Curtis Steiner has an eponymous store in Ballard where every object has a story. Hundred-year old tattoo flash hides in the drawers. A pleated silk Fortuny Delphos gown descends like a waterfall. Jewelry is made of carved gambling chips, or ancient Roman glass, or 1940s Lucite formed in the shape of a cube of ice clasped in tongs, ready to be dropped into a cocktail.
The store has an air of refinement, but not the kind earned with wealth, not gentility. Steiner dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and drifted around in the wild, queer disco Monastery scene downtown, couch-surfing, living on his wits and his style. (“Of tattoos left upon the ass of Seattle’s past, the Monastery is the tattoo that Seattle works the hardest to cover up,” wrote Mueblespasayo in this rich story about the legendary nightclub.)
These days, Steiner shows art by other people, anonymous and named, but he rarely has an entire exhibition of his own, so Tobey in Blue at studio e in Georgetown is an unusual glimpse at a Northwest eccentric. “Tobey” refers to Mark Tobey, the 20th-century artist from Seattle whose paintings of calligraphic “white writing” turned surfaces into swirling, stormy depths. Steiner takes those depths and makes them literal, and blue. The main part of his installation is a field of blue drinking straws arranged in a calligraphic storm on the floor. It creates a mesmerizing double in shadows. His “fountain” of white straws falling from a coat rack is another drawing in three dimensions, and his 2D drawings ring the walls, if you can call them 2D at all. The flat images seem to flex and vibrate. Others are cutouts that build shadow scenes. Steiner makes them compulsively, sitting at his table and drawing line after line, making cut after cut. He’s a natural perfectionist with one toe in the world of the weird. He’s the place where monks and punks and junk and royalty meet. I’m sure he’d like to sell that Delphos gown to somebody with the thousands to afford it, but I get the feeling (at least I hope I’m right) that he’s thrilled to show it to the rest of us.
It just so turns out that Tobey dropped out of high school after his sophomore year, too.
More images on the jump.
