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Hedreen Gallery at Lee Center for the Arts is pleased to present new work by New Mystics // November 12, 2014-January 10, 2015 SECRET/SACRED documents the choreographed personal mythology and shared experiences of the New Mystics, one of Seattle’s largest, multidisciplinary art collectives. SECRET/SACRED is a further investigation within the collective history of the New Mystics and will exhibit video along with sculpture and memorabilia used in the ritualized performances leading up to the exhibit. Writer/ Director/Visionary Don Wallingford conceives these landscapes and orchestrates the shared rituals. Cinematographer Brad Curran captures these rites with help from Project/Production Manager Cassandra Piester. Inaugural viewing of New Mystic accouterments designed and produced by Zoe Sherman in collaboration with Sam Lothrop will be revealed. Crystal Barbré brings with her the ability to forever freeze the anatomy of members, creating death masks and immortalized selections. Jewelry and handcrafted goods created by MaryHannahLittleLamb for the NM membership will also be shown.

ABOUT NEW MYSTICS New Mystics collects degenerates of diverse disciplines: sign painting, screen printing, graffiti, performance, photography, dance, jewelry-making, street art, fabrication, tattooing, music production, painting, DJ’s & MC’s, producers and experimental musicians. New Mystics, individually and collectively, works to produce and comment on urban art, most often existing outside the purview of the gallery or museum, but sometimes within it. In August and September 2014, New Mystics curated and executed (in conjunction with Hedreen Gallery) two public outdoor audio/visual exhibitions called “Dream Cargo” at Seattle University’s Cisco Morris Biodiversity Garden. In partnership with Back Alley Bikes they installed Natural Movement, an exhibit of kinetic, bike-based art works in Nord Alley for the summer of 2014. In 2013, members hosted a secret music show called “New Mystics Mixtapes.” New Mystics has worked with Free Sheep Foundation producing large scale commissioned and noncommissioned public art, including the Art Da$h for Cash, Moore: Inside Out, the Bridge Motel, the Belmont, the TUBS Memorial and other free public installations and exhibitions. New Mystics has also exhibited locally, including shows at the SAM Rental Sales Gallery, the Rosetta M Hunter gallery at SCCC, Vermillion, and curated the Seattle Street Biennale 2009 & 2010. __________________________________________________________________ There is a fundamental recognition that if you’re going to make art today, you’re going to make one of two things: an artifact to or distraction from the fact that humanity has utterly failed and that we’ve missed the point entirely....But it’s important to remember that there is still beauty, and it is important to remember that our relationship to each other and the natural world still matter while they remain and maybe we’re left exactly where we began: in myth. So goes the recording made by one of the members of New Mystics that drones on a set of headphones hanging on the wall. The statement is one of the only pieces of information provided by the significant number of artists who have contributed to the show. They would prefer that the works speak for themselves—or remain mute: a sort of detritus or ephemera that radiates a low frequency hum or whisper about something significant, if ineffable. The audio is positioned next to a neatly-folded pile of couture cloaks. These smell slightly of linseed oil and melted wax, an admixture of which has been painted on with brushes, then massaged into the fabric to make water-resistant oil cloth. Handmade buttons on the hem of the garments allow their edges to be hiked up and pinned while riding bicycles: an unexpected niche of ritual sportswear made for bike messengers—many of whom comprise the New Mystics. The origin of New Mystics is appropriately shrouded. While the exact start date of the collective is misty in the imagination, there is consensus that an initial installation in 2008 marks a type of inception. At that time, a group of artists mounted an installation of posters and paintings near Pike Place Market. The group can be linked to—or has roots in—past Seattle collectives like Free Sheep Foundation (whose founders NKO and D.K. Pan have also appeared amongst the ranks of New Mystics), as well as ties to performance groups like Saint Genet and Implied Violence. Amongst the common denominators of these groups is an interest in exploring a contemporary context for rites, ritual and artistic community in contemporary culture. There is also a consistent interest in interventions within and on the urban landscape. These have taken many forms: sanctioned performance and installation, quietly or privately performed rites to pay homage to hidden corners of the city, or traditional forms of street art, like wheatpaste, sometimes as large as murals, other times diminutive, buried like Easter eggs in forgotten, untraversed pathways, to be stumbled on by urban explorers, vagrants...whomever. What makes New Mystics particularly curious and at times potent, is a fluid style of collaboration and government—that of the body politic. Each member operates as needed to facilitate the well-being and productivity of the whole, often shunning titles, or opting to shift leadership roles with frequency and agility. The list of members reads like a rotating cast: malleable, plastic....the building blocks of a living, breathing organism. (An example: the group deemed it appropriate that I be listed amongst its ranks for this exhibit, as I had a hand in facilitating it.) When New Mystics bring their work inside a gallery or museum, some things remain consistent throughout their exhibits, accreting symbolic provenance and heft with each appearance, such as a ubiquitous excess of dripping black wax that often coats old wine bottles—the suggestion of a last supper, or some other sort of communal breaking of bread. Likewise, old, unwanted books are sealed shut with wax, their contents—whether mundane or oracular—mysteriously silenced. Frequently they introduce remnants from the streets. For this exhibit, tables and plinths have been constructed from a repurposed Proposed Land Use Action sign. It has been so covered with layers of spray paint, its original message is inscrutable, erased by time and angry passersby. Also for this exhibit, a new addition of death masks has been added. These casts of members’ faces employ a type of portraiture common in the 19th century, made from a messy, antiquated recipe for moulage. They capture an essence at once uncannily accurate and somber—a counterpoint to the bacchanalias and suggestion of celebratory ritual staged in the videos presented alongside them in the exhibit. The masks also suggest, draped with the ornamental trappings of engraved rings and pendants, a correlation to the ritual life of secret societies, which have been a part of the fabric of American culture for hundreds of years. The assembled ephemera of New Mystics poses questions alongside its prescriptions. The impenetrable and unsanctioned aspects of their work question the feasibility of living between the margin of myth and everyday life. How does a body politic pragmatically function, and how long can it last? How does such a socially forward and backward-looking governing model, played out on a small stage in the arts, inform a vision for the future of society at large? While the answers to such questions are indeterminate and will necessarily continue to remain in flux, the final takeaway from SECRET / SACRED is, on the contrary, quite straightforward and needs no further statement than that it is important to remember that our relationship to each other and the natural world still matter while they remain. -Amanda Manitach, Hedreen Gallery curator NEW MYSTICS MEMBERSHIP AND GUEST ARTISTS WHO CONTRIBUTED TO SECRET / SACRED Adot Amanda Cobb Amanda Manitach Amanda Moon Angel 179 Ansley E. Lee Aubrey Birdwell Baldmanwatching Baso Fibonacci Brad Curran Cassandra Piester Colin Mikel Northcraft Crystal Barbré Diana Linde DJ Dracko DK Pan Donald Michael Wallingford Emma Sargent Judson Felder Justin Philips Kat Larson Kenzone Lauren Aiello Lehman Noviella Lisa Marie Woodward MaryHannahLittleLamb Michael Evans No Touching Ground NKO Quincy Quiggs Sara Edwards Sarah Galvin Scratchmaster Joe Sign Savant Specs Wizard Smurf Thomas Vincent Chapel Wizdumb Zoe Sherman

