move to our new location. Brad Miller has created a piece of conceptual minimalism that in its simplicity and purity captures the idea that tears have been shed here, an investment of great proportion has happened, and we will take the knowledge of that with us to the new space. The three buckets of gallery paint containing a single tear will be used to cover the walls in our new home. The title of the piece, Dulcinea, references Don Quixote’s love interest that he perceives to be a princess, but is really a prostitute. We dream and we don’t ask permission to do so. Brad notes that installation artists create works expecting nothing in return, other than the privilege to do it.

I am terribly proud of the efforts of the ten artists in this show and feel that they have captured in their diverse works a range of historical, emotional and physical elements related to Consolidated Works, the presentation of visual art, and our occupation of 410 Terry Ave. N.

2000 - Sheila Klein

Title: Sheila Klein, a solo exhibition

Dates: may 19 - June 30, 2000

Location: Consolidated Works, Seattle

Nominated as "Best Exhibition Outside of New York in an Alternative Venue, 2000" by the International Association of Art Critics (USA).

Curatorial Essay

It’s midnight and I’m gently swinging inside of Sheila Klein’s Float Zone #3, suspended from our 35’ ceiling. Wrapped in the golden light that illuminates the inside of the cocoon I feel safe and peaceful. To my left is a fortress - black, sleek and slightly imposing. To my right is a graceful, glowing “hammock” and a ruffled mousehole. From this drifting vantage-point a group of curvaceous sleeping bags appear to be migrating east across the cracked cement floor. Klein has transformed Consolidated’s raw warehouse space into a regal yet fantastically playful campsite.

Sheila is one of those rare individuals who always sees potential, viewing both intimate and public spaces as infinitely malleable. In the past she has dressed environments through the application of sculptural elements. With this new body of work it is clear that she has moved into constructing her own sacred spaces to be experienced from the inside out. Sheila’s work is about transformation – about transforming space and about creating a transformative intimate experience.

Recently Sheila stepped away from public works and buried herself in the studio, emerging months later with a large body of work currently on exhibition at two Seattle venues.

Her installation at Consolidated Works is touched by a sense of humor, but the individual sculptures have a powerful elegance derived from reducing the pieces in the accompanying exhibit to simple form and color. The works are line drawings realized in large-scale three-dimensionality. Stand is a 14’ tall fortress made of interlocking black Spandex pant forms. This piece is dignified but escapes Richard Serra-like austerity through the tenuous and slightly silly interaction of having to walk between the pant legs to enter into the center. Three luminous warm-toned tents, Float Zone 1, 2 and 3, hang from the ceiling at the center of the exhibition reflecting the strong negative space in Stand. Although womb-like and gentle, there is a potent juxtaposition to the feminine in the macho fabric choice of nylon football jersey. xxchip is a graceful wedge that rocks from side to side on a curved aluminum frame covered in suntan-toned pantyhose nylon. It is unsettling, and intimate in spite of its mammoth size. Mousehole tips the frame of xxchip on its side and covers the frame with silver ruffles inviting viewers to enter into a well-defined proscenium. Finally, a series of five space-age sleeping bags create a floor pattern at the back of the space that jars the exhibition with random placement in the midst of precisely positioned pieces.

Meanwhile across town in the main room at Seattle’s Esther Claypool Gallery Sheila exhibits a series of six large textile collages that surround the viewer creating an temple-like setting. Layers of overlapping squares and rectangles with surfaces of reds, golds and greens in a broad array of patterns and sheers, combine to create a balance of garish sensuality and exquisite richness. Sheila admits, “I was thinking of Mark Rothko while making these pieces. Hmm, is that him rolling over in his grave?” The adjoining room houses a collection of wall-mounted embroidery hoops stretching fabrics ranging from camouflage to rubberized net. At the end of that room are two pieces hung side by side made from pairs of Sheila’s father’s pants. The Esther Claypool exhibition, which is both personal and about material culture at large, is reminiscent in theme and execution to her early textile work.

