Leah Schrager: PRETTY
WHATEVER
Opening Reception and Whisky Tasting Thursday, July 8, 6 - 9
pm
CoCA Ballard, 6413 Seaview Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107
On View Weekdays
at Ballard 10 am - 5 pm, July 8 - August 7, 2010
PRETTY WHATEVER is a collection of photo-poems (phoems) by
Leah Schrager curated by Joseph Roberts. Leah is trained as a contemporary
dancer and model and is currently living in New York City. These phoems have
been created over the past year as an interpretation of Leah's move from the
Northwest to NYC, her studies of performance art, her forays into the world
wide web, her travels, and her relationships with friends and lovers.
See press coverage for the show in
The
Sunbreak and
The
Olympian.
This project is made possible
by the generous support of
the Iranian American Community
Alliance of Seattle (IACA).
Opening Reception Thursday, June 10, 6 - 9 pm
CoCA Ballard,
6413 Seaview Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107
On View Weekdays at Ballard 10 am -
5 pm, June 10 - July 5, 2010
The well-reviewed exhibition I RAN Home (In America) travels
to Seattle in June at The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA). The exhibition
first appeared in Washington, DC in November 2009 where it attracted hundreds
of viewers. I RAN Home (In America) seeks to acknowledge Iranian-American art
as an important and emerging genre. Running June 10 - July 5, 2010, at CoCA,
the exhibition will feature two new West Coast-based artists: Taravat
Talepasand and Arien Valizadeh.
Iranian artists have become players in
the national and international contemporary art scene, but too often, this
genre is tied to politics. In reality, Iranian-American artists are
multi-faceted with different and conflicting identities and influences. Their
work may be affected by political realities, but not decided by them. In I RAN
Home (In America), these diverse influences unite in profoundly personal
artworks that strive to achieve acceptance and understanding from all viewers.
The genre educates the American public about Iranian culture and reveals the
effects of Diaspora on community identity.
New York based Eric Robert
Parnes appropriates contemporary images and intentionally revises them to
reveal the ways in which they have driven war, religion and fashion through
time. Iranian-born, Hadieh Shafie explores the fundamental aspects of process,
repetition and time throughout her works, which take direct inspiration from
the whirling dervish of Sufism. Taravat Talepasand creates direct and personal
links between her own identity as an American female and the politics of Iran
by placing her own image into her works. Finally, Arien Valizadeh challenges
and even, criticizes the stereotypical Iranian-American through his Persian
Palaces.
Opening Reception Thursday, June 10, 6 - 9 pm
Runs concurrently
with I RAN Home (In America)
CoCA Ballard, 6413 Seaview Ave NW, Seattle, WA
98107
On View Weekdays at Ballard 10 am - 5 pm, June 10 - July 5, 2010
German artist, Pola Brändle, travels the world as a
modern archeologist with her camera and discerning eye. She finds fascinating
evidence of culture on decrepit billboards and ally walls. The permanence of
her high gloss photographs printed on sleek aluminum provide a sharp contrast
with her decaying subject: multiple layers and tattered fragments of art
posters and advertisements, all evincing the vandalism of hand, weather and
time. -jcr
Across the Divide 2
Contemporary
Art from Big Sky Country: University of Montana MFA Show
Artists' Reception &
Catalog Release, Tuesday, May
11, 6 - 9 pm
CoCA Ballard, 6413 Seaview Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107
On
View Weekdays at Ballard 10 am - 5 pm, May 11 - June 5, 2010
On View Every
Day at Belltown 24 hours, May 11 - June 5, 2010
CoCA is proud to partner with the University of Montana's
School of Art in bringing the first exhibition of Montana MFA candidates to
Seattle, including 14 artists at various stages in their work exploring a wide
range of media, including ceramics (internationally recognized program),
drawing, painting, photography, mixed media installation, sculpture,
printmaking, and video. The exhibit showcases the diversity of a vibrant
program with an attention to objects, materials, processes, and
interdisciplinary inquiry. Featured artists have come to Missoula to study from
all over the country (as well as Japan, Canada, etc.) and include Lucy
Capehart, Pamela Caughey, Michael Flynn, Sarahjess Hurt, Will Hutchinson, Lisa
Jarrett, Steph Johnsen, Anna Lemnitzer, Suzanne Lussier, Yaro Neils, Randi
O'Brien, Cathryn Sugg, Nathan Tonning, and Rebecca Weed.
