Peace on Earth

General Sense of Well-Being, by Jeremy Mangan

We personally savor the opportunity to see the world through artists’ eyes at any time of year, but there is a heightened significance during the holidays, when the approach of a New Year brings the desire for a clean slate, a snow-white tabula rasa from which to launch hopes, dreams and vision for a strong local community, and a more peaceful world.

This past week, we’ve heard many remark on the total lunar eclipse which coincided with the winter solstice – an event that last occurred in 1638, and will not repeat until 2094. For many, it was worth staying up late to observe the penumbral light show, in which the moon appears to take on a reddish hue before the earth blocks the sun’s rays, obscuring it. Engrossed in a latenight project, we noticed the clock just past midnight, and walked out into the silent street. Peering upward we marveled at the darkness looming over the streetlights, aware of so many other pairs of eyes searching the horizon, casting questions and celebration into the evening skies. The sliver of advancing moon seemed ripe with possibility.

Bamboo, by Andrea Erickson

To celebrate the holidays, Spaceworks Tacoma asked two local artists to share art work on the theme of peace. Andrea Erickson is a sumi-e artist whose work expresses a range of ideas in a few sure, deft strokes. For those unfamiliar with Japanese kanji, her brushwork may read as pictographs or powerful abstractions. She shared with us a piece titled Bamboo. Erickson says the supple, articulated green stalk of the bamboo plant represents a quality valuable to humans: “Even against the strongest winds the bamboo flexes, it bends, nearly touching the ground, but never breaks and keeps its delicate structure.” Likewise, “to resist the storms of conflict, hatred, and doubt” requires a similar strength and resilience. She notes that the bamboo traditionally represents characteristics of “strength, longevity, and friendship.” Erickson is a member of Puget Sound Sumi Artists.

Jeremy Mangan‘s vision of peace, General Sense of Well-Being, is both pastoral and metaphysical, with a series of barn-like structures strung tenuously across a night sky. He says the work “is very much inspired by what the holidays are at their best: times of genuine comfort, gratitude, and peace. We live in a broken world where such times are all too rare; when they come they are a gift and a mercy and we ought to slow down and take notice….No, it can’t last, but we’ll take it while we can get it.” Mangan was the 2009 recipient of the Foundation of Art Award, from the Greater Tacoma Community Foundation. He has an exhibition opening at the Linda Hodges Gallery in Seattle, in February 2011.

A Watermark for Tacoma Art and Architecture

Projecting Drop, by Jill Anholt. A message activated by motion detectors flashes on the wall at night.

Last night, the dedication ceremony of Projecting Drop, a new public artwork at 1250 Pacific Ave., marked two important firsts: The monolithic installation is the first U.S. commission for Vancouver, B.C. artist Jill Anholt. And it is the crown jewel for Pacific Plaza, the first building in the Tacoma/Pierce County region to receive LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Hurrying along Pacific Plaza’s sleek glass front ablaze with holiday lights, it was hard to remember that just a few short years ago, it was a crumbling, four-story parking garage, and not a state-of-the-art office building recognized for its integrated, environmental technologies (the renovated structure is one of only 21 core-and-shell buildings worldwide to receive LEED-Platinum certification, according to a press release from BLRB Architects, designers of Pacific Plaza).

Projecting Drop is a 25′-tall artwork occupying a niche between Pacific Plaza and the newly reconstructed 12th Street hill climb connecting Pacific Avenue and Commerce Street. The soaring wall is covered in 1″ hexagonal, blue and green tiles that cascade from top to base, then ripple outward toward the street. Embedded in the sidewalk tilework is a quote from an 1891 edition of the Tacoma Ledger : “From amidst a sombre forest of firs a city has arisen as by a stroke of an enchanter’s wand. Tacoma looks forth like a new Venice over the glassy waters and prepares to handle the commerce of the world.”

