Antioch University Seattle's Student Life Office invites you to go shopping with us! Annual Holiday Craft Fair on Thursday, December 3 and Friday, December 4 from 11:30am to 6:00pm. Antioch University Seattle is located at 2326 Sixth Avenue, between Bell and Battery. The Fair will be held in the Atrium on the first floor of the building. Featuring: * Local artists and vendors * Handmade art, crafts, and gifts * We wish you a healthy and happy holiday season!

Featuring Faye The Tattooed Psychic
Tarot Readings by Kenley and Logan

Novemeber 19th, 2009
7:00pm $10.00
The Jewel Box Theater
2320 2nd Avenue
Seattle's Bellton
Between Battery St and Bell St.

Internationally known Psychic Medium and Author of Unveiling Your Spirit, Faye The Tattooed Psychic opens the door to other realms and takes her audience on a journey of endless possibilities.
Finish the evening with a Tarot Reading by two of Seattle's best tarot readers.

"Spiritus is exciting! Fun! Spooky! Sexxxy! and intelligent entertainment!
Faye is not only putting on a show, she is leading you into the realms beyond, helping you to awaken your inner strengths to reach your full potential!
Faye kicks your butt into gear "
Mary Monterubio
Seattle Wa


for more info contact www.TattooedPsychic.com

Current Exhibition


Show Title: Actaeon At Home


Show Duration: November 13- December 6, 2009


Opening Reception: November 13, 6PM, as part
of the Belltown ArtWalkwww.belltownartwalk.com


Experimental Filmmaker Vladimir exhibits her 5th interactive film experience Actaeon At Home. Vladmasters are handmade View-Master™ reels designed, photographed, and hand-assembled by Vladimir. They make use of toys, neglected household objects, and odd ephemera to tell 28-picture tales of train chases, missing steam shovels, disastrous dinner parties, and overly adventurous cockroaches.


Actaeon, to the ancient Greeks, was a hunter unlucky enough to get a good look at Artemis bathing naked amongst her nymphs. For his trespasses, Actaeon was transformed into a stag and then devoured by his own hounds. Our Actaeon, may or may not have anything to do with the historical Actaeon. He is a small man in a room with striped wallpaper and antlers and a typewriter and a collection of Currier & Ives prints. Oh, also there is a train chase.


This new Vladmaster is narrationless. Instead of talk there is the Apt Ensemble, a trio of musicians who lead you through the Vladmaster story playing a variety of instruments and providing the odd sound effect. Listen carefully and you will hear everything from a pump organ to a tuba to a musical saw to a train whistle. This is also the first Vladmaster set photographed entirely in glorious black and white.


This Vladmaster was made to debut in a live performance with the band and emcee Tim Nickodemus for the 2005 PDX Fest Invitationals where Vladimir was, with some tongue in cheek, crowned the World Champion of Experimental Film.


This set consists of four handmade Vladmaster reels, the box to keep them in, and the mini-cd soundtrack. The music was written by Peter Broderick and Nathan Crockett; performed by the Apt Ensemble (Peter Broderick, Nathan Crockett, and Branic Howard) and recorded by Peter Broderick. Tim Nickodemus introduces the CD. Douglas Jenkins is the human star of the photographs. The story was written and photographed by Vladimir who also designed the reels and box.


Interview by Ross Simioni


Illustration by Tony Millionaire


http://www.vladmaster.com/press/articles.php?article=9


"MOST OF THE TIME DURING MY SHOWS, I'M LOOKING AWKWARDLY DOWN AT THE FLOOR AND WAITING FOR THE SOUND TRACK TO END."


Inspirations for Vladmasters:
Galaga
Frogger
Gertie the Dinosaur
EarlyFritz the Cat


The artist who goes by the name Vladimir is one of the only known filmmakers working with View-masters, which, if you remember, are those cheap-looking toy binoculars usually filled with images of zoo animals or dinosaurs. Instead of watching her so-called films on movie screens, audience members hold "stereoscopic viewing devices" up to their eyes and click through picture reels of dioramas, action figures, and abstract photographs of trains. She calls them Vladmasters.


Through her website, Vladimir mails her handmade films around the world, each one accompanied by a spoken-narration CD and sound track. Her "picture stories" have included adaptations of Calvino and Kafka, along with some of her own writing, like the one about the pseudo-mystical congregation of farming machinery. She claims to "seek out the forgotten, the discarded, and the overlooked objects of this world...and [takes] tiny, tiny photographs in order to tell their stories."


