It’s press day here at The Stranger, which means I’m short on time for meandering art thoughts, so I’ll just include this photo of recent work by Genius short-lister Baso Fibonacci, who posted earlier this week about a “new genre: painting the city from the city on the city.” Riffing on life drawing sessions where artists warm up with rapidfire one- or five-minute sketches before settling in on the longer stuff, he commented: “These warm ups lend themselves to working in the streets, as you want to work quick to avoid the many perils of the city night.” Pictured above: Baso’s sketch of one of the 27 walruses gracing the façade of the Arctic Building, with a sketch of the Smith Tower by Abby Smith.
Now on to some recommendations of must-see art this week.
October 1
Sky of the Mind at Shift Gallery
The hellscape of our current administration has illuminated the significance (and fragility, subjectivity, and inconsistency) of naming things on a map. Naming is political. Maps are colonial. Identification means something. Karey Kessler’s work takes cartography and makes that naming into poetry. Her “fantasy maps and abstracted topography” use the map as a framework to build existential schemata and landscapes to delineate the states of mind. Her inky grids loosely outline terra incognita (again, colonial) and pins dropped on the ephemeral and spiritual.scattered like stardust. Kessler’s work finds resonance with Soo Hong, Kalina Winska, and Teresa Getty in Sky of the Mind at Shift Gallery. Together, the four artists present work that manipulates abstraction to suggest places beyond the physical.
Kelly Bjork: Lunacy at J. Rinehart Gallery
It’s Kelly Bjork’s second show at J. Rinehart Gallery. Called Lunacy, it covers some dense, deep territory that you can read about here.
JRAT 3.0: Prairie Underground Pop-Up
It’s the final iteration of an ongoing collab (since 2023) between designer JRAT (aka Janelle Abbott) and slow fashion design house Prairie Underground, where Abbott has taken a batch of manufacturing whoopsies (PU’s signature Glove Leggings, accidentally manufactured in the wrong textile) and reworked them, transforming them into a new body of zero-waste garments. Abbott’s practice as a designer comprises a totally admirable if Sisyphean edict to waste literally no part of the garments she is deconstructing and reworking, and the resulting designs are maximalist beauties that integrate lots of ruching and ruffles and intricate, unexpected construction. Today is the third and final iteration of this one-of-a-kind sample sale at Prairie Underground’s Pioneer Square pop-up.
Gizelle Hadeed with ONCE REMOVED at Actualize AiR
Our Genius heartthrob Actualize AiR is launching its first Curatorial Residency this month, and the inaugural resident is none other than our Genius short list heartthrob ONCE REMOVED (aka Sam Skidmore and Zoë Hensley). They’re taking over the Actualize Yesler Gallery—a mini gallery on the Yesler side of the building (pin drop at 317 Yesler)—through the end of December. The first exhibition, It Means: God Is Great, features textile works by Gizelle Hadeed, a recent Cornish grad whose work explores Hadeed’s “reckoning with being a Middle Eastern diaspora kid” (their senior thesis included some provocative I <3 9/11 T-shirts).
Luminosity at Stonington Gallery
Refract: The Seattle Glass Experience is on the horizon, which means a lot of glass art is coming (like yoga classes at the Chihuly Garden Glasshouse and studio visits with local glass legends like Carol Milne, Morgan Madison, and Weston Lambert). Kicking things off at the art walk today is Luminosity at Stonington Gallery, a group showcase of emerging and established regional glass artists like our lord of glass Preston Singletary, Raven Skyriver, Dan Friday, and more.
The Seeker & The Sought at ANTIPODE Art Gallery
The Seeker & The Sought at ANTIPODE Art Gallery debuts a solo show by Saina Heshmati, where the artists uses floral still life imagery as a starting point to create ink drawings made with fragments of paper collaged and stitched onto fabric that evolve to become an immersive moment that speaks to the process of work unfolding, following, and becoming, rather than seeking to create a prescriptive body of work.
Laura Hamje Return to Romanticism at Chatwin Arts
Laura Hamje’s images are more like portraits than mere landscape paintings, capturing something at once timeless and ephemeral about the locations and moments that become her subjects. For her third solo exhibition with Chatwin Arts, Hamje delivers a body of work that signals a shift in her practice: Formerly, she’s worked from photographs as starting points and references, but after spending the summer in the countryside of Umbria painting en plein air, her process has shifted, and she’s painting direct from nature. The result is something extra-electric, which is saying something, considering her previous work was already emotive and lush in the extreme. In Return to Romanticism, Hamje’s paintings of PNW and Italian landscapes are shattered with surreal, watery, luminous light.
