^{This photograph is old, but Davidson doesn’t look very different today. He still wears the bowtie.}

Sam Davidson has run a gallery in Seattle for 35 years: He knows where all the bodies are buried. But he also deals in quiet art, often prints, generally the sort that doesn’t send a lot of journalists around to bother him. He’s an undertapped resource.

A few years ago, Davidson opened a contemporary satellite in the middle of the East Edge Artwalk route—near SOIL and Platform, Shift and Punch. Mike Sweney ran Davidson Contemporary, and artists could take risks there (John Grade, for instance, completed his first-ever installation there; Grade is now showing at Bellevue Arts Museum).

But about a year ago, Sweney went to work for the state, and Davidson has decided to close the contemporary space. Its last show is this month’s.

Sam Davidson isn’t going anywhere, though, and he’s got a lot of knowledge and plenty of opinions, as soft-spoken as he is. In this interview, he talks about why he’s disappointed with Seattle Art Museum and the Olympic Sculpture Park, the bravery he expects from the Henry Art Gallery, his love for the ducks at the Frye Art Museum, how he’s something of a “Broadway Danny Rose” character, and why he won’t join the bowtie club of the Northwest.

Here’s the Davidson Gallery, in Occidental Square, that is staying open:

On the morning of September 12, 2001, as the United States descended into a pit of disbelief, Seattle artist Leo Saul Berk happened to be in Guatemala, descending into an ancient Mayan cave. Tourists aren’t allowed in, but Berk and some others bribed the guards, who then conducted the tour of the dark, totally disorienting place—a place Berk was unable to get out of his head afterward.

Now it’s finally come out of his head, and into the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University, in the form of strange, surrealistic, suggestive shapes in two drawings and a sculpture-on-stilts.

Listen to him talk about the whole experience.

That’s a still from a digital video made with clay animation by Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg. It’s called Feed All the Hungry Little Children (2007), but, as you can imagine, it is not as innocent as the title makes it sound. It is, in fact, quite sick—even though nothing that happens in it is really wrong.

The lascivious woman lures the hungry pack of children from their crevices in the back side of a tenement. (See what I mean that something’s wrong but not overtly wrong, just by the potential entendres in that sentence?) The children surround and grope her. They pull out her breasts. She feeds them. It is a clay-milk orgy. Then, they close their eyes like babies do after you feed them, when they go to sleep, except these babies look overstuffed, and like they might have choked to death, just a little.

It’s all very sinister and vague, which is basically the tone of the entire show Ask A Banana, Baby at Howard House. The show features three Swedish artists—Djurberg, Annika von Hausswolff, and Johanna Billing—and their videos, animations, and photographs. It’s not a big show, but it makes a definite impression.

Hear curator Sara Callahan, who is Swedish herself, talk about why she chose these works, which make Sweden seem so, well, freaky and freaked out.

That’s Isaac Layman. He’s asleep, perfectly still except for the rise and fall of his torso as he breathes. The camera is making a picture of him that takes four and a half minutes to complete—it’s a digital process, but it mimics the earliest photographs, when people had to remain perfectly still for minutes on end so that they would be captured as if in a single, clear moment. Any movement would be tracked in the final image. Here, Layman mounts a digital back onto a traditional 4 by 5 camera, and it records one line 1 pixel wide by 8,000 pixels high and then moves to the right to record the next line. Layman is being downloaded.

If you look closely, you can see that his pockets are scallop-edged—that’s not the way they really look, it’s an effect from the motion of his breathing during the shoot. But that’s kind of a gimme.

What’s stranger is the fact that Layman himself doesn’t know what was going on in the mind of his subject at the time this was shot—he was asleep. He’s in the same position we are: seeing someone without really getting any information about him.

Layman’s whole show of new work at Lawrimore Project—called Photographs from the Inside of a Whale, and shot entirely in his Seattle home—is an investigation into how good the information you get from a photograph really is.

Listen to him tell it.

Oliver Herring is a Brooklyn-based artist who works relatively traditionally, in photography, sculpture, and video. But since 2002, he also has had something on the side: something called Task.

Task is an event involving volunteers who come together in a public place for an entire day and give each other tasks to do for the whole time they’re there. While it’s happening a mini-society forms. All Herring does is choose the volunteers, start things off, and then observe. This happened in Seattle June 28; my on-the-scene reporting on the first part of it is here; a longer essay considering it is running in next week’s paper.

In this interview, conducted on the eve of the event in Seattle, Herring talks about why Task is actually not on the side of his studio work, but instead at the heart of it. He talks about the outbreak of Task “parties” around the country. He talks about his year of saying yes to everything.

Listen in.