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Brad Ewing & Cable Griffith Sept 17-October 18, 2014 Reception: Saturday, September 27th, 2014,  4-6 pm Hedreen Gallery is pleased to present fifteen paintings and laser cut woodblock “moire” prints by New York based artist Brad Ewing. Ewing is a graduate of Cornish College of the Arts and now runs Marginal Editions print studio in New York, specializing in letterpress and silkscreen editions for artists worldwide. Alongside Ewing’s smaller scale work, Seattle based artist Cable Griffith offers a site specific installation inspired by nautical distress signals, video games, pixel art and bit-size, bite-size visual packets. Join us for an opening reception on Saturday, September 27th, 2014,  4-6 pm. CABLE GRIFFITH: "I Require a Pilot" is an installation of 36 screenprints, assembled to form an 8-foot tall mountain of repeated tree patterns. The subtle color variations in each print refer to various nautical distress flags, as part of the International Code of Signals. This standardized form of communication is used at sea to help ensure the safe navigation and passage of vessels, overcoming verbal language barriers. It is a landscape of language and a call for help. From the land to the sea, from one to another. Above all, it signals that sometimes our greatest decision is to ask for another’s. Foxtrot - "I am disabled; communicate with me." Golf - "I require a pilot." Uniform - "You are running into danger." Zulu - "I require a tug." BRAD EWING: "It is clear from these various stages that the curators' intent was to show that if a certain form of minimalism as such continues to exist a priori through the work of younger artists, these artists are today completely at ease with using citations and appropriations, not only—for some of them—by making direct references to their elders, but especially by not trying to hide under any circumstances the borrowings which their works take from the society which surrounds them." -Éric Mangion in "Half Square, Half Crazy", on the subject of an exhibition from Centre National d'Art Contemporain de la Villa Arson Nice, Feb 10-June 3, 2007 The paintings are photo reproductions, and my process becomes mechanical, almost paint-by-number. An image is selected, transferred to panel with Saral paper and color is mixed and painted in its respective places. The images chosen are from my daily life: textiles, nature, architecture and other phenomenon. I am distilling and refining these moments. The prints are simple color studies, designed to manipulate the eye. They deal with light and shadow as well as dots and lines—the basic foundations of art making. The current dot works are taking the form of moire. The moire to a printer is a recognizable form: it's problematic. The moire I'm using is abstract and not the result of working with a photographic matrix. Image credit: Cable Griffith, "I Require a Pilot", 2014, screenprint on paper, 16x20 inches; Brad Ewing, "Eleven Twenty Nine", 2014, Letterpress, Polymer, 7.5 x 7.5 inches.

