Shunpike proudly presents eight new installations in South Lake Union as part of its acclaimed Storefronts program, on display through July 2017. Examining the exchanges between teachers and pupils, the collaboration between artist and nature, the origin of dragons, the installations span from an accumulation of marks, of ribbon miles, and unifying markers.
ARTIST: Amanda Manitach
WORK: Frances Farmer Defends Herself
LOCATION: Harrison Storefront
In Manitach’s large-scale wallpaper drawings, text melts into vibrating, hallucinatory design sourced from a 1885 French wallpaper sample. The pieces harken to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In creating them, she invokes a similar physicality to the story’s protagonist, generating drawings up to 30 feet long made with a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil. The pieces are smudged, worn and covered with fingerprints where the artist’s body has been. “Frances Farmer Defends Herself” (graphite on paper, 52 x 360 inches) contains a quote by Seattle-born film star Frances Farmer following a 1943 arrest for drunk driving: “Listen, I get liquor in my milk, I get liquor in my coffee and in my orange juice, what do you expect me to do, starve to death?” The piece took 44 days to complete.
ARTIST: Hanako O’Leary
WORK: Kokoro no Koi
LOCATION: Mercer Storefront
In Buddhist lore, there is a river called Dragon’s Gate. At the top of this river is a waterfall. According to legend, when a koi fish swims up the river and over the waterfall, they are rewarded with immortality and transformed into a dragon. Many fish visit this river, chasing after the dream of eternal life. A select few make it, but are then faced with an unexpected challenge. At the top of this waterfall, they are met with a mischievous oni, who makes sport out of swatting the fish away. Being thrown back down to the bottom of the river, the koi have to start from the beginning. In Japanese there is a term, “Kokoro no Oni”. This means, “demon of the heart”. In our lifetime we will strive to achieve, working against all odds to transform ourselves into something greater. Upon arrival, we linger at the gate of greatness, spending time and energy, swatting away the hopes and dreams we work towards. The koi and the oni are one in the same. We all have a “kokoro no oni” and greatness can only be achieved once we manage to swim passed them. This piece is a totem to our potential and the fear of fulfilling it.
ARTIST: Carmi Weingrod
WORK: Tough Love
LOCATION: Republican Storefront
“Tough Love” is a collaboration between artist and nature. It shows what can happen when an obsessive printmaker discovers that plywood, like wine and cheese, improves with age. Especially plywood that has languished in a Central WA meadow exposed to extremes of heat, sun, cold, and moisture. Each element chiseled away at the plywood sheets, delaminating the horizontal and vertical plies unevenly to create strangely beautiful objects with dramatic textures and irregular edges. I took over where nature left off. With a love of wood and a respect for toughness, I noted that the plywood had succumbed to time but refused to die. To accentuate the wacky beauty of nature’s work, I incorporated color and collage to inject new life into the irrepressible plywood. All the materials used in this installation are repurposed and come from both sides of the Cascade crest.
ARTIST: Amanda Amsel + Elizabeth Arzani
WORK: Tiny Human Moments
LOCATION: Harrison Storefront
Tiny Human Moments is a collaborative installation created by Amanda Amsel and Elizabeth Arzani; which investigates the psychological process and energy of exchanges between teachers and pupils. This piece explores the aspect of art education that is a study about stages of artistic development. Observations of young makers’ explorations of line formation and symbol making inspired both Amanda and Elizabeth’s own reactions to a “schema” or way of portraying an object. Phases of learning and the creative process are represented in repetition and reproduction; the art of practicing and transcribing. In recollecting and repeating a mark by means of reprinting a photographed copy, it becomes altered and faded. An implied texture is created of an actual texture. The mark becomes a memory of the original. These memories layered on top and in between the surfaces are making a world of our imagination visible, inspired through the eyes of children.
http://www.elizabetharzani.com/
ARTIST: Ilysia Van Deren
WORK: Wider than you thought possible
LOCATION: Thomas Storefront
Wider than you thought possible is an exploration of the elusiveness, enigma, and navigation of the unknown. Using hand embroidery, original text addressing these themes is stitched on strips of paper that are constructed into a large, intertwined form. This text is sourced from personal writing meditations which parallels this exploration involving patience, trust, and faith in encountering the unknown in our lives.
ARTIST: Juliana Kang Robinson
WORK: Pojagi Unity Flags
LOCATION: Mercer Storefront
My recent works are contemplations on the manifestations of territoriality in our world. Often times the human instinct for survival goes awry and manifests as the hoarding of resources, contrived boundaries and unnecessary segregation. My work draws from the visual language of territorial markers and reinterprets them as signals of transformation and unity. In Pogjagi Unity Flags, territorial markers such as flags and banners are misused. They lose their nationalistic or political functions and rely on the unifying elements of shape, color and pattern to convey harmony, diversity and interconnectedness.
ARTIST: Lady Firm
WORK: Las Fronteras
LOCATION: Mercer Storefront
Representing the border of the US and Mexico in fabric, Lady Firm will be sewing 1,954 pieces of golden fabric together with blue thread. Each piece of fabric will represent 1 mile of border. We will suspend the fabric from the ceiling and it will cascade it a pile on the floor. Lady Firm is a collaborative firm created by Priscilla Dobler, a textile sculptor, radiant genius Regina Ruff, an abstract painter and colorful crafty Maureen McCourt, a textile artist.
ARTIST: Jo David
WORK: Portraits of Friends
LOCATION: Mercer Storefront
The focus of my current art series is portraiture of friends and artists I know, capturing their likeness and an essence of their character in my studies of them in oil on canvas.
About Shunpike:
Founded in 2001 and based in Seattle, Shunpike (www.shunpike.org) is a non-profit organization that provides independent, Washington-based artists with the services, resources, and opportunities they need to forge their own paths to sustainable success.
Shunpike’s Storefronts program activates neighborhoods and streets by matching artists with vacant retail space.
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