Past the nice big galleries with high ceilings at Howard House is a
crowded area with rows of plastic-wrapped paintings leaning on
each other and a few unwrapped artworks sitting or hanging, attempting
to exhibit themselves despite their surroundings.
Leading away from that area is a low tunnel-like corridor and a
doorway to the back room, where past visitors have stumbled upon and
squeezed around a lawn chair held aloft by balloons, and videos of real
chained-up motorcycles going crazy trying to escape, and paper
sculptures of birds in snow. This room is ugly, claustrophobic, and
has a bumpy floor. But art people are in the business of
transubstantiation. So this ugly, claustrophobic, bumpy room is called
Project Space, which makes it sound like it could one day become a very
important place.
Today is actually sort of that day. Seattle artist Matthew
Offenbacher has transformed the back room into Light Show for
UNESCO.
The light show is on the walls, where the whiteness is deeply
dyed by a ceiling track of lights in the colors of a tropical
sunset. The walls look so good, so soft and concentrated and
glowing, that hanging anything on them would be wrong. The gallery
director compared the project to the transformation of a regular old
place (unlit) into a UNESCO World Heritage Site (rapturously
well-lit!).
In the middle of the room, with a single neutral light falling on
it, is a hollow plywood box. The box’s top surface is a platform for a
miniature art show of miniature artworks, each one strange and
lovable and slightly unsightly in its own way, presented like a
collection of trophies and plaques for the misunderstood.
The objects include a painted ceramic elephant and circus ringmaster
the size of salt and pepper shakers (by Jeffry Mitchell); a thin white
thread with three pearl balls on it (Heide Hinrichs); a dried dahlia
and books on various subjects (Egyptian wall paintings, rocks and
minerals); a lumpy clay ashtray that appears to depict coitus but does
not (Offenbacher; it’s Narcissus and his reflection); a foamy
spray-Styrofoam lion (Jenny Heishman); a totemic figure wearing a
staircase dress (Claudia Fitch); two flat, screaming, eyeless faces
(Gretchen Bennett, adapting designs from stickers).
On the back of the box, hung low, Bennett has glued a bad print of a
blurry drawing she made of a disco ball. The difference between the
degraded print and a real, glinting ball aches. The whole
room aches. A handout says that Offenbacher used the three-part
UNESCO mandate to create the show: “1. to promote diversity, 2. to
mobilise active forces, and 3. to fertilise.” 