CoCA's "Across
the Divide" series was started in 2009 in an effort to bring more contemporary
art from the interior west and the "dry side" of the mountains to Seattle. As
part of the project, CoCA staff flew to Missoula to engage the artists'
community before joining the road trip to deliver the artwork.
Gideon's Book "Becoming",
created to set the context for
this exhibition, is available
at our bookstore.
Gideon Kramer
becOMing: a love
story
Artist's Reception, Book Release, and 93rd Birthday
Party, Thursday, April 8, 6 - 9 pm
CoCA Ballard, 6413 Seaview Ave NW,
Seattle, WA 98107
On View Weekdays 10 am - 5 pm, April 8 - May 8,
2010
Center on Contemporary Art is pleased to present an exhibition of
the work of Gideon Kramer. Weaved around the story of his life-long
relationship with his wife Ruth, this exhibition touches on all aspects of
Gideon's work as a visionary designer, artist, inventor, teacher, builder,
lecturer, and businessman
Seattle's Gideon Kramer is a true renaissance man. Long
fascinated by the relationship between materials, technology, design, and
function -- and given to flights of insightful socio-cultural and philosophical
musings -- Kramer is recognized as one of of the greatest industrial designers
of our age. A graduate of the renowned engineering program at Chicago's
Institute of Design, his achievements are myriad. Kramer devised the first
truly ergonomic chair in 1946; began conceiving radically new truck designs in
the early 1950's; started teaching Industrial Design at the University of
Washington in 1957 and architectural workshops at the University of Oregon in
1960. In 1966 the American Institute of Architects (AIA) honored his
"outstanding achievement in fine arts, allied professions [and] craftsmanship
in the industrial arts" by bestowing on him their coveted Industrial Arts
Medal. Kramer had penned essays for the AIA Journal, The Argus,
The Arts, the World Institute Journal of the United Nations, and
other industrial arts and design publications.
Gideon celebrated hs 93rd Birthday on March 28, 2010.
Resident Alien
Artist's Reception, Thursday, March 11, 6 - 9 pm
CoCA Ballard,
6413 Seaview Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107
On View Weekdays 10 am - 5 pm, March
11 - April 3, 2010
Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) is pleased to feature a
group exhibition focusing on local artists from Europe and the Mediterranean
exploring issues of memory, history, immigration, and displacement. The show
features video, sculpture, book art, site-specific mixed media installation,
and 2D works. An Artists' Reception from 6 - 9 pm on Thursday, March 11, is
free with ample parking at CoCA's Ballard Gallery at 6413 Seaview Ave NW,
98107. Gallery hours are M - Sat., 9 am -5 pm; otherwise by appointment.
These 10 artists have left their respective countries and cultures to
make a home in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Their relationship to
history offers a fascinating contrast to an American past that "officially"
extends up to 350 years ago, a fraction of the several thousand years that
typically characterizes Europe and Asia Minor. Immigrating to America, is one
really free of the past -- or does history somehow follow us to the ends of the
earth? In a land of mediated images where nothing is outside the marketplace,
what is the function of contemporary art? From Hungary to Holland, from Turkey
to Germany, these artists have crisscrossed half the globe in the pursuit of
such impossible questions.
Artist represented include Timea Tihanyi
(Hungary), Sylwia Tur (Poland) , Ingrid Lahti (Finland), Iole Alessandrini
(Italy), Anette Lusher (Germany), Evren Artiran (Turkey), Tobias Walther
(Germany), Paula Stokes (Ireland), Hanita Schwartz (Israel) and Simon Kogan
(Russia).