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Artless: Or why there won't be art in the gallery this month

Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door, where’s all the people? As a pastor’s kid, I grew up in churches. When I was very young, they were monumental, turn-of-the-century Methodist churches that often sprawled half a city block in the center of dusty, little, mid-American towns. Every week after the congregations spilled out into their layman’s worlds, the church building remained my playground. The well-worn commercial carpet of classrooms spread out for miles. The hundred-year-old oak pews that always stunk like a particular kind of wood stain were a place I could curl up and draw pictures on the backs of last week’s bulletins. Probably because of this, I feel more at home, or at least more at rest, in the large hollows of formal, institutional and religious spaces than in Norman Rockwell-esque living rooms (the idea of which was more a fantasy than a reality in a constantly trafficked, open-to-the-public parsonage). The institution of the art gallery fits into this category. In all its overwrought, sanctioned white-cube-ness. Like the church, when an exhibit comes down and the art and the audience spills out into the world, what remains is unsexy, unsanctioned, uncanny quiet. In the doldrums of August, a gasp. Selah. When I think Breathe, I’m not just thinking about the overwork, hyperproductivity and horror vacui that excites (and plagues) the art world (and the world world). I’m thinking of this space taking a breath as well. I think of all the times the walls of this humble, unwieldy, fishbowl of an ex-auto-show-room-turned-gallery have been punctured with hundreds of nails, peppered with butterfly bolts, crisscrossed with self-adhesive strips of cable management casing, drilled, taped, patched, painted, vinyled, the performers who have spattered food, water and other unmentionable fluids across the walls, who have dragged their bodies and inched their way across the hardwood floors, who have utterly had their way with the windows, the cracks, with every gap and interstice. This space is a real trooper. And I want the space to breathe. Perhaps I anthropomorphize too much.

-Amanda Manitach, curator at Hedreen Gallery

PS. Yep, that's one of the churches I grew up in. Image courtesy of Google Earth.

For the month of August, the gallery will be open, but will rest. A little. This week it's getting a fresh coat of paint. Beginning August 13 and continuing through September 13, Hedreen will host a minimal installation of written work, called Breathe. Inspired by Jan Verwoert’s essay “Exhaustion + Exuberance,” Rebecca Brown, Sean J Patrick Carney, Robert Mittenthal, T.s. Flock, Matt Offenbacher, Jason Hirata and Sharon Arnold will create short works on rest, production, NO versus YES, resistance and hyperproductivity in the art world.

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"I knew that events had occurred—or would occur—that I didn’t see. And I knew that much of this wouldn't be explained, and that I left with more questions than answers. But I’ve decided I like this. I didn't need to know anything other than this thing that was happening right then; and I didn't have to be anywhere but there, in that moment; breathing alongside the man on the floor."

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Many thanks to Alice Gosti and to all the Yellow Fish Epic Durational Performance Festival artists who made last month at Hedreen a nonstop visual feast (sometimes an actual feast)! Catch up on some of the photos here...

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Zachary Culler: Portraits opening reception // June 4, 2014Photos by Bruce Clayton Tom.