And here are two images from Seattle’s Task (photographs by Duncan Scovil):

^{These are the bleachers that lead down from the Fifth Avenue level to the auditorium. Remember 83-year-old Bob from my earlier writing? That’s him up and moving around while a young woman naps.}

That there is Matthew Day Jackson’s Chariot II (I Like America and America Likes Me) (2008), the centerpiece of the Henry Art Gallery’s new show The Violet Hour. It’s made of a Skip Nichols race car (crashed/Corvette), steel, wool, felt, leather, stained glass, fluorescent light tubes, solar panels, fiberglass, and plastic.

Like Jackson’s other two works in the show, this one is a glorious thing to look at and look at and keep looking at. It’s also full of associations in and outside of art—the first to come to mind are Richard Prince’s treatments of upstate New York, Beuys’s plane crash and rescue by the Tartars, and stained-glass windows that survive in bombed-out cathedrals. Traditional Western art and pioneer stories are swirling around, too: the driver’s seat is made from a leather cowboy saddle, and set in the passenger’s seat like an eerie mask is a reflective astronaut’s helmet wrapped in gray felt. Oh, and the entire sculpture is solar-powered.

^{That’s the “shattered” windshield of the car.}

^{There’s the cowboy saddle and the space helmet inside the car.}

The Violet Hour is a remarkably entertaining show for being so simultaneously grim. Jen Liu’s videos feature Pink Floyd standards sung in Latin plainchant, Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” performed by a community brass band and performed as an operatic aria for a soprano, cannibalism, brutalist architecture, and pretty young men. In Croatian artist David Maljkovic’s videos, young people in a post-communist daze linger under the burdensome, overpowering modernist architecture of the Italian Pavilion of the Zagreb Fair, loitering in and around cars that have been immobilized.

The overlapping themes in the show reveal themselves continually: cars, architecture, nature, text, religion, crystalline forms. It’s a show in which you can do plenty of mental work while also having a great time.

Talking to the artists (except Maljkovic, who had to remain in Croatia with his wife, who’s expecting) was much the same experience. Have a listen.

On the beleaguered morning after the opening party for the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards last Saturday, the five winning artists sat down in a conference room in the Portland Art Museum and gave each other insane love. This recording is the result of that union.

There was Whiting Tennis,

Dan Attoe,

Marie Watt,

Cat Clifford,

and Jeffry Mitchell.

The Bellevue Arts Museum hasn’t exactly had an easy time of it, what with the shutting down, the “signature” (read: impossible) architecture, and the embezzling.

Okay, but what does its contemporary curator, Stefano Catalani—who has produced more exhibition catalogs in the last few years than any other local curator—have to say about working at BAM?

Here he is. (And here’s a site that says he is actually an Italian prince. He does have a princely mustache…)

Click here to listen.

^{Laylah Ali’s Untitled (from the Greenhead series) (1999), gouache on paper, 10 by 11 1/4 inches}

A few months ago, I wondered what Seattle Art Museum planned to do with its gallery devoted to artists of African descent. There was talk of residencies? Group shows?

The new group show, Black Art, is not only the first broadly themed effort in the small gallery, it’s also a self-reflexive exhibition about the function of the gallery itself. It asks, how useful is the term “black art”? What if blackness were looked at as broadly as possible?

The show is a harvesting of SAM’s permanent collection for “black art,” plus a handful of loans. The results are sometimes surprising.

Listen to Jackson-Dumont tell it.

Here are more of the images in the show:

^{Randy Hayes’s Victor/Victim (1982), pastel on paper, 83 1/4 by 50 7/8 inches}

^{Halford Lembke’s Crouching Negress (1932), wood, 6 3/8 by 3 1/16 by 2 7/8 inches}

^{Max Beckmann’s Jahrmarkt (Annual Fair): Der Neger (The Negro) (1921), drypoint, 29 by 26 cm}

^{Mark Tobey’s Broadway Girl, Head (1957), sumi ink on paper, 23 1/2 by 15 1/2 inches}

^{Sergio Vega’s Paradise on Fire 5 (2007), photograph}

Sergio Vega, who was born in Argentina and now lives in the foresty middle of Florida, has been working on a project called Paradise in the New World for 10 years.

Using his own writings—in voices from academic to confessional—plus photography, sculpture, and video, Vega goes in search of the promised paradise. He treks to the area of Brazil where explorers once said this paradise could be found (pictured above, in a 2007 fire), and he looks at our estranged relationship to tropical paradise as moderns, often distinguishing between First-World and Third-World definitions of modernity.

^{The parrot phone is one example of modern systems mimicking natural ones. A talking bird becomes a talking machine.}

Vega’s newest additions to the project, photographs and a video of two men who discovered and worked in the Brazilian gold rush of the 1970s, are on display at the young contemporary art space Open Satellite in Bellevue, in an exhibition curated by Pablo Schugurensky. Facing off with the Bellevue gallery’s gigantic window wall is a blackout curtain cut to look like a giant silhouette of a jungle canopy.

Vega sits down in the gallery and talks while his home—or at least his home town in Florida—is burning.

