Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Art Manufractures My Face

The Museum of Contemporary Craft doesn’t exactly sound like the most exciting museum in the world, but thanks to its current Manuf®actured exhibit, it just about is. The show contains the work of many artists from around the world, and it is a study on “the conspicuous transformation of everyday objects.” One can expect the manipulation of everything from plastic army soldiers to lipstick tubes. These brightly colored three-dimensional works are guaranteed to entertain even the most stoic of art critics.

Régis Mayot is a French artist who mines trash bins for plastic containers and rids them of everything not necessary for structural stability. The resulting shells are reognizably similar to their original forms, yet stand alone as oddly shaped turns and lines of plastic.

Harriette Estel Berman uses tin cans to craft sculptures resembling teacups. The final products, laden with Milky Way, M&M, and other food brands, are delicately stacked and cleverly magnetized to create visually appealing pieces that don’t stray too far from a tea party in Alice In Wonderland.

Livia Marin uses 2,214 tubes of lipstick to create spires of browns, reds, and pinks in Ficciones de un uso. This sprawling piece is immediately eye-catching upon one’s entrance into the Museum of Contemporary Craft, but fight your urge to take photos… they’re not allowed.

This piece is an ultimate example of “more than meets the eye.” Upon initial inspection, Devorah Sperber’s After Warhol is just a bunch of spools of multi-colored thread arranged on the wall. Closer inspection through an acrylic sphere shows the viewer that the piece is in fact a Campbell’s Soup can, reminiscent of Warhol’s work.

This show is now on display at the Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft until January 4th, 2009. Want to see mass produced items turned on their heads? Look no further.

Jasmine Zimmerman’s Bottle House at Bumbershoot

This year, Seattle’s arts and music festival, Bumbershoot, has followed in the steps of festivals around the world and gone carbon neutral. What that means is they’ve paid for all of the carbon that needs to be offset, including that created from round-trip travel for performers, and that which is created as a result of the festival itself.

Multi-disciplinary artist Jasmine Zimmerman’s Bottle House ties in perfectly with this theme of going green. The purpose of her igloo created out of used water and pop bottles is to drive home the message that Americans consume more than 70 million bottles of water, in disposable plastic bottles, every day. As only one in six bottles are recycled and only half of U.S. residents have access to curbside recycling, the number of plastic bottles that are incinerated or sent to landfills are gigantic.

According to the message posted on the igloo, there ARE some things you can do.
- Employ a water filter at home.
- Take water with you in a permanent container.
- Refill your soap / shampoo / conditioner bottles at your local co-op.
- Reuse any plastic containers, rather than disposing of them.

For more resources and information, visit the Container Recycling Institute or Fast Company.

Free Sheep Foundation Breathes Life Into Belltown

I’ll be the first to say that I’m not a huge fan of Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood. Sure, there are a few cool things like Shorty’s, Roq La Rue, and The Big Picture, and it was once (or perhaps soon again) the home of the legendary Crocodile Cafe. Sure, sure. But for every one of those cool things comes one annoying, expensive, hoity-toity club or restaurant. It’s probably one of the places in Seattle I’d least like to spend my time in.

Nonetheless, Free Sheep Foundation has opened up a new gallery in the husk of an abandoned building in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood. The location is just a couple blocks from the Roq La Rue / BLVD Gallery section of Belltown, and they are [temporarily?] doing some pretty amazing things in this stripped down space.

I’ve been sitting on these pictures forever and this opening was earlier this month, but I hope you enjoy them, weeks later.

Static Invasion / Scntfc installation, commenting on the ‘progress’ of Seattle’s new crazy building expansion projects. Static Invasion is a group of artists that use vinyl clings to promote street art as opposed to permanent methods. Pretty amazing.

No Touching Ground installation.

D.K. Pan installation.

Experimental music takes the stage in one of the back rooms.

Click here to view more about the gallery. Hollar.

Artopia in Georgetown Strikes Again, Part 2

Dan Corson’s Spatial Matrix. Spatial matrixes are nothing new — I saw one at another gallery just a couple days ago — but this one is a little unique. It was an installation at the Georgetown brewery’s former “Engine Room”; clear indigo panels were put up over the windows, and steel cables ran from the ceiling to the floor, with neon stripes painted on them. The result looks is cables that almost look as though they are trembling.

Another view.

Head on over to Dan’s website to see more works. Although I’ve never known Dan’s name, I have seen his works throughout the city of Seattle, and his installations are actually quite commonplace throughout the city. Go take a look; you might be surprised, too.

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A playhouse encased in concrete? Artist unknown.

The Bald Man is watching you

Updated version, courtesy of Jeanine Anderson!

Seattle Art Museum’s 75th Anniversary at the Olympic Sculpture Park.

Apparently we cannot get enough of the Olympic Sculpture Park, so here are some more fixin’s from SAM’s 75th Anniversary Event on fateful Friday evening. Ah, thank God for comped press tickets. Many a poor chap were watching down into the Bill & Melinda Gates Amphitheater from the corner of Broad and Western, while we were inside, enjoying free (and somewhat delicious) snacks and the perks of an open bar. We were also pretending to be important alongside the folks who had paid a good $175 or $250 for their tickets.

Not that we couldn’t have just waltzed in… because we could have. They barely checked. Essentially — if you acted like you were important and knew what you were doing — you were pretty much in. Hehe.

Ice sculpture of a Gibson guitar!!

Later that night, it was revealed that the strings of the Gibson guitar are NEON. OooO.

In case you didn’t believe it was a Gibson. (Gibson sponsored the event, duh.)

In case you didn’t believe it was an ice guitar.

Ah, the art of a spilled glass of wine?

An experimental orchestra, comprised of 50 guitarists and bassists from around Seattle. Visit our REAL website in the near future for an actual write-up of the music portion!! It was SICK. In a good way.

Are these cake girls a trip or WHAT? We tried following them and their little parade… to the magical land of cakes… but the cake land never showed itself :[ No joke… they had boxes of cake but they wouldn’t tell us how we could eat it. So cruel.

On the way to the land of cake…?

Safety Cones at the Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle

Oh we have many more adventures of this past weekend at the Olympic Sculpture Park to come soon, but for now, enjoy the pics of the new installation!!! Glaze and pigmented cast fiberglass “Safety Cones” by Dennis Oppenheim! They will be on show at the Olympic Sculpture Park from May through October 2008.

Here is a message from SAM:

“A recent work, it is one in a long line of public installations by this veteran artist that playfully manipulates scale and everyday objects. By hijacking a banal and ubiquitous street safety icon and amplifying it to heroic proportions, it claims the whole park as a site where heightened caution and care should be taken — a sly pitch for a greater awareness of the space that surrounds us.”

*Applause for SAM for putting together a good description and getting a cool installation!! HOORAH!!*
See? Our blog critiques are starting to work.

This cone *JUST* got set up. Damn! Barely missed it.

Where you going, clouds? Rushing by like that…

This is what traffic cones do at nighttime at the Olympic Sculpture Park…