Seattle artist Nicholas Nyland has been introduced before in single
pieces here and there. For his first major solo show, he invades the
midcentury modern architecture of the brand-new OHGE Ltd. gallery (in
the front of the Lawrimore Project building) with an alternative world
of exuberant blobbiness and rainbow-colored geometry in a
palette of cheerful to gaudy (stopping just short of painful). In
addition to being a painter who plays multiple techniques against one
another like accomplices to make them talk, Nyland humbly
pinches clay and folds paper. He is a materialist of a high order.
(OHGE Ltd., 831 Airport Way S, 261-2315. 10 am–5:30 pm,
free.)

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...