Site Specifics
At the end of a warren of hallways and stairways and offices and storage rooms, behind a pile of music equipment downstairs somewhere at the Capitol Hill Arts Center, there's a strange creature, a series of dark, cocoon-like forms that have attached themselves to the ceiling, with long surgical tubes snaking down toward the floor, where they drip green and red ink onto watercolor paper. If you manage to find this monster, you take away a nice little watercolor.
This is a sculpture by Jessica Dyer, a UW student in Susan Robb's installation-art class. The assignment was to take an "under-used, under-detected" space in CHAC--which, busy though it is with a popular restaurant, a Pilates studio, a theater, and a nightclub, is full of such spots--and activate it. Dyer's idea was that down in the basement, such an entity might extract a bit of the "arts" flowing through the building and make a little distilled work of its own.
It's a good idea, one that engages both the site and, rather coyly, the site's idea about itself. And while there is plenty of art in this little show--called Outsite and only variously available, depending on who's around to unlock doors for you--that is typical student work (clichéd, inflated, good-looking but not yet meaning anything), there's also a rather high proportion of such good ideas. Well, that's what happens when your teacher is a Stranger Genius Award recipient.
Muña Qamar's peepholes have already entered the culture; I've heard people talking about them, scattered throughout CHAC, some between bathrooms and public spaces, some coming from rooms you can't locate. Qamar, with this single, efficient stroke, at the same time reframes how you see what's happening in a familiar space, creates new lines of connection and mystery, and adds the thrill of spying all at once.
Todd Simeone's installation, a printer mounted toward the ceiling at the far side of the main lobby, sends down a bit of creative advice into a little corral every eighth time the front door opens. It's a piece that would be better served right over the front door, so that you get the creative advice whether you want it or not. (This, in fact, was the artist's original idea, but CHAC vetoed it. So life interferes with art.) I walked away with the advice, "At this point in your description of this project it seems like you need a few more somethings"--I liked this; more somethings are always welcome.
But my favorite, my absolute favorite installation, was Mark Annunson's treatment of CHAC's chaotic woodshop. He painted two of the shop walls a calm, pretty blue, swept the floors, stacked lumber, meticulously arranged paint cans, and then hung a few "before" shots in conspicuous places. There's a palpable sense of order's irresistible impulse, a real need to put like with like, and a sort of doomed feeling about it all: You know quite well that before long the only thing left of this installation will be the blue walls. All those artists out there depending on vaguely utopian gestures can learn something from the neat specificity of the task Annunson gave himself.