San Antonio-based artist Dario Robleto has two shows up currently at the Frye Art Museum, but that’s not why In/Visible decided to do two podcasts with him rather than only one. It’s because he’s too interesting to cover everything in one sitting.

In part one, recorded and posted in late April, Robleto talked about his personal history in and around hospice and honky tonks in Texas, and about his philosophy of “attainable magic.”

The wild materials he uses in his artworks are all real things in the world, as far-fetched as they sound—for example, there’s trinitite, glass produced during the first atomic test explosion from Trinity test site, when heat from the blast melted the desert sand.

In part two, recorded May 15, Robleto focuses on his materials, explaining how he gets them and what they mean to him. (Here are a few examples of what he uses: bones from every part of the body, ground seahorse, men’s wedding bands excavated from American battlefields, residue from female tears of mourning overlaid with residue from male tears of mourning, pain bullets, tracheal extractor, ground pituitary gland.)

His latest find? A multimillion-year-old blossom, perfectly preserved, and a multimillion-year-old raindrop, caught in amber. Those objects will be part of an upcoming group exhibition (called Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet) with Mark Dion, Ann Hamilton, Xu Bing, and four other artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Robleto is also in a group show called Old, Weird America (the title comes from Greil Marcus’s take on Dylan’s basement recordings) at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.

His 10-year survey, Alloy of Love, opened last weekend at the Frye in Seattle. Below are two of the many works in the show.

^{Sometimes Billie Is All That Holds Me Together (1998-99), hand-ground and melted vinyl records, various clothing, acrylic, spray paint. Several new buttons were crafted from melted Billie Holiday records to replace missing buttons on found, abandoned, or thrift-store clothing. After the discarded clothing was made whole again, it was re-donated to the thrift-stores or placed where it was originally found.}

^{Detail from A Color God Never Made (2004-05), cast and carved de-carbonized bone dust, bone calcium, military-issued glass eyes for wounded soldiers coated with ground trinitite (glass produced during the first atomic test explosion from Trinity test site, c. 1945, when heat from blast melted surrounding sand), fragments of a soldier’s personal mirror salvaged from a battlefield, soldiers’ uniform fabric and thread from various wars, melted bullet lead and shrapnel from various wars, fragment of a soldier’s letter home, woven human hair of a war widow, bittersweet leaves, soldier-made clay marbles, battlefield dirt, cast bronze teeth, dried rosebuds, porcupine quill, excavated dog tags, rust, velvet, walnut}

^{Matthew Offenbacher’s The Freak in a State of Total Tokenism (2007), oil on canvas, 49 by 29 inches}

Matthew Offenbacher is the painter behind La Especial Norte, the latest in a spotty but notable historical lineage of artist-run zines in Seattle. (Anyone remember Redheaded Stepchild?) He talks about how this one came about, and what he wants to do with it. And, tangentially, why his newest paintings are of his cat.

Maxwell Anderson (who, yes, is grandson of the playwright) was in Seattle a few weeks ago to discuss issues of international art repatriation at Seattle Art Museum—in conjunction with the Roman Art from the Louvre show that’s closing this weekend.

We caught up with him at an absurdly late hour after his talk (11 pm PS, 2 am his time), but he was as eloquent as ever. The fact is, Anderson is one of the smartest and most up-to-date museum directors in the business, and in this podcast, he describes many of the philosophies that make him so good.

Just listen.

And check out the best museum web site in the country at the museum where he’s director in Indianapolis. Next year, the IMA will open its 100-acre art and nature park, which sounds something like what the Olympic Sculpture Park could have been but isn’t. Anderson says it won’t be about “trophy hunting and monument building.”

Oh, and here he is doing one of his regular YouTube videos about the art at the museum. (Yes. Imagine a director making time to do that.)

^{An installation view of Dario Robleto’s An Instinct Toward Life, in his show Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others at the Frye. (Photos by Adam L. Weintraub)}

2008 is not even half over, and I’m putting money on Dario Robleto’s new exhibition at the Frye Art Museum as the Seattle exhibition of the year. Basically, Robleto, a San Antonio-based artist, went in search of a dead Seattle woman, Emma Frye (co-founder of the museum), and this show is the story of his dark travels.

^{A closer view of An Instinct Toward Life, with two madonna-and-child paintings from the permanent collection.}

Not much is known about Emma, except that she was married to Charles, had a miscarriage, and never after had children. Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others is an imagined walk through her life led by a call-and-response of 19th-century paintings from the Frye’s permanent collection and 21st-century “sampled” sculptures made by Robleto using such materials as melted-down audiotape of the longest-married couple talking about their marriage, melted lead excavated from various wars, and fulgurites, or glass made from lightning striking the desert. The show is also a story about the making of an art collection, about war and love, and about loss and the remix—but this is enough to start with.

