Trash Couture

"Marriage of Inconvenience" features a headdress of condoms and syringes, and a skirt made of post-use pill packets.

The worlds of fashion, art and AIDS activism are intimately connected, and they collide in the ebullient couture art of Rebecca Maxim. Maxim is a hospice nurse at Bailey-Boushay House in Seattle, where for the past 15 years she has assisted patients facing the complex challenges of living with HIV/AIDS. Five years ago, she returned to her roots in the textile arts when she began co-producing fashion shows with Haute Trash of California – gloriously campy productions that employed “trash couture” as a tool for educating the public about the serious effects of consumption and waste disposal on the environment.

Her experience as a hospice caregiver combined with a call to create art spurred Maxim to design Marriage of Inconvenience, a monumental gown that is the product of “the copious medications required to maintain relative health in [the] HIV/AIDS population.” The dress will be on exhibit at 908 Broadway starting July 15, as part of Spaceworks Tacoma. “I have collected thousands of these [post-use pill] packets, which are printed with the days of the week and times of the day that medications are to be taken,” says Maxim of the materials used to fabricate the ensemble: headdress, corset, petticoat, skirt and bouquet. “The elaborate wedding dress will signify the ‘pill burden’ [that patients carry], as well as the commitment, or marriage, to medication….The goal of this dress is as an educational piece about the continued struggle with HIV disease.” 

A cocktail dress by Rebecca Maxim features a pouf skirt of recycled styrofoam peanuts inside bird-proof garden netting.

Maxim, whose own favorite couturier is the late Alexander McQueen, favors a thrift-store jacket, layered top, jeans and Frye boots as her “uniform” for knocking around in. Of castoff materials she says, “Ordinary trash, which we don’t normally pay attention to, [can be] transformed, then wrapped around a body to become extraordinary. Then we notice the trash and begin to think about the volume of it.

“All the top designers have made pieces that are pure art (i.e., not wearable under ordinary circumstances),” she points out. With its lavish use of recycled plastic, her bridal piece combines potent messages about environmental degradation as well as the cost of HIV/AIDS. Maxim has been encouraged in the wedding dress project by Seattle artist Ross Palmer Beecher, who is artist-in-residence at Bailey-Boushay House.

"Steam Junque" is made from an erosion-control sock with a white pill-cup ruffle down the front. Sandal boots are designed from bike and wheelbarrow inner tubes. Model: Rebecca Maxim

Marriage of Inconvenience is a visual poem, a keening over the heartbreaking pain, suffering, expense and everyday tedium that is borne by those living with HIV/AIDS. “Even though the meds can sustain life, it is a commitment that can be hard to keep,” writes Maxim. It requires “an adherence to your vows through thick or thin, in sickness and in health, ’til death do you part….In every way possible, this dress is [a] graphic reminder of the endless schedule of medication [patients must repeat] ad nauseum week in, week out….

“Obviously, these drugs have saved lives,” says the hospice nurse. “When I started working in HIV, everyone died. They are living longer [now] but there are repercussions.” The retroviral drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS often have a host of crippling side effects: “Not everyone tolerates the drugs or even tolerates taking pills every day.” Then, there is the cost, anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 per month, she says, not including “the other drugs [patients] take for cholesterol, blood pressure, mental health, insomnia, pain – just to name a few.”

MODblog at the Tollbooth Gallery

An image from Michiko Tanaka's digital blog.

In her 14 years as a scenery artist, Seattle-based Michiko Tanaka has created worlds for others to inhabit or to explore in the form of painted interior backdrops for the theater, opera and museums. But, her own artistic interests have also fanned out in many directions, leading her to far corners of the world, and to artist residencies in six countries. She has studied pottery making with a Japanese master in Tokyo, bamboo furniture craft with artisans in Costa Rica, and plein air painting at a residency in San Miguel de Allende. Religious tableaux were her subject of study in Paris – information she employed in a subsequent residency in Malawi, Africa. Here, in Washington, Tanaka took up a chisel to explore the art of Native American wood carving.

"Japanese Calendar" by Michiko Tanaka

At the moment, the artist finds her creative universe contained within the walls of a computer. She is designing a video installation, MODblog, which will be on view at the diminutive Tollbooth (“The World’s Smallest Gallery”) in downtown Tacoma from July 15 to October 31. Unlike the richly rendered but stationery backgrounds she has created for the theater, the Spaceworks-supported MODblog will offer a visual stream of pop culture iconography.

