Wake Me When It’s Over

Check out Gabriel Brown‘s Dreamtime performance today at the Woolworth Building, noon-2p.m. and 8-10p.m. The artist will settle down for a snooze inside his Great Tasting Goodness! installation on a landfill-size bed of junk packaging whose loud colors could waken the dead.

“Should be pretty low profile,” says Brown. As if modeling after a set of Russian nesting dolls, the artist fits himself neatly inside a work about the pitfalls of consumerism, which is ironically situated inside the storefront window of a former retail giant in the heart of the financial district. Brown promises to be “dressed as an average suburban male wearing a cheap pair of sunglasses, a yellow-and-blue striped polo shirt, khaki pants, a brown belt, a shiny watch, brown socks, and a pair of brown loafers while listening to my i-Pod.” Cardboard packaging slathered with garish colors and advertising slogans covers the floor and walls of the exhibit, threatening to suffocate any who dare to enter.

The American dream, indeed.

A Tainted Tea

Cat Grey's tea party: a morbid gathering.

Acataphasia Grey throws the battiest tea parties – with creatures conjured from a surrealist sanatorium or an insane Victorian child’s nursery. Tea for Short  Expectations, her installation in Opera Alley, is no exception. Look closely through the peepholes in the window and you’ll make out “reworked” taxidermy animals not found in nature, and stuffed animals with more than the recommended number of eyes and limbs. The lighting is appropriately dim, making one strain to interpret the dream-like arrangement of “sparkly things, dead things, found things….I created this installation so that you can see one of the secret places where mutant animals meet to drink tea, or wine, or whatever it is that mutant animals drink,” she says. “This small party is just for the Unusual Ones that live nearby.”

This peculiar gathering is just what you’d expect from the founder of The Unfortunate Animal of the Month Club. We suggest viewing it through absinthe-colored glasses. Tea for Short Expectations, in Opera Alley through July 1.

Beauty Among the Refuse

Definition of Abscission:
1. the natural process by which leaves or other parts are shed from a plant
2. the act of suddenly cutting something off

"Abscission" features objects so common as to be invisible. Photo: Dane Gregory Meyer

Artist Julie M. Jansen says that all the objects in her new installation, Abscission, have two things in common: Each item was hand-collected by herself, and each is deemed unnecessary or unwanted by most people. The inventory includes torn up cardboard, blue masking tape, remnant paint and, somewhat creepily, invasive plant species (collected from nurseries in her hometown of Portland). The latter – homicidal members of the vegetable world – when introduced to alien turf go on to strangle, starve or otherwise corrupt vulnerable native species. But in Jansen’s hands, this lineup of undesirables assembles itself along with inanimate objects into a larger-than-life collage; one that speaks to the idea of a life cycle for every item we mindlessly insert into the consumer chain. Unfortunately, we lose control over such objects once they leave our hands, with untold consequences.

"Debris" by Julie Jansen

Other elements that make up Abscission, such as remnant paint given to the artist by friends, “are ordinary [items], quickly discarded, and so ingrained in everyday life that we no longer see them.” Cardboard flats are cut into shapes resembling land forms, or the layers on a topographical map. “By gathering unwanted items and using them in my work I am engaging in a process encompassing concepts of displacement, temporality, and place,” she says.

Jansen has nurtured invasive species for previous projects, and she’s interested in how once an aggressive species takes hold in an environment, “an entire industry of weed-killing chemicals” must follow to exterminate it. “Humans are poisoning water sources along with desirable plants and crops,” she says. “One reason I am focusing on invasive plants in this installation is because I question the methods used to destroy them.

“Another intention of this work is to cause individuals to rethink their relationships to these plants and hopefully find beauty in something that is usually undesired. Within this concept I see a metaphor for many aspects of human life; in our society we quickly deem objects and even individuals unnecessary and discard them accordingly.” Abscission, the Woolworth Building, 11th & Broadway, March 22 – July 1.

Night Shift

Julie Jansen works the night shift.

A crowd adrift in the city, by Amy Oates.

T-town shows a different face at night, and that’s especially true of the Woolworth Building – that Edward Hopper-esque structure whose illuminated windows attract passersby with beauty like some half-forgotten memory.

The Woolworth windows on Broadway and Commerce are filling with new art installations. Tonight, we spotted Portland artist Julie Jansen burning the midnight oil while setting up her Artscapes exhibit, a meditation on invasive species.