^{A detail from Robleto’s sculpture Time Measures Nothing But This Love.}

Just listen to the artist talk.

This month at James Harris Gallery is Margot Quan Knight’s coming-out party in Seattle.

She is, basically, a disillusioned photographer. A wonderfully disillusioned photographer. She’s become disillusioned from her fantasy (our collective fantasy?) that photographs describe, if not reality, then still a version of truth. Until recently, she made composed images of unreal events that revealed themselves to be fictions indicative of real sensations and experiences, often ones that defy time, like this one (that’s her):

^{Drop, 2006}

But then she was hit by a car. And she started graduate school (MFA at Bard; she finishes this summer). And the result of those things intersecting with Berenice Abbott (and other readings in photographic history), a strobe-light dance she saw at Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the thought of her mother getting older resulted in a break—out of which came an entirely different body of work, all based on reflective surfaces.

Artists at the beginning of their careers—and sometimes, artists at any stage—may be doing great things, but they don’t always really know what they’re doing. That can be perfectly fine, or a disaster. In Quan Knight’s case, her eloquence is not necessary to understand her work, but it’s a very nice surprise. Listening to her will be well worth your time.

And because these works are all reflective, I’m posting a video (by Quan Knight) that depicts the works the way you would experience them, rather than the blank, more formal stills on the gallery’s web site.

Because I’m a semiotics nerd, one of my favorite pieces by LA-based artist Geoff McFetridge is a drawing of concentric rectangles with the slogan, “Support Responsible Abstraction.” When you think about it, there is a lot of irresponsible abstraction going around—you know, the kind determined to mystify some original meaning or impulse that A) may or may not really even be known to the artist, and B) may or may not be worth memorializing in paint anyway. Either way, it pushes the viewer away. What would responsible abstraction look like? McFetridge says it’s not the kind that broadcasts that it’s hoarding a secret. It gives instead of takes.

McFetridge’s background is graphic design. He studied it straight-up as an undergrad in Alberta, Canada, and then moved on to “conceptual graphics” (graphics that are well-considered but often look like crap) as a grad student at CalArts. Now, he has his own studio in Southern California, where he works both as a fine artist, making public murals, gallery pieces, and artist books, and as a commercial designer for various companies (especially skateboard and snowboard), and movies and TV (he did the titles for “The Virgin Suicides” and “Freaks and Geeks”).

His new installation in Seattle will be up at the Olympic Sculpture Pavilion for a whole year. It’s about where graphics and sculpture meet—about the imaginative transition from two dimensions to three, from flat to real, from general and iconic to specific and personal.

He hung sheets of thin plywood that he bent to look like posters with the ends curled up. They’re nailed to the wall, but swaths of blue tape and giant sculptures of tacks pretend to hold them up. One of the giant tacks has the round head of a pin, but casts the painted shadow of a mighty pushpin. It has bigger ideas for itself.

Don’t take my word for any of this; listen to the artist talk. I caught up with him while he was working at the pavilion, and we talked about responsible abstraction, pre-op transgeometrism (not a fancy word, but a condition we invented), and why he wouldn’t mind designing a cigarette commercial in Japan.

BLVD owner Damian Hayes put up some great photos of the installation in progress on Flickr, and here’s one of them:

Want more? Here are two of McFetridge’s moving animations: his video of the Whitest Boy Alive song “Golden Cage”…

And an illustration he did for the New York Times Magazine’s Year in Ideas 2007…

The installation opens today.

Listen as Margaret Laird, University of Washington Assistant Professor of Ancient Art & Archeology, takes Jen Graves on a tour of the Seattle Art Museum’s Roman Art from the Louvre exhibit (through May 11).

We’ve also prepared a slide show of images from the exhibition to accompany the podcast.

In the story “Gray Area” in this week’s paper, Jen Graves takes a look at accusations that two prominent Seattle artists—Lead Pencil Studio, winners of a Stranger Genius Award—are copycats.

“Which is worse,” she writes, “theft or ignorance?”

On this podcast is everything that didn’t make it into the story: more opinions from curators and the artists, what Graves thinks of the whole thing, and how it crossed her desk in the first place.

Listen in.

Eric Eley struggles with illusion. He doesn’t like it. He’s a facts man, and the depth in his resin drawings is literal depth, with pigment embedded in layers of resin.

^{Plane Drift, resin and dry pigment, 2007}

“I’m showing you what I want to show you,” he says of his outer-spacey geometric abstractions, which share affinities with Julie Mehretu’s works. “This isn’t a piece of a larger world.”

He used to be certain about that. But now, his lines, points, and planes are beginning to lead off the edges of his drawings and to fade away into deep space—and he’s trying to figure out why, and whether he likes it, and where he wants it to go.

This is an artist who started by making teapots and became a professional seamstress (seamster?) before he studied in the MFA ceramics program at UW.