Since 2003, she's become and anomalous staple in the independent film festival circuit, winning the World Champion of Experimental Film title on multiple occasions. She remains active in her hometown of Portland, Oregon (also the home of the View-Master), where she works as a projectionist, creates her own scretch-it Vladlast lottery tickets, builds Super 8 film experiments, and works as a quality assurance engineer at a software company.


This interview took place over email, with Vladimir responding from both Portland and Brisbane, Australia, where she was participating in the Other Film Festival. —Ross Simioni


I. MOVIE PROJECTION AS SELF-ABNEGATION


THE BELIEVER: When you set up a performance — or is it better to call it a screening? — what happens, exactly?


VLADIMIR: Sometimes I compare my performances to synchronized swimming. At a performance, everyone in attendance is given a viewer and a set of my handmade disks. There is a brief instructional introduction, and then we begin the sound track, which leads everyone through a tiny private screening experience just past the end of their nose. There are ding noises on the sound track to cue the turning from one image to the next. Sometimes there is a narrator and sometimes there's just music. Perhaps the most exciting moment is participating in the ker-think of tens or hundreds of View-Masters turning simultaneously after that very first ding.


BLVR: Would you say that’s the ideal scenario for someone to experience the vladmaster? In a theater, like most films? I just received the vladmasters you sent me in the mail, watched them all in my living room all day, and really enjoyed the private storytelling feeling. It felt almost like reading.


V: I like both the theater and the personal experience. The great thing about the theater is that there is a sort of euphoria and excitement that comes from the experience of just being in a crowd of people who are all holding View-Masters and all experiencing this sort of simultaneous media for the first time. The crowd experience is really wonderful, but I think that the more personal private experience that you had in your living room is probably more conducive to reflection and paying attention to the story. Perhaps you could call one a roller coaster and one a scenic drive?


BLVR: A little while ago, I heard David Lynch talking about his appreciation of the laptop computer, how it has completely transformed cinema by encouraging people to watch films alone, more like the intimacy of books. It also encourages people to use headphones, which brings a renewed appreciation to the way sound and music function in a film.


V: I really like this idea. The intimacy of the viewmaster viewing experience is very important to me. I’m a projectionist and one of the wonderful things about projecting movies is that you get to hold every part of them in your hand. You get to see the film as an object and to see the individual frames. I think the View-Masters present a similar experience: you can view them narratively, as time-based, alongside the soundtrack, but you can also hold them in your hand, see their individual parts, and appreciate them as craft objects.


BLVR: That reminds me of how Stan Brakhage painted directly on his film. When I first realized what he was doing, my idea of film was suddenly transformed from an abstract thing, with images floating in the air, to the idea of actual physical film stock. He broke that “fourth-wall” of physicality.


V: I’m sad to say I haven’t seen very much Stan Brakhage, but I was fortunate to see two nights of films by his close friend and collaborator Phil Solomon when he visited Portland. He treats the surfaces of his films chemically so that you see the surface layers buckling and peeling. The original images decay and fray and become submerged beneath the layered surface so that his films are filled with a sense of beauty and loss. There is also a Bay Area collective called SILT who often work with the decay of the film image by leaving their films in holes in the ground to get moldy and be eaten by creatures. I saw a wonderful 8mm film they hand-fed through a broken projector, sometimes holding it too long in front of the lamp so that you could see the image start to melt.


Perhaps at the other end of the film-as-object spectrum, there are Bruce McClure’s films. He strips film down to its most basic elements: light and dark. He does multi-projector performances in which each projector is running an identical film loop that consists of several black frames followed by a single clear frame. He uses dimmers, the focus on the projectors, and occasionally gels or different shaped gates to manipulate the stroboscopic shapes created by the film. The sound for his performances is generated by passing the sound of the frames running through the projector through various pedals to create a rhythmic pulse that matches the pulse of the visuals. They are without doubt the most physiologically affecting films I’ve ever experienced.


BLVR: The concept of viewing a film has always been so removed from the idea of performance, but with your work and, say, McClure's, there's that element of it's-happening-right-now — something you don't get with pre-recorded films. Do you think this connection with film comes from your work as a projectionist, where you're sort of "performing" the film?