On the Broadway side, Amy Oates‘ art installation appeared spectral; after nightfall, her congestion of delicate, cut-out paper silhouettes seem to bear less corporeality than their shadows. “My current work has to do with everyday people moving, merging and fading into each other as individuality is lost and something completely other-than emerges,” she says. “The uncertainty of forms….raises the idea that what is seen, reasoned and sensed may not be the ultimate in reality.”

"Brasov, Romania," by Amy Oates.

Oates’ group of cut-out figures seems to be suspended in no particular time or place. “It is probable that any observed crowd will never be seen in the same location and spatial relation again. Individuals are mobile and transitory, and at the [same] moment ‘of the crowd’; nameless and faceless [amidst] unmoving space. Yet, the city – that static dot on the map – is formed, altered, and sustained by anonymous persons, fleeting moments, rubbed shoulders, blocked views, stuffy spaces, converging paths, and diverging destinations,” she explains.

Take a nighttime stroll at Woolworth’s and witness this and other dramas of urban life.

Memoirs of a Garbologist

"Great Tasting Goodness!" at the Woolworth Building.

Have you ever had an advertising jingle stuck in your head? A ditty for some throwaway item that clung to your gray matter like a remora to a cruising shark? If so, then beware of the art of Gabriel Brown – this artist’s exuberant new installation at the Woolworth Building, fashioned from a massive accumulation of junk packaging, has viewers (particularly baby boomers) wracking their brains for the iconic ad slogans they grew up with: Trix are for kids! We try harder! A little dab’ll do ya! Finger lickin’ good! Once you start playing that game, it’s hard to stop.

A house in McDonald's land.

Brown has a problem, and it is us. That is, the Everest-size mountain of waste we Americans create each year that has earned us the dubious distinction of being Earth’s Most Wasteful Citizens. Brown, a self-described “garbologist,” uses a well-honed sense of satire to dissect the American way of life.

His new installation, Great Tasting Goodness!, is a panoramic commentary on the marketing industry and on unbridled consumerism. The work’s central figure, a soaring, two-headed “human” silhouette, is made from hundreds of cookie-cutter houses hand-folded from discarded product packaging. This goliath (reminiscent of the graffiti artist Keith Haring’s “radiant child”), grasps in every direction. Layers of flattened packaging litter the floor, the familiar brand labels playfully begging viewers to “Name That Jingle” – for Mr. Clean, Cheeze-It, Lipitor, Marlboro.

A spotless tub - at what price?

Brown skillfully employs a double row of houses as the line he uses to “draw” with; this line is symbolically loaded, bringing to mind a factory production line, an endless freeway of stopped vehicles, as well as a weirdly generic meta-suburb (an impression accentuated by the innocuous white cotton clouds floating overhead). He has been making these fastidiously folded dwellings since 2007, and notes that it is “surprising how many products children can recognize even with only a portion of a logo revealed.”

Gabriel Brown satirizes the American way of life.

The Tacoma artist has posted some of his interactive projects on his website. For his hilarious Adventure series, Brown dons a suit and tie to assume the persona of an affluent, non-reflective businessman – one who panhandles for gas (for his Hummer!); and rummages through public garbage cans while “talking loudly on [the] cellphone about stocks, golf and wife troubles.” In an installation called Litter Mandala, a design resembling a jewel-like Eastern mandala reveals itself to be constructed from carefully placed bits of refuse. The message is loud and clear: Materialism is the new religion, and the shopping mall is its temple.

Brown’s art invites people to look at themselves and laugh (nervously) at their ability to get suckered by the marketing Masters of the Universe. A fine satirist, he relies on neither didactic rampages nor overdone cynicism to get his point across. The work is most successful when it “has caught the public eye and sparked dialogue over issues such as consumerism, contemporary art, waste, materialism and environmental destruction,” he says.

Gabriel, blow your horn!

In Praise of Print

Elements from "Bit Map," by Jessica Spring. Paper circlets are imprinted with vintage elements known as "printer's flowers."

St. Bartholomew is known as the patron saint of bookbinders. In Tacoma, a town with an unusual number of fine letterpress artists, Jessica Spring may be seen as the Patroness of Paper Artists for co-founding the popular, annual printmakers’ festival, Wayzgoose (named after a medieval guild celebration that took place on – surprise! – St. Bartholomew’s Day).

The founder of locally-based Springtide Press, Spring creates her own exquisite style of art using vintage foundry type, printing presses and bindery equipment, much of it more than a century old. But she brings a clean, modern sensibility to a body of work that, on the surface, appears nostalgic because of the tactile richness of its imprinted images, and the use of luxurious papers that exalt the printed word.