Sheila’s irreverent and unconventional early works leaned heavily toward the domestic, challenging perceptions about women’s roles and the home environment through the creation of flamboyant sculptural furnishings and oversized personal objects like aprons and rouge pots. The layering of patterns and colors and the intense manipulation of fabrics, ranging from industrial to ethnographic, culminated in a bold and beautiful display of hedonistic, eye-popping, psychedelic complexity. The humor in these pieces is derived from their scale and outrageousness, but the underlying discomfort created by the tension of the twisted, wrapped, and knotted fabric demonstrating the tension of constrictive gender stereotypes helped the work transcend frivolity.

In the 1980’s and early 1990’s Sheila decided to dress the world, and proceeded to do so in gallery exhibitions and public works across the country. A giant necklace of blinking streetlights, presented as a wedding gift to the Statue of Liberty, was positioned outside Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas as part of Antoni Miralda’s well publicized project in which he married the Statue of Liberty to a statue in Barcelona of Christopher Columbus. Commemorative Ground Ring was commissioned by Sculpture Chicago in 1989 and incorporated familiar architectural elements from the city’s urban landscape as part of the “gemstone.” The whole notion of architectural jewelry applies a humanistic and primarily feminine trait to the urban landscape and defies the modernist sensibility that ornament is evil. Sheila describes herself as a crusader against banality and homogenization and the resulting works as femmetech. “Kind of like fixing an engine with a hairpin.”

For the last six years Sheila has been designing the Hollywood/Highland Metro Station, near Graumman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles with the architecture firm Dwarsky Associates. Sheila named the station Underground Girl. Subway trains float down long, round-ribbed tubes, letting passengers out in a concrete and metal womb. Fleshy pink light fixtures cast soft pools on the ceiling, and repetitive architectural elements step in curved motion down the platform. The station is not a box that’s been dressed. Underground Girl was designed from the beginning, (with architects known for creating conservative, corporate structures no less) to offer passengers the experience of metamorphosis, entering a cocoon-like structure before rising into the city.

Consolidated Works’ exhibition, like Underground Girl, involves an opportunity for viewers to not only observe the works, but also literally crawl inside of them, activating the participation. Within the yellow folds of Float Zone #3 my meditative state is broken by squeals and giggles coming from the maroon interior of Float Zone #2. I think Sheila would be pleased to know that the breadth of her accomplishments in the art, architecture and design communities, and twenty-five years of cumulative effort has resulted in simple responses of joy.

2000 - Evidence

Title: Evidence

Dates: March 17 - April 30, 2000

Location: Consolidated Works, Seattle, WA

Artists: featuring TWIST / Barry McGee (San Francisco), with Seattle-based artists AMAZE, ANGEL, APPLE, CAUSE-B, EGO, KHAZ, PARS, II SICK, SIRE-ONE

San Francisco graffiti writer and installation artist Barry McGee said in a recent interview that graffiti is “all about the evidence” – evidence that a single individual has been in a particular spot. Graffiti is a distinctively urban art form and the expression of individuality in the midst of an urban environment is poignant and incredibly powerful. The evidence that is also left is often that of criminal activity. This exhibition does not set out to glamorize illegal acts of graffiti, but rather to spark a dialogue about a distinctive cultural movement that has existed in full force for over twenty years.

Is graffiti art? In considering this question one has to acknowledge there are some that consider graffiti to be nothing more than vandalism, and those who participate to be social miscreants. Tagging is generally unapproachable to those who can’t read the code, and even when decipherable it represents the markings of an individual who sets themselves apart from society. Graffiti developed and persists as a creative form of expression in response to societies’ narrow conception of “artwork” as something presented in a studio, gallery, museum, or otherwise sanctioned setting. That is precisely why graffiti is as powerful an artistic statement as it is and continues to thrive. Therefore, it can not be disqualified from being assessed in artistic terms: strong linear qualities, compositional complexity, site-specific visual problem solving and remarkable technical precision.