“I love the easy access that the computer provides for anything that I can think [of] to make,” said Tanaka via e-mail. “The computer is a great place to make renderings for ideas” that may eventually be translated into 3-D objects.

The Tollbooth video will be drawn from a blog she writes for her website. “I post a conceptual art/comic piece weekly.  All of the pieces are about some philosophical issue I am grappling with or some observation I have made; in this way it is like a comic.  I use computer programs to augment images and create other documents so the format is a little unusual…in this way it is more like conceptual art.”

Tanaka’s video loop will be arranged in chapters of images, each prefaced by a title slide. The artist will also include an “answer key” that will expand on the work…or perhaps inspire more questions. MODblog, the Tollbooth Gallery, 11th and Broadway, July 15 – October 31, 2011. www.yellowlaboratories.com

Surface Appearances and Impositions

"Pointing" by Amy Bay. Molding clay applied to various walls in Lower Manhattan.

“I often draw attention to parts of a site that might otherwise be unnoticed or taken for granted,” writes Portland, OR-based artist Amy Bay. “I do this through a kind of mimicry or replication of forms found at the site, often whittling them down to quintessential elements.  This comes from a personal tendency to find meaning and importance in things that are considered commonplace or banal.” Objects such as building brick, for instance, which she chose to outline in lipstick red on an exterior wall for an installation in Manhattan. Bay’s isolation of the mundane describes, to borrow the words of artist John Baldessari, a personal “hierarchy of viewing.”

"Resurfacing (stones)" by Amy Bay, at the Carriage House of the Islip Art Museum, NY.

For Spaceworks Tacoma, Bay is conceiving a site-specific installation in the Woolworth Building where blackberry brambles – summer’s sweet harbinger, but also among the most hard-to-defeat of invasive species – fan out along the walls and floor inside a storefront window; in the background, empty shelving and the remains of a once thriving, now defunct commercial enterprise can be seen. Which force – that of nature or capitalism – will ultimately prevail?

“Both worlds are capable of vacillating between extremes, the commercial world between prosperity and depression, and the natural world between bounty and invasion,” she writes. “Commercial enterprises can bind a community socially and economically, yet fail and abandon the same community that they once served. Blackberries are a source of delicious fruit, but can also be an omnipresent nuisance.” That the newly occupying brambles will be made from molding clay assures them a blatantly false, cartoonish quality “reminiscent of toys [or] faux nature in theme parks….while adding a dimension of discomfort because of the invasive nature of the plant.” Observe the battle for dominance in the Woolworth windows, 11th & Broadway, July 15 – October 31, 2011. http://www.amybay.com.

Spaceworks Moves to Tacoma’s Hilltop

Four new Spaceworks studios are opening next to the Fulcrum Gallery (at right).

Not unlike the gangly adolescent with a grinning mouthful of orthodontia who grows up to become a self-created, self-owning supermodel, the Hilltop in Tacoma has the kind of raw potential that local denizens may someday brag about having “discovered.” It is a transitional neighborhood with breathtaking views, history-rich architecture, an urban vibe and two of the city’s hippest outposts – the Fulcrum Gallery and 1022 South (a bar the New York Times calls “home to some of the most fascinating apothecary cocktail work on the West Coast”). It is also a city sector earmarked for revitalization efforts. Located  just a few miles south of downtown, the Hilltop is a happening place waiting to happen.

Members of Fab-5 and Toy Boat Theatre have a work party. L to R: Chris Jordan, Josh Bornstein, Jen Davis, Alex Smith, Katie Lowery, Kenji Stoll, Eddie Sumlin, Davon White.

That goal may be inching closer: Four vacant retail storefronts on the Hilltop have just been added to the Spaceworks program of exhibition/residency spaces. Located in a building adjacent to the Fulcrum Gallery at 1308 Martin Luther King Way (for years the lone embodiment of the Hilltop “art scene”), the new additions will encourage the critical mass needed to create a more thriving, diverse scene.

Owned by the Marie Thorp Wilson Trust, the brick building at 1310-1316 MLK Way houses four spacious studios which will be available for three-to-six month terms, rent-free, to Spaceworks participants. It is the kind of open, unfinished project space artists salivate over. The aim of Spaceworks is to enable the creation of dynamic art exhibitions, performances and residencies in urban storefronts, a process which benefits property owners by activating vacant spaces and ultimately making them more attractive to potential renters and buyers.

