There is something about this piece of cheese—waterslide transfer print on processed prepared cheese product, to be exact—that’s really doing it for me. Made by Texas-raised, Portland-based artist Ash Stone, it’s on view tonight at RailSpur as part of an exhibition called I Am Love: Rituals in Resistance. The image has been transferred onto the protective plastic sleeve sheathing a glisteny slice of orange cheese: a picture of a trailer, the kind of single- or double-wide you find plentiful in rural Texas. Surrounded by clusters of bright daylilies, an attached staircase-cum-porch leads to the closed front door, where a white-haired woman pauses, her body half-turned toward the viewer.
The Mary in Mary’s Garden is Stone’s grandmother, and the raised flowerbeds in the foreground are hers. Another piece of cheese in the show, titled Some Day, is imprinted with words that seem to have been scrawled on a Post-it-sized note: “I love you and am SO proud of you. I’m sorry it’s not the way I had hoped here—maybe it will be some day.”
Stone’s playfulness is as abundant as the faux cheese on the bottom shelf of a dairy display, and it operates on the same frequency as a Proustian madeleine. The words “say cheese” cling like an aura to the images, forcing smiles. For those of us raised in Texas (Stone included), the image of a trailer might summon a familiar, complicated nostalgia for the containers of our interior world, for home—even if that home also happened to harbor rogue rat snakes and other points of childhood pain. Using a processed food product to process an image (for the second time, after the film itself has been processed), as well as memory and experience, is a poetic device with an unexpected transformative effect. It’s anything but cheesy.
There’s a similar potency to all the gestures in Rituals in Resistance that feels disproportionate to the scale of the objects themselves, each piece or fragment of material imbued with an almost incantatory heft. What is a ritual, after all, if not the small things that make up our lives? The exhibit attends to those modest gestures, whispering their power.
Do spend some time with the cheese. Then linger with Buddy Bunting’s paintings of barbed-wire-wrapped landscapes—eerily placid and romantic depictions of high-desert correctional facilities—or Afroditi Psarra’s universe of 21st-century Greek oracles, whose magic agency has been muddied with garments embedded with AI computing. (Does the idea of that make you scream a little? Me too.) These works are provocative, full of wit, and a reminder that, even in the midst of a blue tsunami wave, our bodies remain the ultimate battleground, and patriarchy is the enemy of sovereignty.
Now, here are the rest of our November recs!
November 5
Pythia Embodied at Gallery 4Culture
Athens-born, Seattle-based artist Afroditi Psarra is a professor in UW’s Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) department. Her work employs “cyber crafts” and open-source technologies to explore the subjects of our time. For Pythia Embodied (at Gallery 4Culture) that means creating a wearable computer embedded with an AI model that allows the user to interact with artificial intelligence in a tangible way. Going deeper, the exhibition examines technology’s role in exerting control over the female and feminized body, while interrogating the way AI is increasingly viewed as a kind of magic—and a societal fix for just about everything.
Charles Mudede at Actualize AiR
It’s the closing reception of Social Contract, a group exhibition curated by Actualize AiR residents Tommy Gregory and Rachael Comer. The exhibit offers works by 16 artists from across the continental United States that do not hesitate to critique our flawed government with works that are both overtly or covertly political, including some really nice pieces leveled at my freshly flipped blue home state of Texas. Stop by at 4:30 to catch The Stranger’s own Charles Tonderai Mudede giving an informal artist lecture, “MEMORIES OF A SOFT CITY.” I highly recommend it. I highly recommend any chance to listen to Mudede talk about anything—he can imbue the way paint dries with unparalleled lyricism. And the subject of his talk is much more enthralling than paint.
Edward Wicklander and John Buck at Greg Kucera Gallery
The phrase “Pissed Kitten” just rolls off the tongue, acrid and adorable. It’s the title of one of Edward Wicklander’s new pieces debuting in his solo exhibition, My Labors, at Kucera Gallery this month. The sculpture in question is a sumptuous little angry baby carved from ebonized myrtle wood and apparently endowed with actual cat whiskers? Joining Wicklander at Kucera is another artist working in wood, John Buck, whose Drawings on Wood are inspired by turn-of-the-century engravings and are made with pen and ink on jelutong, a renewable wood with a golden hue.