V: When you’re a movie projectionist, the goal is actually one of self-abnegation. A good projectionist is an unnoticed projectionist. This is perfect for me because I’m always trying to make myself disappear. I’ve always just used the word “performance” for lack of a better alternative with my own shows. Most of the time during my shows, I’m looking awkwardly down at the floor and waiting for the soundtrack to end. If anyone can be said to be doing the performing, or the projecting, during my shows, it would be the individual audience members.


The thing I’ve taken from projecting is just the intimacy with the medium. Because we tend to show older prints, before we show a film, I pass every reel through my gloved hand to check for damage. When you do this, you become hyper-aware of the individual frames and of the process of these discrete pieces becoming a fluid whole. It is exactly like calculus.


I think that there are many people who turn their films into performances and also make the audience hyper-aware of film’s construction and mechanism. Bruce McClure is certainly one of them. I’ve just been lucky to see three of his performances in the space of a week and a half at the utterly amazing OtherFilm Festival in Brisbane Australia. Almost every film there had a performative element. The projectors were always in the same room as the audience and mostly projected by the filmmakers.


I saw two wonderful multi-projector performances by the great Australian filmmaker Dirk De Bruyn. He began each of his shows by shining a flashlight around the raised arms and reels of the 16mm projectors. The shadows of the reels would play around the audience as a sort of initiation into film via a ritualistic invocation.


There was also a performance by Sally Golding and Joel Stern, two of the organizers of the festival who also do performances under the name Abject Leader. Joel does live soundtracks and Sally makes films. She’s a fellow projectionist and also a film preservationist and her work is steeped in experimentations with film substance and film history. The performance that they did at the festival dealt with early cinema color techniques in which consecutive frames of film would be shot behind red, green, and blue filters onto black and white film and then projected back through those same filters to create a full spectrum effect. Sally set up three projectors pointed straight into the audience, one each with a red, green, and blue filter, and then stood in the center of the room holding up a large picture frame filled with tracing paper. She makes the audience stare into the glare of the projector and then rescues us by physically interrupting the glare and locking the three projections into a single image.


BLVR: One thing I've never been entirely clear about is the job of a projectionist. What's the whole process there?


V: The average feature film comes in two very heavy metal cases each containing three 20-minute reels about 18 inches in diameter. Probably 95 percent of theaters run these reels on what is called a platter system. This means that they build all of the reels onto one big platter so the projector pulls the film off of one level of the platter and spits it back out onto another. The whole film runs through a single projector in a single pass with no need for a projectionist other than to build the film and push the START button.


I’m lucky to work at a theater that doesn’t use platters. Instead we use two projectors and do reel changeovers. Over the course of a film, the projectionist switches back and forth between the projectors four or five times. At the end of each reel of film there are two sets of cue marks, approximately 8 seconds apart. When one reel is winding down, I stand at attention next to the projector that is not running and keep a very careful eye on the top right corner of the screen. When I see the first cue mark, I start the second projector, which then has 8 seconds to get fully up to speed. At eight seconds, I see the second cue mark and hit the CHANGEOVER button which simultaneously closes the dowser on the first projector and opens the dowser on the second. If my timing is off, or if I miss the cue marks, the audience is treated to anything from a half second of black to a very embarrassing six seconds of countdown leader.


II. "YOU ARE A GOOD ROBOT SENT TO SAVE THE LAST HUMAN FAMILY FROM THE EVIL ROBOTS"


BLVR: The Vladmasters have been in a ton of film festivals, and you actually won the title of World Champion of Experimental Film a few times, which means, by all standards, you are clearly a filmmaker. But at the same time, you're not a filmmaker in the same way that pretty much everyone else is a filmmaker.


V: IN terms of the audience experience, which is of a visual and audio narrative that takes place oer a pre-determined time line, I'm closer to making films than anything else. I certainly feel comfortable beinga part of film festivals. However, when I'm making things I don't think of them as films, I think of them as stories. If I had my choice I think I'd go with the very simple description "picture story."


BLVR: So then, if you had to place yourself in a lineage of directors, filmmakers, or picture-story makers, where would you be? On your website it says that you enjoy "the very early films of Rene Clair."


V: Although I love film, I don't often think in terms of cinematic models when I'm working on a project. I get more caught up in the very strict parameters (twenty-eight photographs over four disks) of the View-Master and I concentrate on working things into that tight little structure. One of the great delights in working with the form is in the moment of anticipation, in the narrative disjunction, that comes in the jump from one frame to the next. To me this jump feels more akin to turning a page in a storybook than to smoother flow of a film narrative.