RailSpur x Hall Spassov: The Way Is Open
Hall Spassov’s recent installation at the Assembly Art Fair was one of my favorite moments of the summer: a mini labyrinth constructed onsite, it beckoned visitors through a winding corridor bathed in pink light that eventually led to a series of immaculate glass sculptures by Amber Cowan. With that amuse-bouche, I’m excited for the group exhibition opening tonight at RailSpur Studios (Level 4). The show features work by Hall Spassov artists Kit King, Jeff Peters, Shoichi Okumura, and Michelle Robinson, as well as some recent work by Curtis Steiner, courtesy of Traver Gallery.
October 2
Temporal: Stories of Indigenous Present, Re-imagining Indigenous Futures at Thurston County Museum of Fine Arts
Thurston County Museum of Fine Arts, a volunteer-run, nonprofit contemporary-art venue in Olympia, continues to mount exhibitions with conceptual heft. Temporal: Stories of Indigenous Present, Re-imagining Indigenous Futures is one of those. It brings together a multigenerational group of Indigenous artists, all part of the Indigenous Creatives Collective, who are working across an array of mediums—performance, video and digital, weaving, beadwork, and other traditional forms—to celebrate contemporary Indigenous perspectives stripped of colonial frameworks, as imagined through the lens of Indigenous futurism. Artists include Epiphany Couch (Puyallup/Yakama), Daniel R. Smith (Swinomish), Stefan Gonzales (Prio/Manso/Tiwa), and many more.
Christopher Paul Jordan at Behnke Family Gallery
Christopher Paul Jordan has taken over the Behnke Family Gallery with his solo exhibition, underhand, overhand, backstops, treetops, zaps. The show offers “a window through memories of our shared stories and experiences” that utilizes remnants of paintings, window screens, and salvaged canvases, among other things, to create a space that functions as an “interactive time capsule” of neighborhood artifacts that reflect histories of Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood and the greater Puget Sound.
Surge: A Geography of Flow at the Museum of Northwest Art
There’s no stopping it now: The diluvian age is upon us. It’s fitting that Surge: A Geography of Flow , an exhibition that pairs visual artists with scientists to make work about climate change, takes place at the Museum of Northwest Art, located in La Conner, Washington. Climate change isn’t just a hypothetical there; it’s experienced firsthand as the sea spills over levees and roads and land and crops go under water. This year’s cohort of artists, curated by Chloé Dye Sherpe, is a robust lineup, including Holly Ballard Martz, Kelsey Fernkopf and Steve Gilbert, Melinda Hurst Frye, Morgan Madison, Steve Jensen, Sue Danielson, and Niki Keenan, to name just a few.
October 3
Occultus at the Vestibule
The Vestibule is not fucking around with spooky season. The group show Occultus, curated by Jay Stoneking, encompasses “artworks that live in the boundary between art and the occult.” A reception on Saturday runs 3–7pm, with additional events including Isla Vidal: Unspoken Rites (on Oct. 24, 3-4pm) and Shane Fosse: an american hex (October 30, 6-7pm). I got a sneak peek of a piece included in the show—an interactive cyberdeck by Meghan Thréinfhir, Witchwood Technē, that’s designed to provide a computational-divinatory system using Ogham, the early Irish writing system developed around trees and their spiritual, divinatory meanings. Go get your Ogham divination today
October 5
REVIVAL at On the Boards
For friends, fans, colleagues, and family of Timothy White Eagle: On the Boards is hosting a free screening of White Eagle’s REVIVAL at 7 pm, with popcorn provided (in honor of TWE’s predilection for popcorn machines and carnival vibes, says OtB’s executive and artistic director, Megan Kiskaddon). They’re also inviting patrons to contribute to an altar for White Eagle, for community remembrance, reflection, and offerings, that will live in the lobby. It will be available for visitors any time the lobby is open for a show. Finally, OtB has made White Eagle’s films REVIVAL, Indian School, and Timothy White Eagle in Space available to stream for free on ontheboards.tv. We miss you, Timothy.
