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.

Artopia in Georgetown Strikes Again, Part 1

I’m sad to say that this was my first year attending Artopia in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood, but I now wholeheartedly back the event, which is full of shenanigans, music, and of course, art. And to my pleasant surprise, a lot of installation art — which is relatively lacking in Seattle.

To the unacquainted, Georgetown is a relatively “rundown” part of the city, but in a good way. It’s chock full of antiques and old-school personality. With portions of an old brewery and malt plant still intact, the neighborhood has established itself as a pretty good art niche as of late.

Upon first getting there, we were met with crafts to do. Carve your own clay tile, they said. Partake in our creature swaps, they said. Eat free popcorn, they said. Play in our strongman competitions, they said. But that was just the beginning!

Sand painting, with powdered paint. Powdered paint?!!

Yoga ball alley does a body good. How do they come up with this stuff?

Power tool racing. This was all the rage for some reason. In this particular race, the new generation tool beat the old generation tool. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what tool it was…

Numerous colored paints, one record, and one centrifuge = spin art.

An experimental film setup of sorts.

A contraption that’s a little like a seesaw, but when you stand on the end, it’s similar to a flipbook. You think about that.

Jethaniel “Spyder” Peterka’s Anatomical Icons. Oil on panel and what looks like gold leaf. He was a former (or current?) Gage Academy of Art student. I know nothing more.

Sarah Fansler Lavin – Bite, Tear, Chew, Gnaw #2, made of cast plaster and steel. Here is her artist statement:

“My work is a response to where we have been and where we are going. For me, Blacksmithing is the connection between the worlds. It reflects the physical effort and human struggle in the confrontation with matter. It is an ironic nod to tradition and the labor intensity eschewed today. My work explores the issues of human fragility/natures tenacity. This imbalance is the subject of my recurring dream: Teeth falling out. This common dream represents fear of losing control, not being heard and our caged instinctual and primal instincts.”

Geoff McFetridge Installation at the Olympic Sculpture Park

Last year, the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) unveiled their Olympic Sculpture Park, a… sculpture park… located near the water, next to the Spaghetti Factory. Conveniently enough, I work right next to the sculpture park and can check it out regularly.

But I don’t.

Because it sucks.

SAM managed to really pull a flopper on this one. They had in their hands a really amazing idea that turned out to be just hype met with crappy delivery. They could have given the park a well-rounded feel, representing many types of sculpture and styles of sculpture… yet, they chose to make every sculpture of the “contemporary” art variety, making the Sculpture Park a bit tiresome at BEST. I mean, how cool would it have been to have a traditional sculpture piece ala “The David” sitting in the middle of Seattle? It would have been fucking awesome. But SAM failed to have the foresight to represent sculpture in a diverse manner.

Maybe they know they have a real stinker on their hands, though, because they’ve been introducing some ways to remedy this stifling abomination of a Sculpture Park. (Okay, fine, it’s not THAT bad simply because the metal tree is AWESOME, but it is, as a whole, pretty bad when put next to the idea of what it COULD have been.)

For starters, SAM is inviting a new artist every year to create a site-specific project in the PACCAR Pavilion, which is a teeny-tiny building located on the corner of Western and Broad. There’s a cute little cafe inside and cheap all-day parking in the parking lot directly underneath.

This year they invited Los Angeles-based artist Geoff McFetridge to put up an installation that involves giant chairs, giant poster tape, giant thumb tacks, and giant all sorts of regular everyday objects. There are wooden slabs, curved at the corners and painted white — made to look like giant sheets of falling paper. The whole installation is painted extremely basic colors like blue, red, and yellow, and one can’t help but think that the installation is inspired by childhood. A multimedia element is introduced to the mix as well, and visitors are invited to put on headphones and view matching videos which are quite strange (clips soon to come).

It’s funny, though, because although this installation is cool as fuck, the SAM fails again. In their press release, they hype up the fact that McFetridge is an accomplished graphic designer and has worked for brands like Burton, ESPN, and Stussy, but fail to hype up the nature of the installation. The release has one sentence describing the installation itself, and that was, “He treats the giant wall in the pavilion as an over-sized bulletin board, complete with out-of-scale thumbtacks.”

That one sensible, visual-conjuring sentence is followed by mumbo-jumbo like, “The motifs and posters he has developed for the space echo the concerns of many of the sculptures in the park, such as the relationship between man-made and natural forms, the interplay between two- and three-dimensional space, visual conundrums, and the arbitrariness of boundaries between different cultural practices.”

If you’re reading that last sentence, I think you probably see what I see, which was something like, “blahablhahahshahasdpretentionansdbalahablahbalahtrashablahcanbesaidaboutanyinstallationpieceontheplanet.”

This vague message and bio are echoed in the placard in the Paccard Pavilion. Dammit, SAM, no one wants to hear that this guy is a corporate sellout again and again and again. People want to hear what inspired the piece and what it means. I’d say Alice In Wonderland played a role, as did childhood. If those things did, fucking awesome.