Skip to main contentRain and sex are in the air as I embark upon my monthly jaunt through downtown and the Pearl.
I hadn't expected a carnal/creative theme to develop tonight, but it should come as no surprise. Sex and art have been shacking up since 30,000 B.C., when some nameless caveman-artisan carved the fecund curves of the Venus of Willendorf. The Greeks had their hunky Kouros and shapely Aphrodite of Melos; homoeroticism flowered in the Renaissance with Donatello's pedophilic David, Michelangelo's Dying Slave and Caravaggio's come-hither Bacchus; in our age, the advent of photography has allowed David Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe, et al., to explore the old ins-and-outs of het and homo desire. And now there's First Thursday.
I know I'm in for a Traumnovelle kind of night when I descend into Charles Froelick's downstairs gallery and am confronted with Seattle artist Iggi Green's new sculptures. Green fashions grotesque little dolls out of fabric, wire and bric-a-brac, and as her press release explains, these dolls "often include detailed penises, boobs, and vaginas." Ergo, a bug-eyed gingerbread man with a pointy brown schlong and a creature that looks like an aborted fetus hiking up her skirt to reveal a crinkly, red gash. This is the Craft Fair of the Damned. No doubt the same people who love Tim Burton films will find Green's ogres delightfully twisted and hail the artist for transmogrifying the child's doll into a totem of sexual menace. There will also be people who believe that this work, quite simply, is shit. I fall into the latter camp.
In Chinatown I ascend a long staircase, at the top of which Jeff Butters greets me. Sonia Kasparian's pagan-flavored show at Butters' Gallery, Desire, is a veritable saturnalia with rocks and blackberry vines scattered among the nude and semi-nude portraits. Kasparian digitally manipulates her photographs, paints upon the resulting prints and frames them behind frosted Plexiglas or porch screens, sometimes painting the screens themselves to outline the contours of the photographs underneath. It's a trippy overlap that gets even trippier when you observe the works from shifting vantages.
In one photo, a woman holds fetchingly forth in a plush chair, staring down the camera with bedroom eyes. Another shows a lanky youth in the forest, wielding tree branches like scepters, his bare torso bathed in moonlight. With their multiple layers and sublimated erotic charge, the pieces live up to the show's title. "I love androgyny," Kasparian tells me. Kilt-clad and nez-pierced, the artist (a Burning Man regular) says the show, in part, is dedicated to "the idea that sexual desire isn't gender-specific." Perhaps not even animal-specific. She points to the stylized pomegranates installed around the gallery. "The pomegranate is very sexual to me," she says.
SoundVision, the new gallery at the Everett Station Lofts, is offering a "post-gay" look at the male body called disembodied/reconfigured. As owner T.J. Norris explains, gay men in the 1980s developed a Jeff Stryker body ideal, muscle-bound and waxed, as an armor against oppression. Now that "AIDS has stripped that body of its sensuality," gay men are abandoning that ideal and "letting their bellies and body hair grow." The show features three photographers' take on this thesis. Chris Komater takes pictures of bears--not the grizzly or polar variety, but the rotund, hirsute male-of-a-certain-age variety. His staggered close-ups of bear bodies have a visual continuity across the wall and finely graduated black-and-white tones. Ira Tattelman's Self: Exam consists of close-ups of a nude male body, the photos taped together to show the man in toto. Despite its ambiguous imagery, the most sexually charged picture here is Bruce Eves' 15 Sheets to the Wind, which shows a man tonguing a cleft of flesh that is either another man's ass or the juncture of his own bicep and armpit.
Flushed, I head to Ogle, where Matt Proctor and Eric Franklin have installed their odd, interactive sculptures. It's like a playground in the gallery, people climbing into and out of the steel-and-wood contraptions, which are inset with neon tubing. Proctor, a former construction worker, and Franklin, a glass blower, find fascination in small spaces like children's forts and treehouses. One sculpture looks like a tiki hut, another like an igloo. The hour grows late; the igloo beckons. I squeeze myself through the narrow opening until I'm enclosed within the strange, yet vaguely familiar, interior. There is not much space here; I curl into a fetal position. The nubby walls muffle the chattering of gallery-goers outside. The night is complete. Could it have ended any other way?
WWeek 2015