Seattle

May 29, 2013, 8:30am

Rebuilding the Sublime: Peter Scherrer’s EVERYTHING RIGHT AND ANYWHERE NOW

“Getting out,” into the wilderness in western Washington is rarely a clean, easy experience; the nearly endless rainy season can act as a killjoy until the oversized ferns, mushroom patches and lush understories of its forests override the fact that you are standing in these pristine landscapes completely soaked. Bellingham artist Peter Scherrer’s dense, complicated paintings of the Pacific Northwest incorporate similar dynamics through their surfaces muddied with content, almost to point of deterrence (particularly when seen as reproductions).

Listed under: Review, Seattle

May 20, 2013, 8:00am

Stacey Rozich: Within Without me

Stacey Rozich’s Within Without Me opened May 2 at Roq la Rue Gallery in Seattle. The 22 watercolor and gouache paintings on display cast the artist’s trademark colorful, convivial monsters in a new light—or new darkness, rather.

Listed under: Interview, Seattle

April 29, 2013, 8:30am

Unpacked Cargo: Mary Iverson Inside and Out

Shipping containers have a strange relationship to the city of Seattle.  Their accompanying series of orange and white cranes frame our skyline as highly visible but distantly silent landmarks.  With imported products from Asia on the rise and easier movement across the Arctic Ocean due to climate change, the ever-larger stacks of building block-like crates and their colossal vessels that once seemed to be background noise for the city have become poignant emblems of the present.  Washington artist Mary Iverson (NAP MFA Annual 2001) was ahead of the game on the relevance of the shipping container, interjecting it into familiar natural landscapes in her paintings and public art for years.

Listed under: Seattle

April 22, 2013, 8:30am

Painting Restraint: Julie Alpert’s Boundary at SOIL

Seattle artist Julie Alpert has a penchant for pushing ideas between the second and third dimension.  Her installations often merge large scale, graphic murals with physical objects to create immersive, painted mashups that exist somewhere between contemporary surrealism and a utopic built environment. In her newest set of watercolors at SOIL, Alpert distills her hyper-saturated scenes into seventeen modest paintings that stretch and contract within their postcard-sized confines. The painted mounds seep across their surfaces, building an intricate collision of techniques and mediums within the smallest of spaces.

Listed under: Review, Seattle

March 19, 2013, 8:30am

The Photographer’s Painter: Mark Takamichi Miller

A child’s road trip is an unlikely painting subject, on a number of levels. Since children do not drive, rarely are they associated with the road trip concept otherwise so prevalent in American culture; yet artist Mark Takamichi Miller centers his latest body of paintings on view at Seattle’s 4Culture Gallery on this unusual idea.

Listed under: Review, Seattle

January 15, 2013, 10:56am

Slanted and Enchanted: The Wonders of Jeffrey Simmons’s Watercolors

Jeffrey Simmons’s show Watercolors refuses to conform to the expected behavior of its medium. Where watercolor works traditionally speak a nebulous language of soft borders and fading hues, Simmons’ works on paper in his seventh solo show at Greg Kucera Gallery articulate strong colors and fine lines with the utmost precision.  Even when the color bands within his abstracted forms blur, their gestures radiate with strict intention.

Listed under: Review, Seattle

November 30, 2012, 8:30am

Unsolved Collections: The Paintings of Sarah Awad’s Transference and Speculation

Sarah Awad’s orange and white parachute beams broadly like sunshine across the confines of its modest canvas. Sharing the stage with a blue alligator head, a shiny space shuttle and a set of turquoise artillery, bold objects dominate the artist’s new show Transference and Speculation at Seattle’s James Harris Gallery.

Listed under: Review, Seattle

November 07, 2012, 8:36am

Anonymous Source: Anna Fidler’s Topographic Celebrities

It is difficult to decide whether Anna Fidler’s (NAP #61) new show Cherry Bomb references the firecracker definition or the “smokin’ hot lady” definition of the term. The Portland artist’s meticulously constructed acrylic, pencil and cutout paper portraits on view at Seattle’s Prole Drift gallery literally portray women as their subject matter—nostalgic pop musicians including Heart, Joan Jett, and Karen Carpenter.  Yet, a sinister tone resides within the figures’ construction, a highly textural technique that combines psychedelic blasts of color with dark, map-like details that abstract Fidler’s imagery beyond simple appropriation.

Listed under: Review, Seattle

September 28, 2012, 8:25am

The Space Between: Julia Mangold’s Drawings and Sculpture

The three largest sculptures of Julia Mangold’s Drawings and Sculpture stare, despite being compilations of black, geometric fragments that do not readily read as anthropomorphic. These sculptures made of wood covered in a thick sheen of wax stare not only because they stand at eye level, but their physical masses also emit the weight and form of a standard human when standing beside them.  The block forms that comprise their structures protrude and retract strategically, shifting the overall sculptural shapes without giving any sense of being precarious; these staring stacks do not back down.

Listed under: Review, Seattle

September 19, 2012, 8:25am

Where to draw the line: A Conversation with Bette Burgoyne and Jed Dunkerley

I sit down at a bar at the north end of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood with two artists whose work is the definition of obsessive, both in technique and content. Neither of them identify as OCD or autistic.

Listed under: Artists on Artists, Seattle

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