The one time I did look to cinematic models was working on Actaeon at Home. I knew that that would be a show with live music and no narrator, so I was trying to create a purely visual logic for the jumps from frame to frame. I was inspired by early animation. Looking at something like Gertie the Dinosaur or early Fritz the Cat cartoons you get a sense of these early animators' joy in discovering the infinite malleable possibilities of lines in motion. There is a glorious anarchic logic and infinitely transformative quality to those worlds that I tried to capture, in stiffer form, in Actaeon.


BLVR: Another thing I want to ask you about is Portland, which, per capita, seems like one of the most artistically exciting cities in the world right now. It also seems, from the outside, like there are these very close-knit artistic communities tying together all types of musicians, artists, and filmmakers in a free-spirited sort of way.


V: I'm probably not the best person to talk about the Portland art scene just because I'm very, very shy and mostly opt to retreat from the world. That said, I probably never would have become a sort-of filmmaker if I hadn’t moved to Portland and discovered organizations like the ones I mentioned above. When I moved to Portland, after college, I had spent four years programming a university film series and had a good background in foreign and classic film history but no real concept of experimental or underground film. The only models I had of regular people making films were unnecessary imitations of Quentin Tarantino. Coming to Portland I discovered a whole other idea of making films, films that were small, personal, homemade, and felt completely apart from anything I had seen before. It was not unlike discovering, at the age of 13, that there were people who made music that was not played on Top 40 radio stations.


BLVR: So how did your awakening to experimental film unfold? What directors helped to usher you out of the "Top 40" of filmmaking?


V: I don’t know if experimental is exactly the right word for the films that attracted me. I think I might more use the term handmade. Some of them were certainly experimental, but just as many were simply small or personal or homemade. One thing that happened a week or two after I moved to Portland was that I went to a screening by the Tiny Picture Club. This is a Portland Super 8 collective. Their logo was like the Superman logo with an 8 replacing the S. It was a very chilly November and the screening was in a tiny, unheated Quonset hut. There were about 50 people crammed in there, sitting on the floor, with musicians along one side of the room. They played along to about 10 different Super8 films about dreams. The films were all very small, simple, and joyous. Much of the footage was hand-processed and scratchy. There was some stop action animation. There were homemade costumes and masks. There was an introductory film set to the T-Rex song “Bang a Gong.” In it all of the members of the club wore white jumpsuits with their logo emblazoned on the back. They were running around a park with their cameras. There was much pixilated action made to make them look like they were flying, levitating, rotating in circles on the ground on their bellies. The feeling I felt sitting in that room and watching those films was exactly like the feeling of falling in love.


BLVR: Do you make any handmade films yourself?


The only films I've made have been super8 films with the Tiny Picture Club. The thing that I enjoyed most with films was trying out technical experiments. I used to work in the Equipment Room for the film school at the Northwest Film Center, so I had access to all kinds of super8 cameras and projectors. I built a device that could control up to three super8 cameras simultaneously and could run them at either eighteen frames per second or off of a intervalometer. It was pretty cool but, other than filming some friends playing soccer in a park one afternoon, I never really figured out anything good to point the cameras at.


BLVR: You once said that Atari is one of your favorite art forms. You said you liked the video games where you could still see the pixels. I'm curious if this ties in with all of these homemade ideas. Without any of the high-fidelity bells and whistles, it seems like there is less of a separation between the artist-creator andthe viewer.


V: I think what you said about the lack of separation between creator and viewer is exactly right. I like to be able to get a sense of craft and humanness behind work. When I see the little pixels rolling by in an Atari game, I think back to BASIC programming and how hard that little computer is thinking and how hard the programmer had to work to put all those pixels in just the right place.


I’m very bad at actually playing Atari games. I rarely make it past the first level. However, similar to the viewmaster, I love them as absurd little mini-narratives. The narratives are really what give form and understanding to the pixels. If you take a game like Space Invaders or Galaga or even Frogger, and watch it, forgetting the narrative, you’re left with the motion of abstract colored forms. It’s only those couple of text windows at the beginning (which nobody pays much attention to) that provide form for the whole structure and objective of the game. One of my favorite mini-narratives goes along with a game whose title escapes me at the moment — it’s the one where you are a good robot sent to save the last human family from the evil robots.