A studio in the making.

Trust spokesperson and Thorp family member Jeanette Sorensen is a relative of one of Tacoma’s founding families (her grandfather, Theodore Thorp of Hudson, Wisconsin, followed his cousin, Thea Foss, to settle out West), and says she is a newcomer to the arts. Fulcrum owner Oliver Dorris first floated the idea of opening her building to Spaceworks, she says; then after meeting with the project administrators, “it appeared to be a wonderful program that would give life to our building and an opportunity to help the arts in Tacoma.” Through Sorensen’s generosity, a strip of the Hilltop will become a dynamic point of interest through artistic enterprise. So far, the artists slated for residencies in her building include the Toy Boat Theatre, creative consortium Fab-5 and musician Nate Dybevik.

Toy Boat Theatre Sets Sail

“It is a hopeless endeavour to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get in.”
~Charles Dickens

Toy Boat Theatre member Josh Bornstein in a UPS production of "The Cradle Will Rock" directed by Marilyn Bennett. Photo courtesy of UPS Theatre Arts

The energetic founders of Toy Boat Theatre (TBT) are making one point perfectly clear: The community theatre scene in Tacoma is a stalwart beast; it is seasoned, it has stamina, it’s a survivor, and despite the struggles (and competition) shared by arts organizations, it makes room for hungry experimentalists – such as themselves.

“Tacoma Little Theatre is 93 years old. Lakewood Playhouse is 73!” enthuses Jen Davis, the group’s Associate Artistic Director, and a 2011 University of Puget Sound graduate in Theatre.

“Tacoma Musical Playhouse has a strong following, but retains an older subscription base,” adds Dr. Marilyn Bennett, who holds a Ph.D. in Theatre History and Criticism from the University of Washington, and is TBT’s Artistic Director. “Shakespeare in the Parking Lot is over 10 years old….and, of course, the Broadway Center for the Performing Arts is a vibrant road house.”

A third principal, actor/designer/theatre technician Alex Smith, offers the classic rationale of why, in the age of downloadable entertainment, live theatre isn’t hovering near extinction: “Artists have an effect on the people who view and experience their art in person. The audience helps create the unique energy and exchange at every performance.” Smith is TBT’s Design Technical Associate.

Deya Ozburn and Marilyn Bennett in the Gold from Straw Theatre production of "Doubt" directed by Aaron Schmookler.

The TBT co-founders and their troupe are recipients of a three-month Spaceworks residency that will support the production and performance of Dakota’s Belly, Wyoming, a play by Erin Cressida Wilson. Spaceworks talked to the trio via e-mail about their fringe manifesto: “Toy Boat Theatre is a selective scavenger. We troll the back alleys and mean streets of Tacoma and environs in search of the overlooked cranny, under appreciated artist….and dog-eared, coffee-ringed script with unrealized potential to engage, awaken, even stun.” The three previously worked together on the Gold from Straw Theatre production of Doubt, performed locally in the Mecca building using packing boxes for makeshift dressing room walls. We wondered if the stripped-down approach to theatre was mainly by choice or necessity.

“Choice and necessity both,” says Davis.

“We will break even,” vows Smith. “It takes almost nothing to do good theatre, and we have almost nothing!”

Wayzgoose and Tacoma’s Printmaking Delirium

Freshly pressed: a Ric Matthies print. Photo: Aaron Locke

The Puget Sound region is frequently cited as one of the most reading-obsessed corners of the country (with moss-friendly weather and a high incidence of depression reputed to be factors). Luckily for local literati, there is King’s Books in the Stadium District, an indie gem of a bookstore and a clearinghouse for approximately 100,000 rare, out-of-print, secondhand and newly released books, according to proprietor sweet pea Flaherty.

King’s has everything we love in a neighborhood bookshop – a pithy and knowledgeable staff, the “old book smell” (take that, Kindle!), resident cats roaming the stacks – and enough volumes to keep one busy through a lifetime of soggy weather. On top of that, the 11-year old store supports artists through events such as the renegade craft fair, Tacoma is for Lovers, and highbrow hijinx such as the Banned Book Club. One of the city’s most popular art festivals, a printmaking and book arts showcase called Wayzgoose (after a medieval guild celebration) is an annual event (co-founded by award-winning local artist, Jessica Spring) held at King’s.