Graffiti is temporal, as walls are claimed and reclaimed over time. The art lives for the moment, with no regard to its archival nature. It exists as a fleeting, ever-changing element of our urban landscape. Illegal graffiti is created under time pressure, forcing a quick artistic response to various exterior architectural spaces, resulting in highly spontaneous and gestural works. Writers commissioned to do murals, or those painting on sanctioned walls are involved in the more performative aspects of creating work in full view of the public eye.

During an interview with Barry McGee, Walker Art Center curator Eugenie Joo proposed that graffiti interrupts the urban landscape. This interruption is vital in an age when we are rarely taken off guard aesthetically. The pace of contemporary life, and societies increasing reliance on the Internet and mass media for aesthetic fulfillment, has dulled sensitivity to what is real. Cause-B, a participating artist in Evidence makes reference to spray can art as being a “true” art form, in that it hasn’t changed in its use of materials or its objective since the beginning of the movement. Unaffected by advancing technology, and untouched by commercial success, graffiti writers remain pure in their creative intent.

Evidence was initially inspired by the works of Barry McGee, or TWIST, who has devoted more than a decade of his life to graffiti writing and most recently large-scale installation work. The installation at Consolidated Works is an amalgamation of graffiti tags, expressive and delicate figurative elements, and biomorphic teardrop forms layered onto a background of flat crimson. Eliminating any attempt at preciousness, McGee “buffs”, or selectively paints over various elements of the composition, allowing the paint to spontaneously drip at random. The weight and burdens associated with contemporary existence is evident in the city worn faces of disenfranchised heads, floating on a composition sinking and slumping slowly toward the ground. McGee’s crossover work sits in contrast to the murals created by artists who work on the street exclusively. AMAZE from San Francisco joins graffiti writers from two Seattle crews, By Any Means and Mad Crew, and the independent writer PARS, in a two-week residency resulting in site specific murals covering every wall in the gallery.

This exhibition forces the issue of examining artists that are outside of social acceptance – exactly where they want to be. By transferring this art form into a gallery setting, it is the intent of Evidence to ask mainstream audiences to confront their preconceived notions of graffiti.

2000 - Do Not Touch: an exploration of delicate obsessions

Title: Do Not Touch: an exploration of delicate obsessions

Dates: January 26 - February 27, 2000

Location: Consolidated Works, Seattle, WA

Artists: Nayland Blake (New York), Cris Bruch (Seattle), John Fraser (Chicago), Colleen Hayward (Seattle), Maria Inocencio (Portland, OR), Michelle Kelly (Seattle), Michiko Kon (New York), Matthew Landkammer (Seattle), D’Arcy McGrath (Seattle), Stephanie Speight (Portland)

As the director of visual art for Consolidated Works I was faced with a challenging situation. We had been provided with the opportunity to inhabit a 30,000 sq. ft. warehouse from October 1999 – July 2000, which left just enough time for four exhibitions in the gallery. The first exhibition, Artificial Life filled the 4,000 sq. ft. visual art space with powerful work including a large installation, robots in a car-sized case, a herd of life-size fiberglass sheep and much more. In looking ahead it only seemed logical to curate exhibitions with works that would emphasize and utilize the 35ft. ceilings and the large exhibition walls.

As is true to my nature I questioned and then balked at this obvious use of the space. I became fascinated with the idea of juxtaposing delicate works with the vast physical structure. As I began the curatorial process on this exhibit I explored extremely ephemeral works, being driven by the artist’s choice of materials to fulfill the concept. Maria Inocencio, a Portland artist creates subtle line drawings on paper with her own hair. Connecting each strand of hair end to end, Inocencio marks time, making a calendar of days or a document of each session of hair brushing through the painstakingly intricate and time-consuming process of gluing the hair to sheets paper. Another Portland-based artist, Stephanie Speight, wound cash register tape into 75 large balls that lie in piles on the floor or hang from the ceiling suspended by nylon cord. This first round of artists also included D’Arcy McGrath who has devoted much of her artistic life to sculpting tiny figurative pieces made of carved soap and bits of paper. Many of her tender figures stand balanced on pins and paper nut cups, and few hold their own hand-scrawled signs with messages like, “please don’t harm me.”