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Dream Cargo // Two nights of alternative listening and lucid dreaming in the Cisco Morris Biodiversity Garden on Seattle University Campus 7:30-11pm // all ages // free of charge A series of public outdoor audio/visual exhibitions, held on the first Sundays of August, September in the Cisco Morris Biodiversity Garden from 8-11 pm. Inspired by the garden’s sense of mystery, its strange & dramatic mix of nature and architecture, the New Mystics’ partners with  Hedreen Gallery and Seattle University to present a series of outdoor public art exhibitions in this beautiful, unconventional space featuring new electroacoustic and electronic works by Northwest artists. Each one night event features premiere audio and visual presentations by music and visual artists from the Pacific Northwest.  The A/V presentations are either a single artist working between both visual and audio paradigms, or collaborative/ improvised pieces executed by individual audio and visual artists working and playing together.  Exhibits will begin at 8 p.m. and end at 11 p.m. Rain dates will be on the following Sunday. The events also features a ritualized procession by New Mystics members choreographed by Ezra Dickenson. Highlighting the architecture and lighting of the adjacent modernist/Moorish inspired parking structure and the large semi-circular, glass walled atrium that opens to the Biodiversity Garden, the costumes, video and audio from performances will culminate in a month-long show at the Hedreen Gallery on the SU campus in November. 8/3: Poison Ring Occulist Witness Nick Bartoletti dj Dracko 9/7: Tiny Vipers Garek Druss Raica Limits Artist Bios + Links: Bryan LeFey aka Poison Ring https://www.youtube.com/user/PoisonRingArchive/videos https://soundcloud.com/poison-ring Poison Ring is an experience rooted in sound, but also works to stimulate other aspects of the human sensorium. Iconography and choreography, alongside the use of specific aromatics, serve to potentiate the overall effect of live occurrences. The magical lineage which informs and inspires the individual behind this endeavor is primarily Hermetic, specifically concerning traditional planetary attributes and correspondences. The sound produced and presented live is exclusively comprised of tapes (cassettes and stereo-8s) and vinyl records, all hand-refined into loops. For this particular event, the soloist (composer, host, fool) will share its process with the public. Elements that are typically unseen - yet vital! - for conducting an occurrence will, for the first time, be effected unhidden. Through the entirety of the Dream Cargo experience, viewers may witness the foundation, growth, and dissolution of a little world. The occurrence itself is a revisitation of a piece entitled Book of Seeds. This was originally presented to a limited audience at the Seattle Esoteric Book Conference of 2012. Having been inspired to work with the imagery of a book, the artist was compelled to reveal certain aspects of a work-in-progress by the same title. With the recent release of the music for this piece (Hanged Man Recordings #13), and considering the garden setting of the event, nothing seems more appropriate than to have the Book Of Seeds rebound. Nick Bartoletti of Crypts: http://www.youtube.com/user/barto9 http://crypts.bandcamp.com/ Nick Bartoletti is a member of the Seattle based band, Crypts, with releases on Sargent House Records.  Nick plays both audio and video analogue synthesizers,  and is one of the few artists in Seattle focusing on modular analogue video synthesis paired with this own electronic compositions. Chris Majoris of Oculist Witness (previously Crystal Hell Pool): https://debaclerecords.bandcamp.com/album/domain https://soundcloud.com/crystalhellpool Chris Majoris is a talented young experimental electronic musician with releases on Debacle Recordings, and many self released titles, some in collaboration with Crippled Symmetry recordings. Chris has toured as a keyboardist with some of Seattle’s biggest bands, while also playing an extensive series of low profile solo performances over the years, premiering a new solo piece at each event. Dj Dracko of Draconian Djs: https://soundcloud.com/mysticmixtapes Samuel Lothrop’s Dj Dracko project focuses on heavily layered and effected mixes that explore the alternative listening techniques fundamental to all dj performances.  Playing primarily vinyl and analog delay, Sam uses both classic beat matching and free-mixing styles to fully recontextualize each piece to create a new experience that feels both familiar and foreign to the astute listener. Tiny Vipers: https://www.subpop.com/artists/tiny_vipers http://tinyvipers.bandcamp.com/ Tiny Vipers is the solo project of Jesy Fortino.  Playing long, repetitive acoustic songs topped off with her windswept howl, Fortino's stark studies in near-silence seek out a hypnotic minimalism far from pop-song form. "I don’t know how to play guitar," Fortino says, of her style. "I just hit notes, and then I sing. [My songs] are mostly written around vocal melodies. The guitar is just a hint, here or there, to punctuate what the vocal melody is doing.” Jesy also composes and performs with Grouper as Mirroring. Garek Druss of A Story of Rats: http://asor.bandcamp.com/ http://records.translinguisticother.com/a-story-of-rats/ Garek Druss is a Seattle based musician and artist whose works are influenced by both the spiritual and intellectual aspects of the creative act.  Garek’s solo show at Hedreen in the fall of 2013 created an immersive, kind of total art experience with drawings, sound installation and performance, that worked within, but also helped to define the new style, or school of artistic thought that can be described as “New Occultism.” Raica: http://furtherrecords.org/ https://soundcloud.com/raicamusic http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/mother-of-invention/Content?oid=18781188    Chloe Harris, or Raica, is a long time Seattle electronic musician, dj, and co-founder of Further Records, an internationally distributed and acclaimed record label.  Raica’s music is both bleak and beautiful, blending harsh atmospheric drones and post industrial rhythms with sparsely placed, hypnotic melodies that create a new kind of future techno-scape, or possibly techno-escapism…. Limits: http://pathoftheelk.com/limits/ Jason E Anderson is a Seattle-based artist whose work includes performance, recorded works, video, installation, and music for dance. Emerging from the traditions of experimental music and sound art, his work employs conceptual and intuitive approaches to investigating themes involving time and memory. He creates sound using synthesis, acoustic recordings, programming and text. Anderson performs and records music under his own name, as Spare Death Iconand as LIMITS, a music/performance-art hybrid project. Currently, his most active collaborative projects include dance/sound/visual-theater group Salt Horseand a conceptual computer music project with RM Francis. He also regularly works with Jamie Potter (as Brother Raven), Daryl Groetsch (as Space Habitat),Matt Carlson, as well as other artists involved with both music and dance improvisation. He has toured both coasts of the US and Japan, and produces/organizes various performances and events in the Pacific Northwest. He also curates the work of his contemporaries on his experimental record labels Gift Tapes and DRAFT, which include 62 releases to date. Anderson's recorded work can be found on his own labels, as well as Locust, Digitalis, Aguirre(Belgium), SicSic (Germany), Börft (Sweden) and many others. Curator’s Statement: Dream Cargo is an exhibit focused on the idea of the exhibit as an art piece as a whole, or rather as a piece created by the mixing of it’s constituent parts, nearly identical to the process of collage, but considering the social experience, and the audience itself as a crucial detail to the piece as a whole. Full extrapolation of this creative argument concludes that without an audience or social interaction with the piece of art, then there is no creative piece or affect, only unrealized intention. The argument’s conclusion is the inspiration and guiding principle for the Dream Cargo series.  Shared inspirations with creators of the group art experiences of the 1950s and onwards are acknowledged, however New Mystics’ execution will be one of artistic transgression; seeking to create a “group art experience” within a modern context, with a similar effect to our predecessors’, but with a total revocation of the political, the subjective, the virtuoso, and provincial, narrative or “folk” themes and an emphasis on  exploring the relationship between the artist and technology and the dehumanizing effects of electronics on the creative process, the art object, and most importantly on how technology acts as a filter in shaping the artists’ intent; specifically the intentional subterfuge of the egomaniacal act of an artists’ intent. -Samuel Lothrop