I Am Love: Rituals in Resistance at RailSpur
Curated by tom manzanarez, I Am Love: Rituals in Resistance stems from a broader project (I Am Love) aimed at forming new connections and providing platforms for queer artists in the PNW through exhibitions, workshops, and other opportunities. It’s only continued to grow since its inception, and this month’s exhibit at RailSpur offers a window onto the region’s multidimensional, robust queer scene, featuring work by queer, trans, non-conforming, Indigenous, Black, and Brown artists (including June T. Sanders, Michael Espinoza, Ash Stone, and Teela Misa DeLeón). Objects like Espinoza’s pairing of embroidery with i-Type Polaroids exemplify the kind of work that’s both conceptually rigorous and intimate, dexterously touching on themes of domesticity and ephemerality. (Have you ever seen a print transfer applied to a slice of processed cheese product? The poetics of the show will surprise you.)
Elsewhere during First Thursday Art Walk: J. Rinehart Gallery offers Kelda Martensen’s third solo exhibition, First Rain. Gallery No. 85 continues to showcase great printmaking, with a pleasant surprise: they’re now showing work by multimedia artist, poet, and performer Dez’Mon Omega Fair. At Shift Gallery, Cynthia Hibbard and David Traylor’s Boneyard offers a lot of bone-in work that looks beautiful. Europa Gallery’s exhibit Mystic Journey to Nonesuch features Jade Knox, Fred Smith, Jordan Horton, Ursula Stuart, and Jd Banke (along with the usual music, food, and afters energy). Method Gallery has a solo show of work by Flora Wilds (also showing this month at The Space; see below) that skewers commodity culture with text-on-textile art. You had me at: “if you’re obsessed with worn textiles, deconstructed fast fashion, sun-bleached sports shorts, and capital-C Criticism of late-stage capitalism…literally sewing through the cultural brainrot to interrogate all our collective anxieties.”
Elizabeth Livingston: Dark Matter at Spectrum Fine Art
Beyond Pioneer Square, Spectrum has an opening tonight featuring painter of pattern Elizabeth Livingston, whose imagery borders on trompe l’oeil: immaculately rendered detail on a crumpled fabric shirt, leafy green foliage, or the flourish of a fragment of wallpaper. If you love pattern for pattern’s sake, you’ll eat this lush visual imagery up.
November 6
An Indigenous Present at Frye Art Museum
Tapestries made of AstroTurf and buckskin, blankets woven from ink and tape, a Cree prayer rendered in blood-red acrylic and powdery pastel: One of the year’s most anticipated shows (mine at least) opens this month at the Frye. An Indigenous Present is a traveling exhibition co-organized by the renowned artist Jeffrey Gibson and independent curator Jenelle Porter that includes major works and commissions by 15 Indigenous artists, spanning 100 years of Indigenous art. The exhibition embodies a shift in how Indigenous identity is represented within institutional spaces, as artists move beyond redefining their place within these institutions to actively defying the colonial constraints and expectations they have imposed for centuries. Alongside An Indigenous Present, the museum has mounted My Body Is a Basket, featuring work by three Indigenous Pacific Northwest artists—Brenda Mallory, Danielle Morsette, and Sara Siestreem—who push traditional basket weaving into unexpected conceptual and metaphorical territory.
Tess Michalik: Rococo Puffs at Dirkse/Prim
In conversation with the show at Spectrum this month, Tess Michalik’s Rococo Puffs explores the exuberant impermanence of floral life through compositions inspired by the 17th- and 18th-century European textile designs found in brocade silk and woven tapestries. The unbridled decadence of rococo design, with all the gushing blossoms and impending rot serves a memento mori sensibility that’s as delicious as Michalik’s use of thick, sculptural impasto oil paint, slathered on with palette knife.
November 13
The Mothership at Behnke Family Gallery at Cornish
The Mothership Photography Collective brings together a powerhouse of 13 Seattle-area photographers who also happen to be mothers. The exhibition, featuring more than 50 works, is taking on the subject of motherhood and how it intersects with creative practice and artistic identity, including both the good and bad (combating the persistent marginalization of mothers in the art world).
November 14
Form Over Function: Held Together at Seattle Art Source
The third annual group exhibition at Seattle Art Source, Held Together, is a showcase of some of the city’s most most exciting figurative artists, co-curated by artist Seth Sexton, featuring work by Kelly Bjork, Michael Doyle, Amy Erickson, Becca Fuhrman,Nahom Ghirmay, Barry Johnson, Kade Marsili, Amy Scherer, Zachary Schomburg, and Kimberly Trowbridge. Note: there’s an artist talk on November 10 that should be loaded with meaty stuff.