Artist Jill Anholt

In the airy screening room of PCS Structural Solutions, on Pacific Plaza’s seventh floor, Mayor Strickland lauded Anholt’s stunning art piece, noting that it is “rooted in our past and optimistic about our future.” Ben Ferguson, an associate of BLRB Architects, said Anholt was selected from among project applicants for her “thoughtful nature and professionalism” as much as her use of “very dynamic forms with modern characteristics.”

Anholt, whose art background includes a master’s degree in architecture, and whose installations can be seen across Canada, offered a fascinating slideshow explaining how the project came into being. She said that Projecting Drop synthesizes several layers of site-specific information: geological, historical, environmental and social. The piece’s intent is to “reveal collective meaning in a poetic and not didactic way.” After hours spent sifting the archives with librarian Brian Kamers at the Tacoma Public Library, she said finding a connection between Tacoma’s past and present “renaissances” became an important theme. Aesthetically, she wanted the piece to create a “pause” wherein pedestrians could stop, notice and interact with the art. The towering wall, with its projecting raindrop that radiates out from the vertical surface, accomplishes the latter ingeniously: When pedestrians walk by in the evening, a projection activated by motion sensors flashes onto it: “Let Energy! Ambition! and Enterprise! continue to give lustre to the City of Destiny.” The quote appears like an unexpected spattering of gold while also revealing the origins of our famous moniker, the City of Destiny.

The new Pacific Plaza building. Photo: Steve Wanke

The original Park Plaza South parking garage

The larger story of Projecting Drop lies underground, beneath the hill climb, where a century-old Turkish bath was discovered. Once the haunt of underworld kingpins and prostitutes, the bathhouse has been re-purposed as a water cistern that irrigates the building’s green roof above, making the two hidden systems interdependent. It provided Anholt with a vital historical link between old culture and new – and supported Pacific Plaza’s aspirations as a LEED-Platinum building (the cistern also supplies the building’s nonpotable water needs, such as toilets).

“The Turkish bathhouse was mentioned briefly in the [call-to-artists], but it wasn’t until I was allowed to crawl down into the space below the plaza and discovered these two rooms covered with this beautiful tilework during our artist orientation visit, that I became completely intrigued about the history of the bath, and also that of the city of Tacoma. It is a truly remarkable city with a very colorful past!” said Anholt in an e-mail exchange. “I had no idea how I was going to weave these two times and two distinct stories together, but I did know that I wanted to do that in some way.”

It was “an incredibly progressive move” of the Pacific Plaza design team to re-purpose the 19th-century baths into a rooftop irrigation system, she said. “This incredible story, however, is completely invisible to the public. Water is the element that ties the unique past of this site to its present, and also its future….I decided to ‘bring the water to the surface’ in a very direct and simple way as an attempt to weave together storytelling and experience.” Projecting Drop‘s skin of hand-placed, hexagonal tiles echoes the surfaces of the subterranean bathhouse.

Projecting Drop was funded through a public-private partnership between the City of Tacoma and Pacific Plaza Development, LLC. The development team for the $42 million Pacific Plaza renovation project is BLRB Architects, PCS Structural Solutions, Absher Construction and the City of Tacoma. The presence of the structural engineer, the architect and the contractor as tenants in the building paved the way for construction of the artwork, said Anholt. “This project, top to bottom, was fantastic” for Tacoma, beamed BLRB’s Ben Ferguson. It gave an obsolete structure new life “and something more.”

Forest of Souls Comes to Tacoma

The River Project, an installation by Monika Proffitt

Buried beneath the glass-and-concrete edifices of Tacoma lie traditionally sacred grounds, loci of historical importance submerged by modern structures and urban rhythms. One of these places is Tollefson Plaza, at S. 17th and Pacific Ave., once the site of a Puyallup tribal village and medicine house. Artist and Puyallup tribe member Shaun Peterson sited his 20′ cedar Welcome Figure there, earlier this year. Another artist attracted to the site is Monika Proffitt, whose Spaceworks Tacoma installation, Forest of Souls, will open on the winter solstice, December 21, and conclude with the spring equinox on March 20, 2011.

