Everything in Repetition: Ancestral Modern at SAM
The paintings of “Ancestral Modern” capture the explosive color of a fireworks display, as well as the mesmerizing quality of a zen garden.
Gary Hill’s Glossodelic Attractors
Even among my friends and associates who tend to consider themselves more cultured than most, very few have heard of Gary Hill. Behind this lack of knowledge, I suspect, is the typical disdain with which Seattle often treats its own artists, preferring to fantasize that nothing good ever happens here and the real world is always somewhere else, probably New York.
From the publisher
I aim with The Seattle Star to use my pages to help rebuild our community, to use our knowledge and our limited power to bring artists together and to bring people together with artists. So far we have done this quietly, by publishing poetry, drama, radio plays and fiction alongside our essay writing. We will continue to do so, but rest assured we will expand this mission visibly over the next year.
A Few Clumsy Words about Jeffrey Brown
When I first moved to Boston from Seattle in my early twenties, I was filled with confusion, excitement, and the terrifying thought that I had no idea what I was doing when it came to relationships, jobs and the other mysterious workings of the world. Around that time my good friend Laura introduced me to Brown’s first graphic novel, Clumsy. In his book, Brown so realistically painted a portrait of young love–in all of its awkwardness, earnestness and blind idealism–that it all felt immediately familiar.
Inventions of Memory: Trimpin and the Gurs Zyklus Arrive On the Boards
Some people have called it an opera, some have called it a sound sculpture, some have called it musical theater, some have called it theatrical music. Whatever one chooses to label it, The Gurs Zyklus is most certainly a work by Trimpin and one that continues his exploration of sound and how sound itself tells a story.
ArtsCorps Student Showcase: Watering the Grassroots
Virtually every good citizen is aware of the massive cuts made to arts funding and arts education on a national scale over the past twenty years. Fewer people, however, are aware of the immense disparity between the haves and the have nots when it comes to the education their children receive in the arts. For that reason, programs like ArtsCorps have always been of utmost importance to me.
Rouge: The idée fixe
Performance art is not generally known for its sense of humor. For the past thirty years or so it has been tied down quite often to outrage and outrageousness, particularly concerning sex. However there is certainly another thread of performance art that draws upon absurd humor. Julie Andrée T. most certainly belongs to the latter group of artists who value wit and humor over political earnestness.
ECCC: A Con with No Character
I’ve been hearing from many creators that the Emerald City Comic Convention is one of the last good “comic” conventions to grace the Pacific Northwest, that it still had “character.” On this, the 10th Annual ECCC, the only real characters flitting about were fictional: two designated convention superheroes, Emerald City Crusader and Crusaderette. If those names were any indication of how unique and how filled with character this “comic” convention was supposed to be, Seattle is in a world of hurt.
Romance in the air: Simon & Kirby Comics at Fantagraphics Gallery
The implication is that “vital superheroes” are the apex of comic book writing and that romance comics are beneath contempt for any artist of Jack Kirby’s stature. More accurately, though, a return to simple reality was in the air. Romance comics were the height of American realism in comics.
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