Art Spaces
If I'm weirdly optimistic it must be spring. Let it not be said that I don't feel the pull of the seasons.
Last week I stopped by to say hello to Billy Howard, who is temporarily and rather grandly camping out in a storefront on Second Avenue while his new gallery space is under construction. I found him casually surrounded by a lot of good-looking art: two Jason Salavon multiple-overlay portraits (not shown to their best effect in SAM's Only Skin Deep, but looking fine leaning against a wall), a Leo Berk piece from a few years ago (one of those architectural door-sections, looking like a beehive as designed by Mies Van der Rohe), and a handful of new Ken Kelly paintings, wallpapery, elegant, and surgical, for Howard House's grand reopening in May.
Howard took me two doors down to see the new space, and it is just fucking huge, like twice as big as his old one, two rooms receding endlessly into the dark distance away from the bright storefront windows. It was also filthy and filled with unimaginable debris. (I picked up a dirty plastic thing that turned out to be costume teeth with a reptile tongue.) But somehow those empty rooms cheered me enormously. I can't wait for May.
In other news, 911 Media Arts Center is also moving, about two blocks west of its current space and closer to the hopeful new epicenter of Seattle arts. And I finally saw CoCA's new space on Dexter Avenue, and I have to say it is nice. There's a good feeling to it--something about the proportions, the alignment, the ergonomics, I don't know. It just gives one a feeling of potential in a way completely absent from the organization's very unaccommodating last space. After the current show--the results of the Art Pack competition, complete with a machine that can smoke two cigarettes--CoCA is shutting down for two months for real renovations, and board president Dino Martini promises they'll open with a bang after that. I wish them the best. I really do.
I haven't yet seen the studios in the Toshiro-Kaplan Building but I mean to get down there any day now. In the meantime, I'd love to talk to anyone who's applied to live in one. Give me a shout at the e-mail address below.