His newest works are at Platform Gallery in Pioneer Square through February 9, including this drawing, titled In Place of Three (2008)—the dry pigment is applied with makeup applicators—

and the installation/spatial drawing Prospect Fields, which fills the gallery.

Listen in.

This is Ellen Forney doing Kelly O. Meaning, Forney’s the artist and Kelly’s the subject. Then again, who knows what else happened in that modeling session?

In this episode of In/Visible (and here in video form), the cartoonist and the porn-columnist come together at the Frye Art Museum to talk about the R. Crumb exhibition, Forney’s new hardback book LUST (opening party for the accompanying art show Saturday at Fantagraphics), and whether they would let R. Crumb jump on their backs for a ride.

LUST is a collection of Forney’s Lustlab cartoons, which appear every week on her blog, in addition to on the Stranger’s site. Here’s the latest, a tribute to a woman who likes Odd Nerdrum, Zdzislaw Beksinski, and Joel-Peter Witkin:

The man with his back to us in the photograph above is Seattle artist John Grade. Mounted on him is his sculpture Collector: two horn shapes made of interlocking wood parts, first displayed at Davidson Contemporary Gallery last year. Back then, the piece hung on the white wall—in a refined state. That was before Grade took it hiking.

Now, the piece has acquired a mane of seaweed: It lies among the oysters—watched over by some oystermen—in Willapa Bay. Here are views of it there.

Later this year, Grade will take it out of the water, remove the oysters that have grown on it, and eat them in a formal feast on the site. After that, the horns will be mounted onto the front of Grade’s red pickup truck, where they’ll acquire a layer of bug guts as he drives them down to a slot canyon in Utah.

This particular canyon was the driving force behind the shape of the horns in the first place—that and an experience Grade had with hostile Ugandans during a trip a few years ago. (For the full story on that, you have to listen to the podcast.) The horns were shaped to fit snugly into the canyon, and in the spring, the rushing water that goes through the canyon will either scrub the horns bone-clean, or destroy them. Grade will wait to see.

Until recently, Grade was known mostly for his small, intensely controlled charcoal and graphite drawings, like this one, Bog (2005).

His other familiar work was finely wrought, faux-weathered sculptures. The new work comes out of both these traditions. It’s formally tight, at least to start. It’s not faux-weathered, it actually weathers. It changes with its site, like the process work of Turner Prize winner Simon Starling, and according to the lapsing of time, like (Turner Prize nominee) Darren Almond’s videos. (Grade admires both British artists.)

Bog is a drawing that refers directly to an installation Grade unveiled last week: a giant, sagging false ceiling dotted with craters, made of paper pulp and hanging in Suyama Space in Belltown. That’s where I met him to talk for this podcast.

Seeps of Winter is the new installation’s title. Grade first got the idea for it during a residency near a bog in Mayo County, Ireland. Running by, Grade couldn’t help thinking about the human beings frozen under the thick surfaces of bogs for thousands of years—the ones who surface occasionally, staring upward. In Suyama Space, the false ceiling acts as the bog surface; you can lie on the floor to look through at the natural light above.

Like Collector, Seeps of Winter has an adventurous life ahead of it.

Listen in.

When Martha Rosler made her photographic series of Skid Row in the 1970s, she left out the people and instead added words referring to drunkenness, calling the whole thing “The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems.” This was her demonstration of what she called “the indignity of speaking for others,” in implicit protest of the sort of sympathetic documentary photography made by early 20th-century snappers like Jacob Riis.

Zoe Strauss would side not with Rosler, but with Riis. She backs up her perspective by showing her images not only in galleries and museums—and currently at Open Satellite in Bellevue—but also in an annual exhibition she organizes under a freeway bridge in the tough neighborhood where she shoots the photographs, not far from the South Philadelphia neighborhood where she grew up and still lives.

Hear her talk about her Philadelphia street practice, about her time harassing the Factoria Mall Santa, about what gets on her last gay nerve, and about her mixed feelings on Diane Arbus in this installment of In/Visible.

Seattle-based sculptor Dan Webb’s problem is that he can make anything with his hands. He could build a perfect monument, but he doesn’t believe in perfect monuments. So he builds things that warp and disintegrate, that survive with compromises.

Twice he’s been on the Stranger Genius Award shortlist (2003 and 2007) and his new installation Little Cuts immediately became a part of the regional canon when it was first shown last December. It’s up now—just until December 21—at Western Bridge, in a terrific group show with work by Martin Creed, Jordan Wolfson, Anthony McCall, Jeppe Hein, Rachel Harrison, Alex Schweder, Neil Goldberg, Julia Schmidt, and Roger Hiorns. (Northwest readers: Miss it at risk of serious regret.)