Flaherty takes the wheel at Wayzgoose. Photo: Aaron Locke

Spaceworks is celebrating seven years of Wayzgoose with an exhibition opening at the Woolworth Building, July 15. On view will be a gonzo selection of eye-popping, black-and-white prints produced by steamroller printing (you read that right) – a feat that is the coup de grâce of each year’s festival. The artworks, originally cut on 4′-long slabs of linoleum, are by some of Tacoma’s finest. And an artist riding a steamroller like a bucking bronco – we can’t think of an image that better encapsulates the gritty T-town spirit. We caught up with sweet pea Flaherty to talk about Wayzgooses (Wayzgeese?) past, present and future.

Spaceworks: Hi sweet pea, Wayzgoose turned seven this year! What has been your most memorable experience of the event thus far?

sweet pea Flaherty: The most amazing thing has been the [raised] public awareness of what letterpress printers and book artists do. When we started the Wayzgoose, only a select few knew what their craft entailed. We’ve played a role in giving these arts a wider exposure in Tacoma. The support of the public, the City, universities and art organizations….has been astounding.

Native son: a portrait of the late, local crooner, Bing Crosby, by Beautiful Angle.

SW:What is the most marked difference between Tacoma’s Wayzgoose and that of the medieval hamlets from whence it originated?

spF: Less mead, certainly. Which is a good thing, as we play with steamrollers! Also, the older festival was more insular, [intended] for printers and their families. While information and equipment swapping is definitely a part of our event, it’s more for the general public. We try to provide hands-on activities so people can get their hands dirty and make pretty.

SW: Approximately how many people showed up for this year’s event?

spF: According to our highly scientific methods, about 900 people came through this year….We had beautiful weather thanks to a pre-event sacrifice. The festival couldn’t have gone better.

Lance Kagey of Beautiful Angle inks up his plate. Photo: Aaron Locke

SW: Why is Wayzgoose important to T-town and the art community?
spF: It’s the annual visual showcase for what printers and book artists do. While a lot of the individual artists participate in other public events, you get to see [a comprehensive representation] of work being done in Tacoma and the region. With Tacoma being a working class town, there is something about the tactility of printing, binding, etc., that seems to appeal to people. So many of the artists at Wayzgoose are doing innovative work and expanding the definition of what a book is, that it’s hard to not be inspired to new creative heights, whatever your chosen medium.

Jessica Spring Wins 2011 GTCF Award

"Saw" by Jessica Spring

The Greater Tacoma Community Foundation (GTCF) has announced Jessica Spring as the recipient of its 2011 Foundation of Art Award. The $7,500 prize recognizes Spring’s excellence as an artist and her commitment to the creative life of Pierce County.

Nominees for the prestigious award are chosen by a panel of local arts professionals including curators, academics and other artists. Amy McBride, Arts Administrator for the City of Tacoma, nominated Spring for this year’s prize. “Jessica’s artwork is funny and heady, beautiful and ironic,” she said in a press release. “She pushes the boundaries of her medium experimenting with unexpected materials but maintains the precision and structure required of a professional printmaker.

“Since she moved to Tacoma, Spring has been pivotal to the explosion of letterpress and book arts….and is a fantastic teacher and mentor to both kids and adults. She partnered to help start Wayzgoose—an annual printers festival dedicated to St. Bartholomew, the patron saint of bookbinders—over five years ago. This has grown into one of the best community events we have,” she continued.

Installation by Jessica Spring

Since its inception in 2008, the Foundation of Art Award has offered significant recognition for the region’s artists. Past recipients include Chris Sharp in 2008, Jeremy Mangan in 2009 and Lisa Kinoshita in 2010. The GTCF itself was in the spotlight recently when it brought Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Tacoma as part of its “Be the Spark” community enhancement initiative. The Community Foundation is a philanthropic organization that began in 1981, with $10,000 in assets. Now celebrating its 30th year, it today “holds more than $61 million in assets and [has] distributed more than $78 million in grants over the last 29 years,” according to the GTCF website.

Spring has ideas on how she will put her monetary prize to use: “The cash award coincides nicely with the TAIP [Tacoma Artists Initiative Program] award I received, allowing me to pursue more papermaking. When I can make prints or books that start with an idea and incorporate handmade paper and letterpress printing, it feels really complete. In terms of this year, I’ll be working towards a show at University of Puget Sound Collins Library [to open] next spring.” As a component of the award, Spring will create a commissioned artwork  for the foundation, with completion set for the fall of 2011.

