Storefronts Seattle

Storefronts Seattle is proud to announce the first two of three projects in the Belltown neighborhood!

Ingrid Lahti
One Pacific Tower, 2006 First Avenue, Belltown
Through June 2013

Ingrid Lahti traditionally works in neon, but has branched out into illuminated lighting gels in her new installation at First and Virginia.  Inspired by the saturated color in Matisse paintings and Chinese artwork, Ingrid views the illuminated window pieces as a study on the emotional effects of color and light, fitting seamlessly into the vibrant neighborhood in Belltown.  

These installations glow brightly at night, adding to the street-level nightlife of Belltown and kicking off a summer in Seattle with a burst of color.

Chris Papa
2505 Second Avenue
Through June 2013

Chris Papa, a local printmaker and sculptor, has installed 5 sculptures at Second and Wall, featuring playful sewn wood sculptures conflating art, craft, and architecture.   Interested in the connotations of sewing as domesticity and mending, Chris utilizes these mundane materials to link art and life and emphasize the connections between art and craft in minimalist forms.

As Chris explains, “I generate sculptural form using eccentric construction techniques such as the stitching together of wooden panels in this group of work. Simple geometric forms – boxes, a cylinder, a plane – are implied by the modular structure. My aim is to present a highly idiosyncratic sense of order full of contradictions that shifts between categories and interpretations.”

Grand Opening March 23, 2013 from noon – 6PM

Ongoing Hours: Tuesday – Sunday Noon – 6PM
666 South Jackson Street, Seattle

Storefronts Seattle, a project of Shunpike, is proud to partner with Our Fabric Stash-http://www.ourfabricstash.com- the new go-to pop-up shop for shared fabric and crafting materials. Join with Seattle’s thriving crafting community, take a ton of material out of the waste stream (and out of your closet), and meet your crafting neighbors at this unique resource for designers, open to professional and amateur alike.

Our Fabric Stash is an innovative, community-based consignment enterprise that began life as a twice annual event in Seattle in 2009. In its new pop-up location in Chinatown, it will be offering consigned fabrics, notions, and textile-related supplies at 666 Jackson Street. Become a member and recycle your unneeded materials, or come by and browse through the stash to find some brilliant new treasures and meet fellow stash-a-holics.

Project lead Deborah Boone has taken a slightly dumpy, run-down retail space on Jackson Street, and in less than a month has added a new floor, has painted, installed cabinetry and display shelves… She has, in short, completely turned the space around, creating a gem of a retail space out of the raw materials of chronically vacant space.

Join us for the opening this Saturday, March 23, and get a chance to see the project in person.

Somewhere Out There by Ryan Everson. (Image: R. Everson)

Somewhere Out There
A new work by Ryan Everson at the Publix Hotel
504 5th Avenue South through summer 2013

photo by R. Everson

Ryan Everson is a Boulder, Colorado artist showing in Seattle for the first time through the Storefronts program. His work responds directly to the environment where it’s sited, and was developed after site visits to the old Publix Hotel and to South Lake Union, where we hope to install the piece later in the year.

The work consists of two large freestanding marquee signs, announcing the phrase “Somewhere Out There.” The letters (in Jersey font, in case you were curious) are cut from solid wood and inset with several hundred light bulbs.

“I chose the phrase ‘Somewhere Out There,’” says Everson, “because of Seattle’s history, and the Publix Hotel’s history, of harboring seafarers. Thinking of a life at sea and the boat being a sort of untethered, moveable island lead me to think of uncertainty of place.”

Shutter
RSVR visual research (Ian Campbell and Benjamin Gray)
409 Maynard Avenue South (overlooking the park) through Summer 2013

Shutter by RSVR visual research (Image: M Richter)

Overlooking Hing Hay Park in the International District, we have installed a new work by RSVR visual research, Shutter. 

The piece is extremely site-specific, reacting to the size and shape of the space that houses it as well as the park over which it sits. The artists (an architect-and-visual-artist team) sought to activate the space for both pedestrians and cars, for daytime and nighttime, and in a non-literal way that spoke to the neighborhood’s Chinese community and visitors alike.

The piece plays with perspective, and with the ideas of empty space, and unfinished space. The roughly torn squares of sheetrock echo the unfinished mid-construction feel of the empty storefront, while the clean, glowing lines of the string pierce them like laser light, offering a crispness of line and a dazzle of color that play against the raggedness of the rest of the piece.

Utilizing a combination of colored and ultraviolet light, the installation jumps out from the background to grab the public’s attention. It also changes shape subtly as you walk past it, and is visible either length-wise or end-on, offering various ways to interact with it.

Artist Meghan Trainor spent a bunch of last year with electrodes stuck to her head. These electrodes were creating an electroencephalogram, recording her brain patterns as she read poetry (Rudyard Kipling’s The Secret of the Machines) and listened to music (Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 5). She ended up with hours of recordings of what her brain looked like on poetry and music.

When she wasn’t reading poetry and recording her brain, she was building mechanical devices that, based on electrical inputs, could open or close apertures, or spin dials, or lift and release sections of netting… I think you see where we’re headed.

Meghan Trainor’s Ex-Voto Machina

Combining the two projects (they were never really separate) she uses the brainwave recordings as a control track to drive her kinetic sculptures, and the audience sees these objects opening, closing, lifting, dropping, turning, and spinning in response to the electroencephalogram. We are seeing robotic “bodies” respond to the way the artist felt (felt here with all of its emotional connotations) while reading and listening to music.

Meghan Trainor’s Two Fans

They do so in the cold, raw setting of 411 South Maynard Street, an unfinished storefront in Chinatown, a contextual reminder of the meeting of the harsh coldness of the constructed environment and the emotional warmth of these two works of poetry and music.

We would be remiss not to spotlight Susan Brown’s delightful Skeleton City Puppets installation on Thomas Street in South Lake Union, which looked glorious in yesterday’s sunshine.

Paper puppet skeletons loom over brick storefronts mischievously playing with various objects, from butterflies to cakes sourced from a Victorian cookbook.  Puppetry, found images, and a darkly comic joy animate this evolving installation that is changing over time as Susan updates and animates the puppets and their toys.

Please stop by the Thomas street windows (1110 Thomas) and see what she is up to next, and also take in Michael Harrison’s Sentinels project next door!