Little Cuts (pictured above, at right) is the process of Webb carving a man’s head out of a block of wood. In a series of 40 photographs, the man’s face emerges from the wood and then grows old; his flesh decomposes leaving only his skull, and then even his bones wither to dust. The dust—all the sawdust from the carving—is encased in a Plexiglas box, set on a pedestal in the center of the room, with the 40 photographs hung on the walls around it.

Next month, Webb has a solo show at Acuna Hansen Gallery in LA. I caught up with Webb in his unheated studio for a peek at the work that will be in that show.

The show is titled Dandelion, in a play on the artist’s name (though the down-to-earth sculptor is neither really dandy nor lion), and on his most common theme through the years, survival in sculpture. At left is his floor installation, Dandelion in America. In it, a weed made from the pages of old issues of art magazines like Art in America sprouts up from a pile of the magazines, as if in homage to all the now-forgotten names inside the periodicals.

At right, Rubber Dandelion is a cast-rubber dandelion held up by a bronze wire armature. It will be set on the floor on a platform with springs. Whenever anyone walks near it, the rubber will wobble, invoking the tough malleability of weeds but also, thanks to the wire maze, the appearance of limbs gone slack and on life support.

Listen to the artist talk about these and other dandelions, made of bronze, paper, and Sculpy—and about the chopped-off finger of Galileo, on this week’s In/Visible.

Alison Knowles, performing tonight (December 5 at 7:30 pm at Good Sheperd Chapel in Wallingford—thanks to the inspired programming of Steve Peters’ series Nonsequitur and Robert Mittenthal’s Subtext Reading Series), is a pioneering sound/visual/performance artist. She made prints with Marcel Duchamp. She was pivotal in early Fluxus. She turns making a salad into a work of art.

And this is the first time she has ever performed in Seattle. Do not miss it. But if you do, at least you can hear her talk, and hear her playing some of her “instruments” from the performance, on In/Visible.

When Beth Sellars notices that an artist she’s invited to Suyama Space is making something that doesn’t really work in the gallery, what does she do?

How involved should a curator be in the formation of new works?

Is it possible to compare the work that curators do with the work that artists do?

Four curators tackle these and other questions in a roundtable on this week’s In/Visible: two independent (Suzanne Beal and Jim O’Donnell), and two attached (Sellars at Suyama Space and Jess Van Nostrand at Cornish College of the Arts).

In the last year, Seattle Art Museum has gotten attention for new architecture, big-name sculpture, and a giant donation of art from various donors to celebrate its new facilities.

But Asian art has always been a specialty of SAM. The place was founded by an Asian art collector—and even now it’s run by a scholar of Chinese art who happens to be more famous as Bill Gates’s stepmother, Mimi Gardner Gates.

Gardner Gates is not a particularly contemporary soul, or tech-savvy; before we turned on the recorder for this podcast, I introduced her to the concept of Wikipedia, and showed her her own page, which includes a reference to her old friendship with Teresa Heinz Kerry. Of the page, she would like to correct the date of her arrival in Seattle—it was 1994, not 1995—and she would like to know why Bruce Hornsby “lent her special thanks in the liner notes on his 1993 album Harbor Lights.” (She did not know he had done that, and she does not know him.)

But here is a rare example of Gates talking about the art she loves, and explaining why. A few times she even seems to break out of official museum-director mode.

Three pieces she geeks out on in particular:

^{14th-century Chinese porcelain painted in underglaze cobalt blue}

^{Chinese vase from early 1700s, porcelain with copper red glaze}

^{14th century ink on paper Flowering Plum branch, by the “amateur” artist Yang Hui}

Brad Biancardi is a formidable painter. He makes strange, wildly colorful images that look like reflected and refracted blueprints, and often, they are based on the real architecture of a room or a building.

He’s also the kind of guy who says he doesn’t understand color. That one of his paintings at Crawl Space only counts for a half-painting, because it’s bad, but that he put it up to demonstrate what he was going through in his studio at the time. No wonder he was a finalist for this year’s Betty Bowen Award.

In other words, he’s devoted, curious, generous, and talented—and, sadly, moving to Chicago in November. (He’s got family back there.)

Listen to what he’s struggled with in the studio since last spring. You can see the results at Crawl Space Gallery, where he has a solo show (of 4 1/2 paintings) through Nov. 11, and Platform Gallery, where he’s part of a group exhibition called A Spectral Glimpse through Dec. 1.

Here are a couple of teasers:

The Millennium Falcon (doubling, unintentionally, as a Marsden Hartley soldier painting):

1983 Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue “Made in
America” (his first car):

A painting unusual for him in that it incorporates collage (that bird is made of cutouts of eyes), which he calls Enchanted Elevator Shaft or Hawkeye:

Dawn Cerny is the most anarchic of the emerging talents of Seattle. Her work cannibalizes history and spits it out on cheap paper.

In a solo show at Gallery 4Culture in May 2006, wild dogs painted directly on the wall terrorized each other, but they didn’t affect the delicate, framed paintings of noblemen on which they were superimposed. The two realms rebuffed each other like opposing magnets.

