In Art News

A year ago, Crawl Space gallery had a five-year expansion plan and
its first-ever staff director. Now, rather than violate its basic
mandate—”Be awesome,” as member artist Anne Mathern once
said—it’s closing forever. It turned out it wasn’t possible to be
awesome and to be bigger, or even, at this point, to go back to Crawl
Space’s roots as a true small collective. “I just think things in
the U.S. are not supposed to be permanent,” Mathern said. “They
just can’t be or they just suck. Someone else gets to do something
awesome now.”

Crawl Space was never just a gallery. When it started six years ago,
it was a stage for a handful of hungry young artists who’d
recently graduated from the University of Washington. Then, as members
turned over—Mathern is the only one who’s been there the entire
time; today’s lineup is Mathern, Diana Falchuk, Matt Browning, Brendan
Jansen, and Jennifer Towner—it became a lab. The artists still
wanted to show their own work, but they also wanted to try on ideas,
invite outsiders, and host a residency.

The final expansion plan would have turned Crawl Space into
something very close to a Canadian artist-run center with member
artists functioning as a curatorial board. They no longer wanted the
pay-to-play dues model. But dues are how artist collectives get funded.
What happened instead is that Crawl Space’s new staff director, the
savvy and capable Jennifer Campbell (a Vancouver, BC, native and artist
who’d also run a space in Montreal), worked almost full-time for an
entire year—with zero pay. Campbell was someone the
members trusted and believed in, but when it came time for the heavy
administrative work of doubling the budget in order to come up with
that salary, the members realized they just didn’t have the will,
Mathern said. There’d be no point in finding another director, because
any director worth the job would need to be paid. “Instead of
dragging out an organization to its death, we decided to go out
on a high note,” Campbell said. Given the circumstances, that’s for the
best.

An inordinate number of my great memories of Seattle art are from
Crawl Space (which has been short-listed for a Stranger Genius Award
twice): squinting at Brad Biancardi’s low-lit paintings of national
government buildings in the middle of Bush’s second term, as if they
were X-rays and the disease was advanced and mysterious;
discovering in Falchuk’s sewn-fruit sculptures tiny acts of total
benevolence; falling in love with a small rectangle of stretched yarn
unraveled from baseballs by Browning. Two of my top-10 shows last year
were at Crawl Space, including one of the best shows in recent history
in the city, by Mathern and Chad Wentzel.

Crawl Space’s final show, Stranger Circumstances, opens
November 7. It’s a group exhibition devoted to awkward, open-ended,
and hopeful encounters between artists and strangers. Miss you
already, Crawl Space.