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New Mystics and Hedreen Gallery Present: Dream Cargo Sunday, August 3rd & Sunday, September 7th at Seattle University Campus, Cisco Morris Biodiversity Garden

7:30pm-11pm

(8/3) Poison Ring, Occulist Witness, Nick Bartoletti, dj Dracko (9/7) Tiny Vipers, Garek Druss, Raica, Limits FREE! Refreshments provided!

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"Il Dolce Risorgimento" // Jim Demetre

The following essay written by Jim Demetre for the "Vanitas" exhibit is accompanied at Hedreen Gallery by a video of the same name, featuring Alice Gosti and photographed by Tim Summers.

Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis delighted movie goers in 1959 when they donned women's clothes and impersonated female jazz musicians in Billy Wilder's celebrated classic "Some Like It Hot." The sight of the two actors tromping around in skirts, heels and wigs through the snowy streets of Chicago and the sun-drenched grounds of San Diego's Coronado Hotel as they attempt to avoid mafia hit men left audiences laughing as the movie explored the social constructs of gender in America. Far less remembered today but more provocative in its investigation of male sexuality was the cinematic reunion of the two actors in Blake Edwards's overwrought 1965 comedy "The Great Race." While both movies are comedies they could not be more dissimilar in tone and production. Wilder's film is remembered for its witty and quotable dialogue, Edwards's for its raucous, unrelenting slapstick. Though comprised of manic and unrestrained performances, "Some Like It Hot" is a tight, economic ensemble piece in black and white. "The Great Race," by contrast, is a florid, rainbow-hued pageant of Edith Head costumes, exotic landscapes and noisy internal combustion engines set to a Strauss and ragtime-inflected Henry Mancini score. The directors themselves provide a stark contrast of backgrounds and interests. Wilder, a worldly Jew from Austria-Hungary, left Berlin for Paris before coming to the United States to escape the Nazis and write screenplays. Edwards, a kid from Tulsa, Oklahoma, left his dry and dusty home state to pursue his dream of being an actor in Hollywood. As an outsider, Wilder was fascinated with the a-historical consciousness of America, the implications of its spoken idioms, and its culture of reinvention. Edwards, in a film career that was more varied in genre and quality, celebrated the collision of the modern world with the manners of old Europe or the social strictures of America's conservative past. But sex - and the idea of masculinity - looms large at the center of both men's oeuvre. Like Shakespeare's great comedy "Twelfth Night," "Some Like It Hot" offers age-old insights into the subject of gender that results from sudden and unexpected acts of crossdressing. "The Great Race," on the other hand, though set just after the turn of the century, is really about the evolution of male identity at the particular (and, in retrospect, significant) moment when the movie was released - that strange and confusing lull before American culture began to take a radically different course and powerful, long-standing institutions would no longer continue to hold their traditional authority. The subject of "The Great Race" is a fictional New York to Paris road race that takes place during the first decade of the 20th century. Such events are known to have occurred in the years prior to the the automobile's widespread consumption and use. The subsequent adoption of the car by the masses would, of course, usher in a new era of humankind and the movie deliberately places itself at this cultural and technological tipping point to tell other stories of social change. Curtis plays The Great Leslie, a suave, Houdini-like daredevil and obvious Hollywood prototype. Clean-shaven, neatly coiffed, and at all times immaculately dressed from head to toe in white, he is the embodiment of grace and improvisational virtuosity. Lemmon is cast as his malicious and ill-tempered rival, the inventor Professor Fate. Sooty, cantankerous and forever scheming, his mustachioed, top-hatted character is as possessed by envy as Curtis's is with sprezzatura. If Leslie is the cool hero of the modern age, Fate is the crazed villain of the previous, industrialized century. The trajectories of Fate’s rockets, dirigibles and motorized coaches inevitably culminate in violent acts of self-destruction and self-immolation. When the smoke clears, he vents his anger (and frequently hurls his fists) at Max, his hapless Sancho Panza, played by Peter Falk. Leslie is accompanied by his resolute and uncomplicated mechanic Hezekiah, a burly, bald-headed and gruff-voiced Keenan Wynn, whose expressionless face is punctuated by a large nose and bushy handle-bar mustache. The resulting drama is no mere Jonsonian comedy of humors, however. Underlying this madcap intercontinental car race is a bigger story about women asserting their rightful place in a rigid, male-dominated American society and their possible impact on the men themselves. In depicting the suffragette movement of the early 20th century as the alternate socio-cultural backstory to the rise of the automobile, the movie presaged the feminist movement that would heat up in the late 60s and early 70s. A third entry into this great race is Maggie Dubois, an intrepid and stunning woman reporter played by Natalie Wood. She barges into the office of New York newspaper publisher Henry Goodbody (Arthur O'Connell), the man who has sponsored the event, and demands that