"Parts Unknown" transports viewers back to the 1890s.

Take Bit Map, an installation for Spaceworks Tacoma opening March 17 at the Woolworth Building. This work resembles a curtain of hundreds of floating paper circlets, each composed with multiple graphic elements. Each circlet is letterpress printed on one side with vintage images known as “printer’s flowers” or “ornaments”; the reverse is embellished with end papers taken from antique children’s books. As the strands of circlets twist and turn, they create a spinning narrative of story and image, color and texture. While densely encoded with information from days past, Spring notes that as a whole, Bit Map should be read “like a constant flow of data composed of binary zeroes and ones, potential chaos controlled by pattern.” This art of “nostalgic touch points” is not as innocent as it looks.

Mixed message: printed words on braille by Jessica Spring

“There’s a tension there, no doubt,” she says. “I’m grabbing the last century as hard as I can, and it’s slipping away. There’s also some design tension – mixing ornate Victorian ornaments with polka dots and bright colors…It’s also unavoidable to mention all the discussion around the end of the printed book. So here’s a response, a memorial.” Springtide Press produces small, finely-crafted editions of artist books, broadsides and ephemera incorporating letterpress and handmade papers. Check out the (ultra) fine print at http://www.springtidepress.com. Bit Map, at the Woolworth Building, 11th & Broadway, March 17 through July 1.

Paper Garden

Holly Senn plants an idea in "Composites."

Every garden is a collaboration, a creative conversation between human being and plants in which the gardener has the louder voice, but the vegetation has the final say.

Unless the gardener is Holly Senn. For a number of years, the Tacoma-based artist has been crafting botanical sculptures that “explore the life cycle of ideas – the organic, non-linear process in which thoughts have a genesis and then are disseminated, adopted or refuted, forgotten or referenced.” In her world, old books provide the rich mulch from which art arises. She takes discarded library volumes, plucks their yellowed leaves then reanimates them in the form of three-dimensional buds, seeds and fruit.

Senn’s new installation at the Woolworth Building, Composites, is a colorful hybrid of an exhibit combining her word-based sculptures and photography. Six flower sculptures are paired with six photographs of flowers, each duo creating, in effect, a self-contained diorama.

“I’m a sculptor – I think and work in three-dimensional forms. Instead of sketching I take photographs of plants and use those photos as inspiration and models for my sculptures,” she explains. “In combining the two processes I wanted to invite viewers to look closer….The integration of the sculptures with the canvases allows viewers to reflect on the level of similarity and integration.”

A diorama by Holly Senn.

Senn’s Spaceworks-supported installation is located at 11th and Broadway in windows that face out at the weekly Tacoma farmers’ market. The siting adds vibrancy and site responsiveness to the work. The open marketplace “brings a composite of plants, people and ideas to Broadway….Ideas are the most invisible part of the market composition, but are an important part of the communication and transactions that take place across cultures, genders and ages of the participants.”

The works in Composites were originally exhibited at the Brooklyn Public Library in 2009. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden provided Senn with source material – photographs of plants from the garden which she transformed digitally, enlarged and printed on canvas for the dioramas’ backgrounds. She then created, leaf by leaf, her vivid and painstakingly detailed individual responses to the images of wisteria, holly, red bud, tulip, rhododendron and cherry. You can see the artist’s personal journal of photographs and observations about plants on her website. Composites, 11th and Broadway, March 14 through July 1.

Imagining Ice Land

"Rings" by Nicole Linde

If Nature is the reigning goddess-muse for a legion of contemporary artists, Iceland must be her sexiest manifestation. The singer Bjork, the post-rock band Sigur Rós, and Nobel Prize-winning author, Halldór Laxness, all hail from this island south of the Arctic Circle, where myths of trolls and pixies hold a special place in the minds of some, and the geography of spewing volcanoes, gushing geysers, steaming hot springs and growling blue ice floes is something magical.

And then there’s winter – the endless winter.

“When I first went to Iceland, I arrived in early January and stayed until late July,” says Portland-based artist, Nicole Linde, of her artist’s residency in the northern town of Akureyri. “There were only two hours of daylight in January and about the same amount of darkness in July.” One thing the elongated Icelandic winter offers artists is the time and motivation to stay inside and create. For Linde, that meant embarking on a series of crystal-themed pieces inspired by the ice-encrusted landscape, one of which is coming to Tacoma.

