Filed under: Art World, Seattle | Tags: Erin Langner, Gallery 4Culture, Installation, Julia Freeman, Seattle
© 2011, Julia Freeman, VERY LITTLE ROOM FOR MISHAPS, mixed-media installation, Photos by Julia Freeman.
Julia Freeman’s installation Very Little Room for Mishaps drenches Gallery 4Culture in a visceral cacophony. The Seattle artist’s hand-painted and collaged floral wallpaper wraps the gallery walls, while life-sized cutout photographs of shrubs and dark, amorphous masses on wheels float aimlessly within its center, intended to be pulled and arranged within the space by viewers. A table display of tape-wrapped tools provides the utilitarian objects of this estranged reality, while an ominous soundtrack created by Ajax Wood and J.M. McNuity complete the installation, fully immersing the viewer in the constructed scene.Compared to Freeman’s recent shoebox-sized scenes created for the windows of ACT Theatre, Very Little Room for Mishaps is colossal in scale, changing the role of the viewer from voyeur to participant.
More after the jump! —Erin Langner, Seattle contributor
Filed under: Art World, Seattle | Tags: Andy Arkley, Erin Langner, Installation, Joey Veltkamp, Julie Alpert, sculpture, Seattle, SOIL
TOP: (installation view) Julie Alpert and Andy Arkley, Flat & Bright. Courtesy of the artists. BOTTOM: Joey Veltkamp, The Ghost of Claude, acrylic and resin on bisque ceramic. Courtesy of the artist. Photos: Amanda Ringstad.
When Seattle’s first ever exhibition of Picasso’s work closed at the end of January, the city had been thoroughly saturated with the weight of both the artist’s legacy and the museum blockbuster experience. Leaving a heavy association with painting to linger in the city, this month Seattle’s SOIL provides an antidote with the March shows Flat & Bright and The Ghosts of Joey Veltkamp. Here, painting lets its guard down, leaving behind the tradition of the three-dimensional canvas in exchange for a pursuit of proudly flat forms closely tied to video games and cartoons. More after the jump! —Erin Langner, Seattle contributor
Filed under: Art World | Tags: Evan J. Garza, Installation, Katharina Grosse, MASS MoCA
Installation view, Katharina Grosse: One Floor Up More Highly, 2010. On display at MASS MoCA through October 2011. Images courtesy MASS MoCA.
A painting’s scale has always had a direct impact on the viewer, but never quite like this. For her most ambitious project thus far in the United States, Katharina Grosse has created a dramatic, epicly-scaled (and surprisingly romantic) installation that almost entirely consumes the massive Building 5 gallery at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA. The paint normally found on her large-scale canvases has been removed and replaced with monumental, undulating fields of chromatic intensity and texture in a giant gallery, instead using painted piles of soil and large Styrofoam “shards,” which viewers can walk around.
Grosse has long turned installation sites into three-dimensional investigations of paint, brandishing a spray gun in lieu of a brush. Her spray-painted mountains of soil dot the landscape of the gallery much in the same way that piles of pigment create surface texture on a canvas, simultaneously pushing the limits (and definitions) of painting, sculpture, and installation. One Floor Up More Highly, her large-scale exhibition for MASS MoCA, takes Grosse’s interest in the function of painting in an expanded field and, as the title suggests, kicks it up a notch. More pics after the jump. —Evan J. Garza