she be allowed both to compete in the race and report on it for paper's readers back home. Unrestrained in her self-confidence, she shocks the gray-haired executive by sitting on his desk and revealing her shapely, stockinged legs. But as a typical man of his times, he simply cannot conceive of a woman either driving or working alongside men. When her determination and overt sexuality fail to sway him she appeals to his strong-willed, political activist wife (Vivian Vance) who forces her husband to concede the request and supply her with an automobile, camera and cage of homing pigeons. The result is an odd reversal of Wilder's film. Instead of having Curtis and Lemmon pursue the beautiful woman who suddenly appears and takes part in their odyssey (Marilyn Monroe, in "Some Like It Hot"), Edwards has the glamorous Wood follow his two obsessed, preoccupied leads as they drive across North America, over the icy Bering Strait and through the vast expanse of Siberia into the very heart of Europe. While the patriarchal Fate, Goodbody and Hezekiah all regard Dubios with condescension, derision and fear, Leslie’s attitude towards his new rival, imbued with an intellectual and sexual curiosity, is far more nuanced and complex. But he is from the start a different sort of man. When we first first encounter him, just as he is about to perform a dangerous stunt in a hot-air balloon, he gleams light into the crowd like a large precious gem. He is surrounded by an adoring throng of women in feathered hats and petticoats, each of whom impulsively embraces and passionately kisses him before being peeled off by his handlers. When he meets Dubois at a distant oceanside in his exotic desert tent, he playfully attempts to seduce her. Though she rebuffs this initial advance, he is left fascinated by her personal declaration of independence and the feminist ideas behind it. In spite of the appeal he holds for women, Leslie is not overcome by sexual appetites or a desire to control those around him. And although he and the megalomaniacal Fate - a precursor to the arrogant tech entrepreneur of our own era - both aim to overturn the status quo, Leslie’s peculiar narcissism seems, if anything, an attempt to obscure a fundamental lack of ego. If the Great Leslie is the future man of the feminist era, he is also, in the context of the movie itself, an empowered woman who miraculously happens to inhabit the body of a man. In the course of this great race our three principals pass through two iconic, yet fictional centers of civilization, the frontier town of Boracho - a dust-filled remnant of the Old West, and the Kingdom of Potsdorf - a tottering vestige of faded Hapsburgian glory. These two societies - each hopelessly stuck in an earlier era - appear at first glance to be very different. As the action unfolds, however, we begin to see their similarities. Both have hierarchical structures with weakened central authority figures and no rule of law. Each are in fact ruled by powerful, largely off-scene figures through manipulation and violence. And neither place has the capacity to accommodate the presence of an independent, 20th century woman. Fate arrives first at Boracho but soon alienates the townspeople who’ve come to greet him, including a gang of citizens disguised as Indians on horseback. When Leslie and Miss Dubois arrive together they are feted at the big saloon by the town’s mayor and other leading citizens. Entertaining the guests that evening, along to the enthusiastic gunfire of the patrons, is the tall, blonde chanteuse Lily Olay (Dorothy Provine) who sings the ballad “He Shouldn't-a, Hadn't-a, Oughtn't-a Swang on Me.” The song concerns the likely fatal outcome of provoking violence in such a place and it includes a ribald, ambiguous warning to men, “All the men are hairy-chested, And all the women, double-breasted, We're lady-like until molested, And then we're on our own!” Leslie, attracted to Lily’s fire and bound by his customary graciousness, offers her champagne and a seat at his table, where she displaces the disgruntled Dubois as the focus of his attention. But no sooner does Lily assert herself sexually in this raucous bar when the rough-looking patrons begin to whisper fearfully about the impending arrival of her own murderous and jealous lover, Texas Jack (Larry Storch), whose men have been tipped off by Fate wearing cowboy drag. The actions of the courtly Leslie and the adventurous Lily fulfill the prophecy of her song once Jake and his gang arrive and the town’s mayor and sheriff run for cover. Soon all the patrons of the bar, including the showgirls and prostitutes, are drawn into a lengthy, comic fist fight until the place is left in ruins. The brawl comes to an end after Fate manages to ignite Leslie’s gasoline supply and blow up much of the surrounding town. It makes sense that Blake Edwards, who achieved his biggest success directing a series of comedies about a bumbling French detective, would create the movies best scenes on the European leg of the race. The diminutive mitteleuropäische Kingdom of Carpania, with its crisis of royal succession, provides him with a perfect set of circumstances for exploring his themes of social transformation and a great opportunity for his actors, especially Lemmon, to exhibit the frenzied style of comedy for which he was best known. On the outskirts of Potsdorf, the kingdom’s capital, Professor Fate is first observed, then captured by a group of mounted soldiers who whisk him away to a dark prison cell beneath an old castle. What follows is a The Prisoner of Zenda storyline. Fate bears a striking resemblance to the vacuous, besotted Crown Prince Frederick Hoepnick who is about to assume the throne. His rival, the Baron Rolfe Von Stuppe (Ross Martin) plots to have Fate impersonate him, then, once crowned, abdicate in favor of his elderly advisor and ‘tucker-inner’ General Kuhster. Lemmon’s performance as Prince Hoepnick is as over-the-top as any sustained cinematic comic turn filmed during that decade.   