Australian artist Patricia Piccinini's first American survey is in Seattle, at the Frye Art Museum, organized by Robin Held. It is aptly titled Hug, in an intimation of the warmth that emanates from her otherwise discomfiting work.

There are videos, photographs, and sculptures, all proposing new forms of life—baby motorcycles that will grow up to be regular-sized bikes, faceless furry blobs wiggling around on a living-room floor, toothsome creatures designed by Piccinini as bodyguards for endangered species, a patch of bubbling, hairy, transforming skin. Her creations are wild, slightly beyond control or understanding. So are we, she suggests.

This one's called Embrace. It's life-sized.

Here's a drawing titled Leo.

^{Schematic drawing for Anthony McCall's Doubling Back, an installation in which two digitally animated sine waves are projected onto a wall in a dark room as they slowly wrap around one another. Shaped by a haze machine, the light that is projected creates forms in the room that move through a half-hour sequence of two 15-minute segments played forward and backward. In this drawing, the strip at the top refers to the first 15 minutes, and the strip at the bottom is the reverse motion, played out in second 15 minutes.}

When the prestigious jokesters behind the Wrong Gallery were asked to select artists (typically hot, young artists) for the latest edition of the Cream series of art books, one of their choices was Anthony McCall—a guy who broke onto the scene 34 years ago.

Similarly, ARTnews magazine this summer dubbed McCall one of 25 worldwide "trendsetters." Well, yes, he is a great rediscovery, having been absent from the art world from 1980 to 2000. Then again, he started the trend in 1973—of cinematic sculpture.

McCall's 2003 "solid light" installation Doubling Back is at Western Bridge this fall, and I've written about it here. For the opening, McCall was in Seattle, and he was gracious enough to sit down with me for a conversation upstairs at the gallery.