Presence noon-8 pm daily, Northwest Courtrooms, Fidalgo Room

It's a little over two weeks before Bumbershoot and Juniper Shuey has just changed his mind about his installation for Presence. After seeing the work by the other artists in the exhibition-- Dan Dean, Sami Ben Larbi, Todd Simeone, Aaron Welch, and Jennifer Zwick--he's decided the piece he's been planning on isn't interactive enough. So, as of this writing, Shuey is shooting new video and preparing to lie on the Fidalgo Room floor eight hours a day for five days straight.

"Video art," "interactive art," and "performance art" are inaccurate labels for the time-based media work in Presence and for Juniper Shuey's work in particular. Because his work is more about attuning the viewer's awareness to a situation rather than eliciting a specific reaction, I asked him if "accentuation" was a better word to describe his interactive/video/performance art. His face lit up. "Exactly," he said. But "accentuative art" (besides not being a word) isn't as catchy or as easily understood as the other terms. For now, Shuey's work is best described as installation art, a label that sits sloppily atop what he does but best describes the self-stylized hybrid he's developed.

Juniper Shuey's primary medium is Juniper Shuey. Through Juniper Shuey, he explores communication patterns (more aptly, defaults) and human interactions (better yet, transactions). In most of his work, he constructs a frame and directly engages the audience--not in an abusive or pleading or manipulative way, but by his mere presence within the structure. "Audiences can treat my work more like a painting: If they like it, they can stay; but if they don't, they can leave," he said. This is a welcome departure from theater, where you're obliged to sit through an entire performance even if you hate it, and from the inevitable discomfort felt while watching a lot of live performance art.

In pieces where Shuey himself is absent from the installation, he explores the many folds and layers of projections by filming himself creating the piece then projects the recording back onto the material. Instead of mere documentation, the projection is inherent to the piece, a feat rarely achieved in video art. In all of his work, Shuey's primary interest is in sincerely engaging the audience. The question he asks is "What are all the variant reactions and how can I engage each person without offending anyone or losing them?"

Shuey hardly has to worry about losing his audience, as evidenced in honors he's received over the past few years. Inflection, currently on view in the Tacoma Art Museum's Northwest Biennial: Buildingwise, won the Juror's Award (which is no small thing considering the biennial was juried by renowned Russian installation artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov) and Myth, a projection of Shuey onto a mound of sand piled on the museum floor, won the People's Choice Award for the Bellevue Art Museum's 2001 Northwest Annual. Shuey is no stranger to Bumbershoot, either. Last year, his work appeared in three separate exhibitions: THREAD's Fashion Is Art, SOIL's Gallery of Collections and Creations, and the Bumbershoot-sponsored Under Construction. In 2002, he appeared--literally--in Michael Van Horne's Multiplex invitational. In Just Looking, viewers' faces were projected onto his face as they stood in front of him. Lots of people were game and stopped to talk to him while others (like me) steered clear, unsettled by seeing a reflection that went well beyond any funhouse-mirror effect.

Although he uses himself as the primary vehicle, Shuey's work is by no means an exercise in artistic egotism. His ongoing investigation of the ultimate human question, How do other people see me?, is genuine, mostly because he asks first, How do I see other people? Shuey told me the piece in Presence is a meditation on the cycle of life and death and about wakefulness, dreaming, and sleeping. He might be lying there when you arrive or he might not. He might talk to you or he might not. "Every person is a foreign country and you have to learn their customs," he said. And the passport? You.