Edwards chooses the eleventh hour of Europe’s Imperial Age as his setting to mirror the cultural decline of Europe his own post-war era. Despite the allure of brocade uniforms and ballroom waltzes in mustard-colored stucco palaces with enormous chandeliers and gilded interiors, there is a hollowness at the core that is embodied by the loud, drunken and oblivious crown prince. And lurking in the shadows are conspirators who have no qualms about cruelly incarcerating innocent men and women who wander into their scheme. Fate grudgingly agrees to go along with the Baron’s plan in the hopes that he can resume the race as Leslie and Dubois are arrested by his soldiers at the edge of a quiet lake. Wood emerges from the water in a state of semi-nakedness and they are hauled off to the castle’s dungeon. Unimpressed by the trappings of royalty and eager to be on his way, Fate hastens through the ceremony, undetected by the crowd, before suddenly storming out of the cathedral onto a street lined with cheering Carpania subjects. He looks for an escape and sees a basement door at the back of the palace. He takes the enormous crown off the top of his head and throws it into an empty, open barrel before entering. Although Fate has served as the movie’s ego-driven bad guy and does not possess the enlightened attitudes or gracious manners of his rival Leslie, he here reveals himself to be a modern American who is obsessed with the notion of human progress, even if it is his alone. No riches or divine right of rule will satisfy him. He and his invention must win at all costs. Back at the castle, Leslie, shirtless, buff and waxed, thrusts and parries his foil against the baron, who proves a formidable opponent and, though devious, a far better exemplar of European skill and fortitude than the prince he hoped to usurp. But Leslie prevails after the baron miscalculates the distance from his window to his escape vessel below and crashes through its bottom into the moat. He and Maggie escape and head to the palace along with the merry, cackling prince. The scene that follows is the highlight of the Edwards’s movie. Fate, having cast off his crown and robes, enters the door and finds himself in the royal bakery where preparations are being made for the final course of the coronation feast. Dozens of bakers in white uniforms are at work making a huge quantity and assortment of cakes, pies and confections in a wide spectrum of bright colors.   Fate falls off the staircase into the enormous blue cake intended as the centerpiece of the royal celebration. Then, an angry baker throws a pie in his face. One by one, the cast enters basement where they are pelted with cake, custards, meringues and icings of all kinds and return fire on the royal bakers. Leslie, wearing his characteristic white garb, miraculously wanders through the fray without being sullied by sugar, eggs or flour. Maggie, on the other hand, still dressed in the pink corset, black stockings and garters she wore in captivity, hurls pies with abandon in every direction. Being the only women present, she also finds herself on the receiving end of the barrage and her scantily clad body is soon completely covered in a multi-colored layer of sticky, exploding desserts. Spinning around blindly, she manages to land a white, fluffy pie on The Great Leslie, a sign no doubt of his newfound vulnerability and the subsequent consummation of their love. The orgiastic bacchanalia reaches its peak as the delighted prince himself arrives like a modern day Dionysus at his own Mysteries. Sampling a dessert that crashes into his face he shrieks with joy and shouts, “Brandy!” Upon spotting the now cake-covered traitor General Kuhster in the room, he sprinkles flour in his face and cries, “Banished, banished, banished!” The old order of Europe, however tenuous, is suddenly and peacefully restored as our contestants hurriedly proceed to the finish line. As Leslie and Maggie approach the the Eiffel Tower just a few paces ahead of Fate, he decides to declares his love for her. When she expresses her doubt, he slams on the brakes to show her that she is far more important to him than any automotive victory. As they kiss, Fate breezes past them and wins the race as the surrounding throng erupts in cheers.   The transformation of Leslie into man of feminist sensibilities and of Maggie into a self-actualizing, independent women over the course of the race makes their union inevitable. When the jubilant Fate realizes Leslie has thrown the race he reverts to his familiar contentious self and challenges him to another race from Paris to New York. Leslie accepts his challenge but the world has now changed. Back home in New York, publisher Goodbody has been deposed by his wife who now runs the paper. The Great Leslie switches out his bearish male companion, Hezekiah, for his new bride, who shows up at the starting line in a wedding dress. Yet Professor Fate presses on as before. After the starting gun is fired, he accidentally unloads a round from his retractable grill-mounted cannon, demolishing the Eiffel Tower and, perhaps, all that its erect form represents.