At Catherine Person Gallery in March, Cerny installed a large grid of dozens of scraps of drawings and paintings on the wall in the form of questions and answers, based on the Victorian magazine Notes and Queries.

Now, she has an eccentric, multimedia double marriage portrait of Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln up at Kirkland Arts Center, as part of Suzanne Beal’s excellent Help Me I’m Hurt show.

What is this woman up to? Time to find out. Here are two older works:

Around 1974, Kim Jones, a former painter and sometime sculptor, became a sculpture himself. He called it “Mudman,” and it meant him wearing a latticework of sticks on his back, and covering his body in mud and his head in pantyhose—but interacting with people more or less normally, which often, well, freaked them out.

As Mudman, Jones walked the streets of Los Angeles and, later, New York. He gave performances that included smearing himself in his own shit while hacking at beer cans with a machete he got during his tour in Vietnam, and burning live rats to death, repeating something he and his fellow Marines had done during the war. (The rat act got him sent to court and put on partial probation.)

In his retrospective opening Friday night at the Henry Art Gallery, documents from those performances join sculpture, installation, ever-evolving war drawings, and a timeline of his life that includes snapshots from his time in Vietnam and begins with a newspaper photograph of him when he was crippled from a polio-like disease as a child.

At Friday’s opening, Jones will perform Mudman for the first time in a while. Before you meet him there, listen to him talk.

Drew Daly’s latest sculptures are all made from the same single object: an IKEA chair, “an object that has absolutely no shock value,” an object “without content.”

It isn’t the object that Daly hones in on, it’s what’s happening to it. For these are objects that have been subjected, at least optically, to a series of actions. They’ve been compressed or expanded, cropped, merged, doubled, and quadrupled. They’ve been handled like photographs in Photoshop, taken to be as malleable as information.

Why does Drew Daly chop up chairs? Listen in.

Australian artist Patricia Piccinini’s first American survey is in Seattle, at the Frye Art Museum, organized by Robin Held. It is aptly titled Hug, in an intimation of the warmth that emanates from her otherwise discomfiting work.

There are videos, photographs, and sculptures, all proposing new forms of life—baby motorcycles that will grow up to be regular-sized bikes, faceless furry blobs wiggling around on a living-room floor, toothsome creatures designed by Piccinini as bodyguards for endangered species, a patch of bubbling, hairy, transforming skin. Her creations are wild, slightly beyond control or understanding. So are we, she suggests.

This one’s called Embrace. It’s life-sized.

Here’s a drawing titled Leo.

^{Schematic drawing for Anthony McCall’s Doubling Back, an installation in which two digitally animated sine waves are projected onto a wall in a dark room as they slowly wrap around one another. Shaped by a haze machine, the light that is projected creates forms in the room that move through a half-hour sequence of two 15-minute segments played forward and backward. In this drawing, the strip at the top refers to the first 15 minutes, and the strip at the bottom is the reverse motion, played out in second 15 minutes.}

When the prestigious jokesters behind the Wrong Gallery were asked to select artists (typically hot, young artists) for the latest edition of the Cream series of art books, one of their choices was Anthony McCall—a guy who broke onto the scene 34 years ago.

Similarly, ARTnews magazine this summer dubbed McCall one of 25 worldwide “trendsetters.” Well, yes, he is a great rediscovery, having been absent from the art world from 1980 to 2000. Then again, he started the trend in 1973—of cinematic sculpture.

McCall’s 2003 “solid light” installation Doubling Back is at Western Bridge this fall, and I’ve written about it here. For the opening, McCall was in Seattle, and he was gracious enough to sit down with me for a conversation upstairs at the gallery.

L.A. artist Olga Koumoundouros arrived in Bellevue three weeks ago to begin her residency at Open Satellite, a brave new exhibition space that invites artists from out of town to create work here.

In a phone interview before she arrived, she told the story of wandering around Bellevue in search of a coffee and not being able to find one because the urban core is so segregated—residential versus commercial. What she found instead were two crumbling shacks right up next to a brand new high-rise.

What kind of life is dying in Bellevue, and what kind of life is sprouting up in its place? How is the new architecture designed to deliver luxury, and how well does it serve basic needs?

Koumoundouros’s installation at Open Satellite, up Aug. 29-Oct. 13 and curated by Lead Pencil Studio, explores just these questions. In this conversation recorded last week, she talks about the process of making it, and about why inviting an artist whose work is socially critical was a difficult but smart way to begin Open Satellite.

Ken Allan arrived in Seattle a year ago from L.A. He’s assistant professor of art history at Seattle University, and he specializes in postwar L.A.—essentially, in the construction of Los Angeles as an art center.

I first came to know him through an essay he wrote looking back at the late Walter Hopps.

