Some months the galleries all just hit it at once. Tonight, start early, stay late.
In Sodo at Ouch My Eye is Strange Coupling, which pairs working artists with hot-shit students. Here's a still from Mike Pham and Acacia Marable doing their cardboard-karaoke "Juicy" by Notorious B.I.G., giving the Ferrari dealership on 12th and Union its seriously deserved closeup. (The next song on their lineup is Madonna's "Burning Up," featuring the bathroom at Pony.) Also in the show are funny and smart pieces by Tim Roda and Hanita Schwarz, and Shawn Patrick Landis and Sohroosh Hashemi. Hashemi and Landis, in the spirit of "mentoring" a junior artist into a more senior understanding of things, moved all of Hashemi's belongings into Landis's residence by walking them, in several trips, from Hashemi's place in the University District to Landis's place in the Central District. They mapped their journey—sort of a parody, sort of not—and had themselves photographed marching across the Montlake Bridge. If nothing else, what artists learn from each other is how to walk the road with your own stuff in tow, thanklessly. At Greg Kucera Gallery, the pitch is the thing: "Made in U.S.A." It's a group show of little wonders by Americans (all the gallery's artists). This is a New Economy, people. A little patriotic art buying never hurt anybody. (Except maybe that time when the CIA exported abstract expressionism to the Soviet Union; Kucera vows that no Cold or Hot War shit is going down in his gallery tonight.) I CANNOT WAIT to see this Josh Faught; this Claudia Fitch, Jack Daws's tongue-in-cheek bodycheck of the artist who makes driftwood horses, Deborah Butterfield (also represented by Kucera); and the pictured Alice Wheeler, a gothic view of Belmont and Denny. Lots of other good stuff, too, by Jeffrey Simmons, Katy Stone, Sherry Markovitz, Victoria Haven. You name it, Kucera's got it. Plenty of goods, locally grown. At Lawrimore Project is Eli Hansen's druggy, glassy We Used to Get So High, with its downlow images of cluttered Tacoma backyards and graffiti walls, and its highbrow formalist paintings—!—that look like chemistry drawings writ large in black (on black walls) and white (on white walls) (hiding in plain sight). Do not miss.Howard House has Sean Johnson's symbolic totems. In BFFs, three girls' bikes are keeping each other upright. They need all three, but three is a crowd when you're talking BFFs. It's a dilemma. The show's called This Growing Up Stuff....
There's much, much more—but I'll let you discover it.