"The Council" by Nicole Linde

For Spaceworks Tacoma, Linde is creating The Crystalline Garden, an installation opening March 18 at 906 Broadway. Universal forces converge in this “cosmic piece” inspired by the artist’s interest in natural crystals, Nordic mythology, science fiction and fantasy. Images of “the volcanic, hot landscape of obsidian” are one catalyst behind her work. But The Crystalline Garden extends beyond the seen realm.

“I like the idea that we are all stardust. I don’t know much about the scientific facts behind this, but poetically it is a nice visual connection,” she says. “In my art, I am constantly exploring new ideas, and new ways to express my finite self to the infinite. Perhaps this cosmic sea of chemicals, gases, and minerals is the glue that binds us all together within a dimensional giant web.”

"An Offering," by Nicole Linde

Linde says that while developing her “fantastical world” on the theme of crystals, she became interested in the relationship between natural vs. artificial objects. She then made resin casts “to try and imitate crystals and gems. The meeting of these two worlds is where I feel the magic of Crystalline Garden starts to happen.” The Crystalline Garden, 906 Broadway, March 18 through July 1. http://www.nicolelinde.com

A Tea Party Radical

This tea party in Paris inspired the art work of Acataphasia Grey. Photo by Cat Grey

The first thing you notice about the artist Acataphasia Grey is an air of twisted opulence; it tinges everything from her formal way of speaking, to her complicated name, from “a medical Latin term that basically means, ‘Being able to form complete sentences in your head but not say them out loud.’” And that’s before you see the doleful, three-eyed stuffed bunnies she makes, or photos of the surrealist Old World tea party she convened, attended by taxidermy zebras and assorted other African game.

Cat Grey goes for baroque.

This creator of phantasmagoria confesses to a penchant for the past, “Specifically, the rage for ‘cabinets of curiosities’ that the Victorians were so particularly fond of, and the taxonomy collectors. The unusual being regarded as special, or better than normal.” Grey’s own unique brand of taxonomy will be on exhibit in a Spaceworks Tacoma installation, Tea for Short Expectations, opening March 15. “I envision a clandestine gathering of mutant animals: drinking tea, eating sugar cubes or upsetting the cream in an atmosphere of secrecy and safety,” she muses. Alice in Wonderland gone awry? The scene will be partially obscured “to enhance the feeling that this is a glimpse into a private world, not commonly seen, but perhaps going on all around you.”

A soft toy by Cat Grey

Grey glides like a changeling between the self-created worlds and time periods she inhabits. In a previous life, she was art director of a Bainbridge Island production company where she oversaw projects ranging from an M-TV music video to the transformation of a defunct bar into a fabulous set for a Bombay Sapphire gin shoot. She has been a full-time artist for several years.

In addition to her large-scale art, Grey creates original soft toys; stuffed animals that, while cuddly, could be read as the abandoned playthings of an ill-fated dystopia. “‘Bunnies’ is my generic term for any stuffed animal,” she says. “I look at them and my goal is to ‘fix’ them, so that they have teeth at last, or better eyes, or many, many eyes…I could say that the objective is to whisper, ‘Hey, it’s perfectly alright to like this better because it has two heads. You are not alone.’” Enter the world of Acataphasia Grey at www.morbidtendencies.com. Tea for Short Expectations, Opera Alley, March 15 through July 1.

New Spaceworks Artists Announced

Painting by Jeremy Gregory.

The third round of Spaceworks Tacoma artists is on deck. After a review of applications, a total of 17 artists and/or performance groups were chosen for participation on three tracks: Artscapes, Artist Residencies or Creative Enterprise.

Ten visual artists were selected to create Artscapes installations in downtown storefronts: Julie M. Jansen, Gabriel Brown, Holly Senn, Jessica Spring, Amy Oates, Nicole Linde, Rachel Hibbard, Celeste Cooning, Acataphasia Grey, Cheryl Rux and Nichole Vandever. The installations will run from March 15 – July 1, 2011.

Three individuals and two arts organizations were awarded Spaceworks Tacoma Artist Residencies: James Grayson Sinding, Chris Sharp, Jeremy Gregory, the 4th Wall theater group and Tacoma Music Collective. Four of the residencies, which vary in length from three-to-six months, are underway, with the Tacoma Music Collective taking occupancy April 1.

Topping off the Round 3 roster is the Barefoot Collective, awarded a Spaceworks Tacoma Creative Enterprise residency for a rehearsal space at 915 Pacific Avenue, effective immediately.

More award recipients will be announced in the spring. Congratulations to all!