“So much of my work is interdisciplinary and fits between categories—it’s a challenge to explain what I do,” she says. “There’s graphic design, writing, printing, papermaking, binding with lots of collaboration. To have that validated is encouraging.” Stay tuned for more dazzling mixed-media art and innovation from Jessica Spring.

Fab-5 Ups the Ante with FABITAT

“The Motherboard” by Fab-5. Commissioned by the Intel Corporation, April 2010.

The City of Tacoma has a surprisingly cozy relationship with graffiti art, one that is embraced in many aspects by Mayor Marilyn Strickland, the Tacoma Arts Commission and a range of community organizations. More importantly, it is supported by members of a discerning public who are able to distinguish between the kind of deft, freestyle wall spraying (e.g., mural painting) that helps snatch buildings back from the edge of urban blight, from the type that illegally defaces properties, scaring the neighbors.

Maestros in the making: Fab-5 students choreograph a live "scratch" routine on turntables.

One of the most stunning local examples of sanctioned graffiti is The Garages on Tacoma’s Antique Row – an organically mutating, covered-parking-lot-slash-art-gallery where for years taggers and commuters have coexisted peacefully. In 2008, enforcement officials deemed The Garages’ surreal artworks “graffiti” in violation of City code, and the building’s owners, Lorig & Associates, were ordered to paint them over. But through the efforts of the property owners, local nonprofit Fab-5, and Tacoma’s Safe and Clean Team, in 2009, The Garages’ three large parking bays were legally reopened to artists working under the classification of “free form painting.”  Such aerosol paint-friendly venues are known in street parlance as “free walls.” Far from becoming a magnet for gang activity, as detractors feared, The Garages have instead become Tacoma’s most beguiling, unsung museum hosting the explosive yet phantom-like imagery (here today, gone tomorrow) of some of the country’s most skilled street artists. And, you can still park there.

Not a blank slate: a community effort saved The Garages' murals (many created by unknown artists), from oblivion.

Eddie Sumlin, Chris Jordan and Kenji Stoll form the core of the art group known as Fab-5; they are best known for their color-slashed, acidic graffiti murals that cover indoor/outdoor walls all over town. A fourth member, Program Associate Katie Lowery, is the group’s strategic and administrative lead.

Art and History Connect on the Prairie Line Trail

Walk on the wild side (l to r): Todd Bressi, Lucy Begg, artist Elizabeth Conner and Robert Gay get the back story on Tacoma rail from historian Michael Sullivan.

Urban planner Todd Bressi and the design team of Lucy Begg and Robert Gay (Thoughtbarn) held a lively series of speaking engagements in Tacoma last week on the public art plan for the much-vaunted Prairie Line Trail (PLT). The trio met with staff from the City, University of Washington-Tacoma and Tacoma Art Museum; historic preservationists, downtown stakeholders, artists, cycling advocates and interested citizens about the trail’s potential to become a showcase for art and art experiences, as well as a magnet for civic activity. The design team was awarded a $30,000 commission, supported by a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) planning grant, to develop an art proposal for the legacy trail which will link downtown Tacoma’s most significant cultural and historical sectors.

Unbeknownst to most Tacomans, the Prairie Line Trail is an extraordinary landmark of Tacoma history. In 1873, the Northern Pacific Railroad designated the now-overgrown, half-mile, two-acre corridor as the western terminus for its transcontinental railroad, beating out competitors Seattle, Olympia and Bellingham. Modern city-building and telegraph communications followed the railroad, and from here sprung the town’s moniker, “The City of Destiny.” The proposed $5.83 million walking, biking and interpretive trail follows the historic rail corridor linking the University of Washington-Tacoma campus, the Brewery District, the Museum District and Thea Foss Waterway, and eventually connects with the Water Ditch Trail. Users will be within walking distance of the convention center, the copper-domed Union Station, and the ethereal Museum of Glass Bridge – all destinations that radiate outward from the Tacoma Art Museum (currently awaiting a streetscaping and plaza/entrance redesign). By commissioning a public art plan, “We are developing a roadmap that’s considerate of art” and honors the city’s history, says City Art Administrator, Amy McBride. That may be an understatement: The Prairie Line Trail offers a ripping opportunity to create a history-infused active destination and outdoor art venue that is unique to Washington, and the country. The PLT will draw visitors to our historic downtown, where curated temporary and site-specific permanent art may greet trail users.