Nimbus, by Monika Proffitt

Lighting is the medium Proffitt is best known for, and for Forest of Souls she is creating an underwater, fiber-optic light sculpture that will illuminate the cascading pools at Tollefson Plaza. She says a conversation with the grounds maintenance supervisor, Tom Slagle, first inspired her idea for the project. “[Slagle] mentioned that the site of Tollefson Plaza is where a natural cold springs used to come out of the ground and flow into the river,” and that this aquifer was of importance to the medicine house. “This was very intriguing, and I thought about how the city had somehow decided to put in a fountain/water feature in the same place where once upon a time natural water used to flow.”

Because of the site’s history, Proffitt says she felt that the essence of “ancestors and silent people” must be ever present there. “I wanted the light installation to give them voice in some silent, yet understood way.” Forest of Souls will be Proffitt’s modern homage to the area’s original inhabitants.

Garden of Light, by Monika Proffitt

The Seattle-based artist, formerly of Colorado, says the prevailing gray of Northwest skies first sparked her interest in light as a medium. Early experiments with rewiring incandescent lamps progressed to making multimedia installations using recorded stories, LED lighting and blown glass. The River Project, an installation at the Pilchuck Glass School, gathered the recorded stories of friends and strangers in a darkened room where the disembodied narratives flowed over a stream bed of rock-shaped, cobalt lights. Over several years, Proffitt has become expert in her manipulation of the emotional qualities of light and color.

With Forest of Souls, she breaks new territory: “I have not worked with a large series of pools of flowing water like what is in Tollefson Plaza.  I am excited to see what comes of something this large.” The art work should provide a striking nighttime spectacle, “when light disturbance from other sources is minimized. At night, my intention is for this piece to enhance the sense of serenity and soothing motion that the water feature provides in Tollefson Plaza.” In addition to her studio work, Proffitt recently opened a bar, The Living Room, on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Forest of Souls, at Tollefson Plaza, S. 17th and Pacific Ave., December 21, 2010 – March 20, 2011. www.monikaproffitt.com.

‘fly’ Rises Again

Huladay greetings by Jessica Spring of Springtide Press. Photo courtesy of 'fly.'

fly, Tacoma headquarters for the best in artist-designed products, has reopened in a new location at King’s Books (218 Saint Helens Ave.), just in time for the holidays. And we’re so relieved, because now we can proceed with our strategy of doing all our holiday shopping in one place (we’re not lazy, we just recognize a beautifully edited emporium – one offering high-quality, unique and reasonably priced items – when we see one).

fly moved out of its original location on Broadway several weeks ago, after a fire at the next-door Subway caused smoke damage. The new location, in the former rare-books room at King’s, is a more fortuitous fit for the artists’ showcase. The room is a fraction of the size of the old space, and offers a more focused setting for the original designs on display. fly features some of the finest letterpress art in town, and we can’t think of a more apt place for it to be shown, than next to the tomes at King’s (which is under new ownership – congratulations, Sweet Pea Flaherty).

'fly' owner Jennifer Adams cradles a wiener dog by artist Mirka Hokkanen

For those lucky dogs who are shopping for the 12 days of Christmas, or some variation thereof, fly proprietor Jennifer Adams offers mind-boggling choices, including Tacoma is for Lovers hoodies, felted acorns by Miranda Pollitz, glass baby heads by Oliver Doriss, stylish togs for the under-5 set by Lindsey Barnes, block-printed napkins and dishtowels by cabinet 713 (Jessica Bender), and jewelry by Wendy Gordon and Connie DeBruler. You’ll find letterpress art including feminist postcards by Jessica Spring (Springtide Press), prints and coasters by uncommon envelope and black dog designs, screen prints by Slide Sideways, and many more items sure to delight. Take a peek at flytacomafly.blogspot.com. fly, at King’s Books, 218 St. Helens Ave.