For the next two weeks, the artist Jennifer West, who lives in LA and formerly lived in Seattle, is traveling throughout San Francisco revisiting all the places associated with her movie memories.
She’s going to video stores—or what’s there now. Old movie theaters—same. Every day she’s posting to the Instagram account of her sponsoring organization, the Kadist Foundation.
I remember when West lived in Tacoma, and in her garage she was filming a pair of little silver silos. The silos were made of a material that melted when she put a blowdryer on it full blast. She held the blowdryer out of the frame and filmed the melting, and the architecture gave way and let itself go. Then she projected it so that the silver structures looked like full-scale buildings. Their destruction was calm, slumping, gradual. I can’t remember whether this was before September 11 or after; it was right around then.
Last week at a preview lunch, Seattle Art Museum unveiled its upcoming exhibitions through 2018. There are three solo shows I’m looking forward to: West (November 16, 2016-May 7, 2017), Denzil Hurley (May 20-November 2017), and Yayoi Kusama (June 29-September 10, 2017). They’d make quite the group show, actually, what with West’s psychedelia, Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, and Hurley’s new black monochromes quietly embedded with real-world associations.