In examining this first grouping of works I found that it not only the ephemeral nature of the works that bound them together, but also the obsessive nature in which they were created. Releasing the show from its focus on media, and spinning it towards the conceptual led me to artists like Michiko Kon. This New York-based artist produces objects made from sticky, wet and sometimes repulsive food items including chicken feet, octopus, and fish heads with eyes still glistening in combination with fruit and flowers. The forms these sculptures take are often garments, forcing the viewer to imagine intimate contact. Kon doesn’t display the objects, but rather photographs them in vivid cibachrome and luscious black and white. This archival form makes the rancid ultimately seductive.
Rabbits by nature are sweet, timid creatures, and Nayland Blake has focussed on their likeness for more than a decade. His rabbits however are intolerably sweet, and also ridiculously comic and at best truly menacing. The series of six drawings and seven-foot neoprene bunny suit included in this exhibition perfectly exemplify the range of his obsession and the depth of exploration his years have produced. Blake’s work sits beside John Fraser’s an installation of 196 antique shirt collars hung in a mesmerizing grid where the shadows produced are as strong as the objects themselves. The installation the eye is bombarded with pattern and repetition first, and then upon closer inspection, the joy of the uniqueness of each linen collar.

Each of the artists described above and the others in the exhibition have chosen to devote an incredible amount of time and energy in creating temporal works that are not only obsessively time consuming to create, but challenging to view. In the end, these precarious and delicate works prove powerful enough in their large surroundings to not just grab the attention of visitors, but demand intimate investigation.

1999 - Artificial Life

Title: Artificial Life
Dates: October 8 – November 28, 1999

Location: Consolidated Works, Seattle, WA
Artists: Mark Bennett, Lauren Grossman, Jim Rittiman, Sandy Skoglund, Dr. Mark Tilden, Shawn Wolfe

Excerpt from curatorial statement:

Last Spring I saw a videotape of a Discovery Channel show called Robots Rising. I was immediately sucked in, not by the subject matter at first, but rather the unadulterated boyish displays of excitement and wonder the scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratories displayed for their creations. Dr. Mark W. Tilden is internationally recognized as the pioneer of analog robotic technology research, and he beams with pride as he watches one of his tiny solar powered insect-like robots react to environmental stimuli seemingly instinctually. The creatures are put together with simple hardware; scavenged transistor radio parts, old calculators, and discarded pagers, and are generally no larger than a paper airplane. Tilden and his team have created more than 300 robots with artificial nervous systems and electronic cores that perform basic tasks, surviving obstacles in the environment, and overcoming damage to themselves. These simple machines accomplish all this with no programming whatsoever, which makes them as close to artificial life as anything humans have created.

These robots, which were made for a scientific purpose, struck me as touchingly beautiful, delicate, obsessively detailed interactive sculpture, and the foundation was laid for my curatorial trek. With Tilden as the purely scientific cornerstone for the exhibition I began to ponder broader artificial life concepts such as religion, television and film, drugs, the witness protection program, personal memory, propaganda, dreams, time travel, chat rooms, role playing games….

As we look toward the millennium and this age of rapidly advancing technology it is important to acknowledge that it is distinctly human to question ethical issues, issues of morality and mortality, and to ponder beauty. The creative spirit that drives scientists, architects and the like to create things that fill a need is the same creative spark that drives artistic vision. Tilden’s “living” machines stretch the boundaries of the scientific definition of life; in this exhibition, the accompanying works of art stretch the boundaries of our personal, individual conceptions about life.