I’ve recently encountered some interesting Flash games online that return to a completely abstract and non-narrative form of the video game. One in particular is called Boomshine. It’s a field of slowly moving colored balls. The objective is to click your mouse somewhere on the screen to create an expanding ripple. Every ball this ripple touches turns into a new ripple. You try to turn as many balls into ripples as possible with your single click. It’s so simple that it doesn’t require directions, yet it’s also beautiful and incredibly addictive.


BLVR: OK, I just played Boomshine for twenty minutes and I was in some sort of weird trance with that game. Plus, you're right about the directions. To figure the game out, you just get to resort to simple visual assumptions (e.g., if I do A then B happens). In the context of this conversation, it reminds me a little of the abstract filmmaking you've been mentioning, where you're forced to start thinking things like "That thing over there is moving fast, and the other thing is moving slow." It engages the mind in such a different way than narrative film.


V: I’m very untrained when it comes to watching experimental film. I don’t think I could make an abstract film if I tried because everything inside of my head only knows how to operate on cause and effect. But I do like to sit back and enjoy other people’s abstractions even if I’m always very self conscious about not appreciating them in the right way. This might be why I like Boomshine so much. You get cause and effect alongside your abstractions. I can’t help but trying to make sense of everything I see whether I’m supposed to or not.


BLVR: And finally, just to clarify, Vladimir is not your birth name, right?


V: I was never enamored of my birth name and I’d always planned on changing it when I went off to college. But one day, when I was sixteen, one of my English classes had a class assignment in which we were supposed to pair up and write little essays about our partners based solely on looking up their name in a few baby books. Maybe it was just my natural impulse toward sabotage, but it seemed like the perfect opportunity to make the change. I had a sharpie and an index card and I made myself a name tag introducing myself by my new name. Ever since then, I’ve been Vladimir. I have now been Vladimir for almost half of my life.

Vendors Wanted. Antioch University Seattle has space available for artists selling their handmade goods at Antioch’s annual holiday Craft Fair from 11:30am to 6:00pm, Dec 3 and 4. For more information contact Antioch’s Student Life Office at (206) 268-4025 or email studentlife@antiochseattle.edu.

Form/Space Atelier Program For February 2009

Show Title: Trombones Jaunes

Show Duration: February 13- March 8

Opening Reception: February 13, 6PM as part of Belltown Art Dealers Assn.
Second Friday Artwalk www.belltownartwalk.com

Postminimalist painter Matthew Kandegas exhibits his yearly crop of paperclip paintings, this time they are yellow paperclips on pink grounds. The images are becoming more vague and ambiguous. As the world goes paperless, the paperclip rides the vagaries of necessity. The scale of the paintings come in two sizes; 18x36 and 48x96 inches. All are oil on panel save one which is oil on fabric mounted to panel. Show curated by Paul Pauper, exhibit is free.

Form/Space Atelier Exhibit August 14- Sep 6, 2009

Show Title: Outskirts

Show Duration: August 14- September 6, 2009

Opening Reception August 14, 6PM as part of the Belltown ArtWalk; www.belltownartwalk.com

Outskirts is a site-specific infiltration using photographs and a kiosk to narrate a previous site-specific exhibit by Rebsom developed during a residency at the Ucross Foundation in a Montana prairie dog metropolis. Outskirts is Rebsom's first solo show at Form/Space Atelier and her second show at Form/Space ATelier overall. Portland-based Rebsom is the recipient of the Jan Zach Award for excellence in sculpture and the AAA Dean's Fellowship Award from the University of Oregon, where she received her MFA.


Eric Kellogg II comments on Paula Rebsom:

My favorite show in Portland this year (2006) was Paula Rebsom at the Tilt Gallery. Her work is amazing. She brings a whole new flair to photography. Her photographs were of massive wood structures, cut out in the shape of wolves. Honestly, you have to see the work. It reminds me of Bev Doolittle—when I was younger, I would spend hours gazing at my mother's Doolittle collection. When I saw Rebsom's work I had to keep coming back, sometimes twice a day. In my opinion, Paula Rebsom is the Bev Doolittle of the contemporary photography world.

Jeff Jahn comments on Paula Rebsom:

Probably the best local show up is "When I can't be here, I go there" at Tilt gallery (run by PORT's own Jenene Nagy, I just can't ignore this gem, which comes on the heels of several other decent to good shows). In addition, "WICBTIGT" is the auspicious debut of recent University of Oregon MFA grad Paula Rebsom who seems to have become ten times the artist she was 6 months ago. With just two large format images Rebsom constructs impressive somewhat pensive scenes of moody artifice but it's the little touches that win the day here, including the conceptual installation.