At studio e, catch dual solo shows Warren Dykeman: GLYPH & GROUND and Buddy Bunting: High Desert Landscapes, 2024-26. Bunting’s paintings of correctional and industrial facilities in the Mojave Desert are unusual subjects; he’s been documenting in nearly 30 years of field research across California prompted by the incarceration of Bunting’s childhood friend. The paintings are small (each less than 14 x 18 inches) and their
November 14 & 15
Light the Forest at Pilchuck Glass School
About an hour’s drive north of Seattle, there’s a magical place called Pilchuck Glass School where the world’s top glass artists convene throughout the year to whip miraculous glass art into existence in boiling hot shops and less-hot cold shops. The campus is a work of art in its own right: It spreads out like a 1970s hobbit fantasy complete with forests threaded with secret paths, stained-glass follies, and treehouses where acolytes retire to revel at the end of a long day’s work. The school isn’t typically accessible to the public, which makes the annual Light the Forest even more special. The event—a self-guided walking tour—unfolds on two dusky November nights, during which the already-ensorcelling Pilchuck campus transforms into an immersive light installation ablaze with neon. This year’s artists are Seattle-based glass baddies MiNHi England and John Sharvin (who both appeared on season 3 of Blown Away). Did I mention it’s magical? I can’t overemphasize how utterly enchanted it is. This year, they’re also offering day-of workshops, so you can walk away with your very own neon creation or hand-blown ornaments.
November 15
SUNDAY SERVICE at Kenyon Hall
If you’re a recovering church kid like me, eternally grappling with a love-hate longing-loathing for congregation life of yore, or if you’re a fan of Pastor Kaleb’s Easter Service, or if you just want to participate in a non-run-of-the-mill art happening, then get thine divine ass to SUNDAY SERVICE. The event is led by the Good Rev. N.M. Langston, a.k.a. Nathan Langston, engineer, musician, and director of the expansive global art game TELEPHONE (which exhibited at Base Camp 2 last year). Langston is blessed with an exquisite, honey-tongued gift of gab, and he’s been letting it loose at this semiregular, secular gathering of congregants playing “make-believe church revival.” It’s got the trappings of real church (non-hymnal hymns!), but the only religion being practiced here is art, music, film, poetry, and community vibes. Special guests and speakers at this month’s service include Israel Nebeker of Blind Pilot; artist, writer, activist, and educator Amber Flame; writer, publisher, and former EIC of The Stranger, Christopher Frizzelle; and musician, producer, and music supervisor Kaylee Cole. Tickets start at $15 and all profits go to the West Seattle Food Bank for assembling weekend meal kits for children in need. Now, that’s doing the lord’s work.
November 19
Fade Into You at The Space
Columbia City art walk kicks off with Fade Into You at The Space, an exhibit hosted by Disposable Parts featuring a group of artists who are doing radical things with textiles, trash, and other detritus: Janelle R. Abbott, Dagny Rayn Chika, Sam Guccione, Cameron Kester, Cathy McClure, Morgan Rosskopf, and Flora Wilds.
November 27
Cristina Martinez at Hometeam Gallery
One of our city’s most prolific and ascendant artists, Cristina Martinez creates figurative imagery that taps into something both emotional and sensual with its lavish saturated color and elongated, monumental bodies that take up space. (Her recent mural, A Soft Place to Land, located along Occidental Promenade near Lumen Field measures 150 feet wide and covers 9,000 square feet.) Hometeam is hosting a special opening on Black Friday (the show will run through the December art walk as well), so mark your calendars if you’re looking to score some art for the holidays.
Ongoing (Through December 19)
Hyunjeong Lim: Archive of the Mind at Winston Wächter Fine Art
Hyunjeong Lim is our November cover artist! Drawing from traditional Korean landscape and Renaissance painting, Lim’s landscapes have an almost fairytale-like quality, and they’re packed with so much detail, you can’t help but fall in and get lost. Her latest body of work at Winston Wächter is embroidered with scenes from the American West and Pacific Northwest: lakes, canyons, and lost highways winding around craggy outcroppings and islands sprouting like mushrooms from the sea. Look closer and you’ll find the terrain populated by tiny, quizzical blob people, unhinged grotesqueries plucked straight from Hieronymus Bosch, and even art history Easter eggs. For Lim, landscape is more than a pretty picture of a place: It serves as a container where lived experience tangles with imagination and memory. Because of that, her places feel uncannily placeless, but also like everywhere you’ve ever been. We love them because we have been there—if not in the flesh, then in dream.