Kate Vrijmoet: Essential Gestures
Artist's Reception, Thursday, February 11, 6 - 9 pm
CoCA
Ballard, 6413 Seaview Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107
On View Weekdays 10 am - 5
pm, February 11 - March 7, 2010
Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) is pleased to present
“Essential Gestures” – an exhibition of paintings and drawings
by Kate Vrijmoet who recently settled in Seattle. The exhibition features 8
paintings on canvas and 17 charcoal drawings.
That Vrijmoet’s work
is based in figurative portraiture is well represented by her charcoal
drawings. Yet the artist’s radical project is immediately apparent in her
“accident series” in which a single figure is in the process of a
horrific (and usually grotesquely bloody) accident with a chainsaw, shotgun,
axe or similar tools and weapons. Her handling of the paint matches the
situation’s goriness – melting bodies tossing explosive splatters of
blood. Often, her subjects seem not yet to be aware of the violence they have
perpetrated on themselves: The viewer plays the role of the witness much as he
might watch a horror movie – completely aware of the violence and agony
that awaits the victim’s realization.
Vrijmoet’s subject,
however, is less the gore than the moment the gore marks: A moment of waking,
of a new consciousness, of self-awareness. Her subject is trauma itself –
the word coming from the German for “dream.” The accidents mark the
rest of the victim’s life, whether it is merely to be a few more seconds
or to lived from then on without an arm, a leg or an eye – or with deep
physical and psychological scars.
The idea of waking is what draws
Vrijmoet’s main bodies of work together. The centerpiece of the exhibition
is her 6’ by 10’ “Creation (of Melancholy Fate) by Supreme
Being” which but for the title could be seen as a family swimming pool
scene viewed from under water. Yet, metaphorically, the work reads as chaos in
the primordial soup or as the moment of waking from a dream or a spiritual
birth.
Vrijmoet’s drawings not only reveal the artist’s
virtuosity but her serious project as an observer of the human condition.
Together with the water paintings and the accident paintings, the drawings help
us see how Vrijmoet pictures people as defined by their bodies, their minds,
their self-awareness as well as trauma and scars.
Vrijmoet’s
artistic vision combines Pop Art (think Andy Warhol’s “Car
Accident”) with the sublime (think Edmund Burke who in 1757 wrote
“Astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are
suspended, with some degree of horror."
Vrijmoet received her MFA from
Syracuse University. Her work has been shown in dozens of exhibitions around
the country. “Essential Gestures” – Vrijmoet’s first solo
exhibition in Seattle – will be on view at CoCA Ballard through March 7,
2010. Wine and hors d'oeuvres will be served at the public reception on
Thursday, February 11.
Visit
Kate's website here.
Paul D. McKee: Excerpts from Trophies of the American Home
Artist's Reception, Thursday, March 25, 7 - 9pm
CoCA
Belltown, 2721 First Ave. (at Clay), Seattle, WA 98121
Reception takes place
in the Club Room of the Avenue One Condominiums, directly above the
Gallery.
On View 24 hours every day, February 11, 2009 - March 28,
2010
Paul D. McKee received a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts
(2000) and his MFA from Wichita State University in 2008. This exhibit is a
variation of his thesis exhibition titled, Trophies of the American Home. He
has transformed the CoCA Belltown Gallery into what appears to be the
fragmented structure of an upscale American home, but after closer inspection,
weaves into something more challenging and confrontational to the viewer. By
using items from an exaggerated domestic environment (specifically items
pertaining to the creation of home by traditional standards) and juxtaposing
them with objects and materials associated with men and masculinity, he wishes
to trigger an internal reaction in the viewer. By questioning the competition
of these items with one another (and their classification in relation to
gender), McKee is commenting on the social structure of the home and family
unit in our modern society and its exclusion of certain peoples - specifically
gay and lesbian family units - and the struggle to achieve the so called
"American dream".
Of this work Paul states, "I want the viewers to
acknowledge the objects' existence- their histories, their contents and their
connections to diverse perceptions of family, home and sanctuary. I want their
personal stories and my own to establish common ground regardless of the
viewer's upbringings, levels of tolerance or feelings about non normative
sexualities and spaces; I want them to use the work as a bridge
between."