What I like here is that unlike Gregory Crewdson and to a lesser extent Thomas Demand, Rebsom's scenes are studies in revealed staging and rather spoiled artifice.

It is a nice installation as the two photos (one is a front yard, the other is of the back yard) seem to long for one another's phoniness… its like Breakfast at Tiffanies only with Joan Crawford as Holly and Mickey Rooney cast as Paul "Fred" Varjak not the intolerable landlord. That effect would be icky but you would have to watch that trainwreck.

Back to the photos, the house itself seems to be a non-entity, a prop for the props which sets up some nice rythms for the rest of the show. Also, like Ad Reinhardt paintings they need to be seen in person as tiny internet images can't possibly provide enough detail or contrast to represent them well. It is a nice touch of phoniness that demands there be no subsitutes.

The front yard photo, "North Dakota Badlands," sports a tiny dandelion in the extreme foreground, which highlights the simple and artificial cutout steppes in front of the ranch house and in "Howling Coyote" we can practically hear the yelping of a film foley that will never be added to this acknowledged contrivance. It's all chicanery and there is something refreshingly honest about the gloom here. Apparently all of it was accomplished with existing lighting, yet it hardly feels like an indie filmmaker's work and more like a darker and still cousin to Terry Gilliam's strange film, The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen.

In the crowded genre of cinematic and staged large format photography Rebsom has come right out of school with something to say of her own. It isnt behind the scenes but its rather refreshing that she doesnt try to delight her audience so much as not make any promises that her work can't keep. For me it delivered more. By Jeff Jahn, October 11, 2006.

Paula Rebsom comments on her work:

Outskirts

I could hear the prairie dogs barking miles before I arrived in their desolate town 5 miles down a dirt road from Ucross, Wyoming, population 25. As I got out of my vehicle to survey the location for a new suburban development, a family of pronghorn circled me curiously and marked their territory along the way. The road I walked along was littered with bullet casings. The prairie dogs continued to bark as they scattered to their burrows for safety. As they disappeared into their extensive network of underground tunnels a ghostly stillness settled over the town. All that remained were a few bleached prairie dog skulls and scat that I found lying next to their burrows.

All this was very familiar to me having grown up in western North Dakota. As a young girl I thought prairie dogs were cute animals you fed crackers to, as a teenager I shot them for sport (an act I am not proud of), and as a young adult I educated people on the importance of prairie dogs in the ecosystem as a ranger for Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Although prairie dogs are small and seemingly harmless animals they are quite controversial. Farmers and ranchers see them as competition for acreage and their burrows as a danger to livestock. Ecologists consider them a keystone species playing a central role in the survival of many endangered species that prey on them or use their burrows for nesting.

This new suburban development I scouted on the 22,000-acre ranch that houses the Ucross Foundation was not for humans, but rather for the prairie dogs themselves. I constructed 85 small house facades, each with its own set of pleated curtains, to be placed in a very active portion of a prairie dog town. Over the course of three days, I staked one house behind each existing burrow, creating a visual map of the prairie dog town. For the remainder of my stay I spent the mornings and early afternoons (when prairie dogs are most active) observing their interactions with this new development. Instead of embracing this new suburban utopia, the prairie dogs abandoned the heart of the town. Only the young, naive ones remained in the homes on the outskirts.

The installation in the prairie dog town on the Ucross ranch combined elements of urban sprawl, homesteads, and ghost towns. My role fluctuates between that of a rancher, a deputy, and a park ranger, leaving room for an ambiguous narrative to form within the sequence of images. In the Outskirts project I explored my own personal relationship with these animals and also created a domestic paradox of human and animal relationships that balances on the edge of absurdity. The images act as historical documents, offering a different perspective in the complex relationships that we have developed with animals and nature.

Vendors Wanted. Antioch University Seattle has space available for artists selling their handmade goods at Antioch’s annual holiday Craft Fair from 11:30am to 6:00pm, December 3 and 4. For more information contact Antioch’s Student Life Office at (206) 268-4025 or email studentlife@antiochseattle.edu.

Shannon Barry exhibits at Form/Space Atelier June 12- July 5. Opening reception June 12, 6pm.