He’s at work on a book about “artistic practice, spectatorship, and social space in 1960s Los Angeles,” and he sat down at his office to talk about the birth of L.A., the way emerging scenes (like Seattle’s) perform themselves, the role of a place in shaping art and vice versa, and why there’s so much damn L.A. in Seattle lately.

^{Ceci n’est pas une swingset (This Is Not a Swingset) by PDL. (Photograph by Felipe Luis Naranjo)}

Jason Puccinelli, Jed Dunkerley, and Greg Lundgren are PDL—a group of artists that originally began as an homage/parody of another collaborative trio in Seattle, SuttonBeresCuller. (The guys are all friends.)

So what have they done since they announced their intention to work together for one year starting March 1, 2007? Actually, a lot, all under the radar. They dumped money in public squares in Coin Drops, entertained riders in their cars in Theater Hitchhiking, and interrogated Seattle Art Museum’s “don’t-touch” campaign at the Olympic Sculpture Park with Ceci n’est pas une swingset. Now, they’re about to roll about Portable Confessional Units at Bumbershoot.

They may have started out as fake artists, but at times they’ve made it hard to tell the difference. That’s probably just as they like it. Listen in.

Here’s what I wrote about Patterson Sims in a Stranger Suggests last week:

Before even-keeled Michael Darling, before take-charge Lisa Corrin, before academic Trevor Fairbrother, there was Patterson Sims, the notoriously charming Seattle Art Museum curator who could always get a collector on the phone and an artwork in the museum’s vault. Now he’s directing the Montclair Museum of Art in New Jersey, where he put together Anxious Objects: Willie Cole’s Favorite Brands.

In this podcast, Sims talks about Cole (Anxious Objects is now at the Frye), his days at SAM, Seattle art now, and whether he’s inclined to try to make a move back to Seattle (hint: yes).

(And for more on Cole, the New Jersey artist who has a fascinating fixation on the steam iron, do not miss SAM African curator Pam McClusky’s talk with him Friday, August 10, at 7 pm at the Frye Art Museum.)

^{Domestic ID by Willie Cole}

^{Stowage by Willie Cole}

^{How Do You Spell America? by Willie Cole}

Marisa Sanchez started in April as assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at Seattle Art Museum—just before the crush of the opening, so her arrival got kind of buried. No more.

Before this, she worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; got her master’s degree in art history, theory, and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and originally, she’s a Jersey girl.

So what’s she like? Listen in as she details her journey from this

^{Van Gogh’s Room at Arles by van Gogh (1889)}

to this

^{Oval Billiard Table (1996) by Gabriel Orozco}

to this

^{Untitled (Barragan House, 10) (2005) by Luisa Lambri}

and to why she’s dying to see this.

Bill and Ruth True are the leading collectors of contemporary art in Seattle. They buy a lot of art and they really do live with it—there are stories of videos playing above the table in their dining room or over a set of stairs. They even accidentally scared one of their children with something they installed in her room when she was young.

But they can’t put it all up at home. In 2004, they opened Western Bridge, a contemporary art center that this summer looks empty but is actually full of a new sound installation by Bill Fontana. (The Trues commissioned him to make the work.) They’ve also given and loaned regularly to museums—The Henry Art Gallery currently has an exhibition up, Mouth Open, Teeth Showing, of several works owned by the Trues, including Doug Aitken’s i am in you, having its U.S. premiere.

On a sunny day recently, the Trues sat down outside the St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle University and talked about their history, their hopes, and the way they feel about having exposed themselves publicly at Western Bridge.

Listen in.

Cris Bruch has been one of those artists who’s famous mostly among artists. No longer.

Lawrimore Project has organized a terrific 20-year survey of his work, which manages to cross minimalism, feminism, and 1980s Pioneer Square. It’s up through August 4, and ranges from early sculptures that carry overt social commentary to the complexly built abstractions he makes now.

What are these objects, why does he make them, and how did he get from there

to here?

Listen in.

(Read a review and see more images.)

The first time Richard Andrews saw art, it was because a friend of his urged him to get in a car that was rushing toward the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “You have to see it before the bastards take it down!” she told him. He was a teenager. The exhibition was the censored Ed Kienholz show of sculptures including Backseat Dodge.

Andrews became an artist, but eventually he stopped making his own work—and as if to make that completely worth it, pursued supporting the work of other artists with a vengeance.

After 20 years of working with contemporary artists on commissions, installations, and touring exhibitions as director of the Henry Art Gallery, Andrews is about to step down.

But he remembers it all, and he has words of advice (though he’d never call them that) for whoever it is that takes over Seattle’s contemporary art museum.

(And as a bonus, he talks about his current work with the Skystone Foundation, which is supporting the creation of James Turrell’s Roden Crater in Arizona, seen below in two interior views and from above, in a lithograph—listen to the podcast to understand what you’re seeing.)