First Thursday

First Thursday response

Inoperable

The first piece to stand out to me was the installation by Jessie Blackmen in the “Method” exhibit.  This was a scab-like infection that took over a whole corner and spread out onto the walls and into the surface it was on, appearing to be eating it away at the platform behind it. At first I was unsure of its meaning but with the description came the great idea being infectious to anything one touches. This was a static installation, all plaster and paint, yet it looked as if it were growing, pulsing with life and taking over the room. I loved Blackmen’s idea that anyone an artist touches is infected, and grows with their influence. A culture of bacteria or a hive of bees is not more natural than the building of cities by man. We have the innate response to build a home a living area to make our own and it is the growing ebb and flow of this building that defines us as an organism (aside from other characteristics of life, energy, reproduction, etc) .  The affect that artists have on objects, to infect and take them over with our influence, is yet another form of humans as a life form making something in the world into a domain for our existence, and in the case of an installation like this, a dwelling place for our minds.

ReGrade

This series of works by Molly Magal were all painted on a surface with a brick-like texture. They were perception of cityscapes that all seemed to have some distorted qualities. Along some of the roads or girders of the metropolitan scenes were strips of illegible newsprint or navigation maps. The haphazard feel to the pieces and the feeling of dilapidated structures reminded me so clearly of my perception of the city of Seattle. Burned to the ground, then built on top of. Paved, re-paved, broken down, built upon and repaved again, the surfaces of this city are layers upon layers of history and human compilation. Walking up a set of stairs along a building wall I noticed a few inches of some sort of window frame poking out from in between the brick wall and the stairs. Obviously the builders would not have made a window there if they knew a stairway would then block it, thus it revealed to me the nature of rebuilding and re-plastering on top of old decapitated infrastructures, building and growing upon its self just like shrubs and bushes and small saplings sprout and grow from the monolithic corpse of a fallen old growth tree. After a while there are so many vertical lines and contorted frames that the once level entities that block the horizon are no longer a rigid and square barrier for the eye, but a forest of over lapping and crossing skeletons of a living, breathing city, just as they are depicted in Magal’s Regrade series.