Form/Space Atelier Program for June 2009

Show Title: The Quiet Society

Show Duration: June 12- July 5, 2009

Opening Reception June 12, 6PM, as part
of Belltown Second Friday Artwalk www.belltownartwalk.com

Shannon Barry studied in the atelier of Mark Kang-O'Higgins at the Gage Academy of Art, Seattle. The Quiet Society is her second consecutive solo exhibition at Form/Space Atelier, and her third exhibit overall at the gallery.

Artist's Statement:

This series is called The Quiet Society because the central characters, despite their different surroundings, all share a common relaxed state.-Shannon Barry

Curator's Notes:

Shannon Barry eschews obfuscation at every chance she can, and her art is no exception. Ms. Barry has a great degree of skill as an artist, and has distinguished herself as an academic through her study at the atelier of Mark Kang O'Higgins, and since passing from Gage, formidable and sustained self-study of art literature, New York museum visits and consistent studio practice. Anyone familiar with the curriculum at the Gage Academy of Art is aware of the rigorous battery of daily life study, unquestionably the time-honored truth of an artist's training. Draftsmanship cannot be faked, where it is required for freehand expression. Ms. Barry is an outstanding draftsperson, along the lines of Lucien Freud, Alice Neel and Wayne Thiebaud. Ms. Barry paid homage to Thiebaud's hand in a years-long series of donuts and coffee cups in oil on canvas, her primary medium. She was living across the street from Top Pot Donuts at the time, and this series was a visual report, almost anthropological, of her environment at the time. This series was also Ms. Barry's first commercial success, her first collector purchasing a work from her which has fixed her current rate of value. A curated showing of this series was exhibited as part of a group show at Form/Space Atelier in April 2008.
Ms. Barry next began a series of large-scale abstract landscapes of clouds in bright, cartoon-like renderings. As a curator, I find this series to be a bold expression, and as art objects, these paintings are extremely original, eye-catching and elicit happy emotions in virtually every observer. The case for a therapeutic work of art could definitely be made with Ms. Barry's Clouds series. The "wow" factor was recorded by this curator, who sat with these paintings in an exhibit at Form/Space Atelier in August of 2008, "wow" being the consistent ejaculation of those visiting the exhibit during the duration of the show.
With the advent of the Quiet Society in June 2009, Ms. Barry returns to production of large-scale figures in oil on canvas. The characters in these paintings, with the exception of a work after John Singer Sargent, are the product of Ms. Barry's imagination. She is sure of her expression with this series. Her drafting, color-mixing and compositional skills are synergized in masterstrokes.

Vendors Wanted. Antioch University Seattle has space available for artists selling their goods at Antioch’s annual holiday Craft Fair from 11:30am to 6:00pm, December 3 and 4. For more information contact Antioch’s Student Life Office at (206) 268-4025 or email studentlife@antiochsea.edu.

Form/Space Atelier program for March 2009

Show Title: The Return Of the Amazing Daredevil Bears

Show Duration: March 13- April 5

Opening Reception March 13 as part of the Belltown Art Walk www.belltownartwalk.com

Aaron Murray exhibits his recent character series, the Daredevil Bears at Form/Space Atelier. Timing isn't everything, as the sage once quipped, it's the ONLY thing; the stock market has been overrun recently with the carefree, devil-may-care, Daredevil Bears. Aren't they lovable? For sure.

Aaron Murray is a visual artist, educator, and shop keeper in Seattle, WA. Murray owns a shop called Nancy with his wife Kate, www.nancynancynancy.com Murray teaches art at several Seattle community centers, is an active member of the Capitol Hill Watercolor Society, and has been making and selling art since 1990.

Make the most of your lunch hour (and your budget!). Join Roar Yoga (www.roaryoga.com) for an all-levels vinyasa flow yoga class.

Get your workout in during your workday; stretch, strengthen, tone, relax, and refresh both mind and body in an accessible and affordable yoga class minutes away from Downtown and Belltown office locations.

The instructor will offer plenty of options so you can adjust the intensity of the class to meet your needs. Beginners and advanced students will be accommodated.

PRICING: First class FREE, otherwise just $10! If you bring a friend who is new to Roar Yoga, your next class is only $5. Bring your own mat or rent one from us for $2. Cash/check only.

LOCATION: 2306 4th Avenue between Bell and Battery (inside Belltown Ballet and Conditioning Studio)

QUESTIONS? Email info@roaryoga.com