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Vanitas opening at Hedreen Gallery, April 17, 2014. Photos courtesy of Bruce Clayton Tom.

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Vanitas (Eat, drink and be merry.)

Vanitas paintings were a genre of symbolic still life tableaux that peaked in popularity in Northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. The imagery served as a sensuous if morbid reminder of the vanity and brevity of life and usually comprised a mashup of fruit (fresh or in stages of decay), flowers, skulls, mold, soap bubbles or smoke. Sometimes lemons were thrown in for good measure, on account of their bitterness. For Vanitas, six artists (Brandon Aleson, Jim Demetre, Alice Gosti, Sean McElroy, Anthony Sonnenberg and Sam Whalen) re-imagine and re-image the vanitas, sometimes stretching the concept to the point of exquisite (and messy) slippage. In Il Dolce Risorgimento, Alice Gosti is filmed standing against a white wall, dressed in her pale yellow, floral prairie dress. “It’s running,” says a male voice offscreen. She picks up reading halfway through Jim Demetre’s treatise on patriarchy, homoeroticism, camp, sex and automobile races depicted in Blake Edwards’ 1965 slapstick The Great Race. In conversation about this film (for which Demetre and I share a passion), the scene that comes up most and perhaps titillates most is the epic pie fight towards the end. The cream pies running down Nataile Wood’s pink corset might have something to do with it. As a child, my favorite part of the scene was Jack Lemon as the befuddled, drunkard Prince Hapnick perpetually stumbling around oblivious, begging for “more, more brandy!” The scene is a total mess. The image of Gosti besmirched with white cream on the face is instantly suggestive and humiliating as it is funny, the twilight alluded to in Demetre’s essay perhaps as flimsy and tenuous as Lily Olay’s cardboard moon. After filming this video in one take, the floor around Gosti looked like a crime scene. Brandon Aleson’s nearly hour-long Blood Let is a flagrant, paced act of self-cannibalism at the hand of an expert butcher (himself)—someone who can make blood sausage with his eyes closed. The ouroborus comes to mind. Aleson writes about it: “I have been more sensitive recently to the ways in which external influences are consumed, digested, and incorporated into my demeanor and personal affectations. If I spend time with someone over the course of days or weeks, I start to notice that I inadvertently, yet selectively, begin to adopt their mannerisms, modes of expression, particular colloquialisms, even their distinctive gait...vestiges of their person which can and do reverberate through time, and which start to exist independently of the individual who sets them in motion. They are ripples in the fabric of my personality where it has been touched by another. Some of them last for a time and fade away, others take root and change shape as they find a permanent nest in that body which constitutes the affectable and effectible me. This piece is an attempt to localize this phenomenon of change by arresting and extending the space of its realization. By extracting my own blood, exposing it to external action and substance—making it into a blood sausage—and then consuming it, this process is run from start to finish in a closed system. How will this process change the blood itself? Will it change the constitution of my physical or personal body? To what degree does the movement enacted upon the physical substance bleed into (inform) the constitution of the ontological being? Where, exactly, does the change occur?” Aleson’s Organic Video Study #2 features one of the most conspicuous stars of the vanitas genre: the spoiling fruit. Comprising more than 30,000 still photographs captured over the period of two months, the decay depicted in the seconds-long loop pulses along with Aleson’s deep breaths, which sound between a gasp and a song. Anthony Sonnenberg’s Six Candelabras take ceramic knick knacks (the most abject, silly detritus and valueless castoffs found in Goodwill and other thrift stores) and imbues them—or drenches them, rather—in crenellating, porcelain ooze. Layered in glaze and luster, chintzy baubles are buried and revived. The candelabras’ mismatched, colorful candlesticks, also found for dollars or a few cents on thrift store shelves, perpetuate the drippy, additive process of the sculpture, which will be added to over time. Sean McElroy’s monster mobile Pastoral isn’t a far cry from Aleson’s Blood Let in that it is also a sort of autocannibalistic joke. The hanging hanger steaks dangle, just kissing the AstroTurf. “Grazing” on it. McElroy’s mastery of the perverse/political joke nested in an arsenal of cheap, pop culture junk and symbols like latex condoms, toilet paper, styrofoam cups, sausage links, beef, Bill Clinton and, most recently, Egyptology is packed in this U.S. Prime homage to (and laugh at) all things fruitful and futile. Last but certainly not least (their presence looms), the sextet of large, paintings on bedsheets by Sam Whalen fills the gallery with the pungent, chemical scent of processed foods, coffee and hair dye. The exact list of materials used to make the blush tone contour drawings is fruit punch Kool-Aid, blue raspberry Kool-Aid, soy sauce, instant coffee, Pepsi, hot sauce, mustard, L'Oreal hair dye in dark ash and bleach on white linen bed sheets. The significance of the bedsheets (used, sourced from thrift stores) doubling as tablecloths stained with the signs of a great feast, as well as rot, is compounded by the haunted titles which accompany them. Each painting is named after a person who died the day Whalen was born—January 30, 1991. John Bardeen, John McIntyre, Jean Butcher, Clifton Edom, Delania Ann Wilson. —Amanda Manitach

Photo courtesy of Bruce Clayton Tom

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Pendulous steaks, rot of berries and blood sausage, pie fights that signal the twilight of the patriarchy, paintings made with L’Oreal hair dye, bleach, soy sauce, Koolaid and hot sauce, candelabra choking on their own corpulence.... Vanitas paintings were a genre of symbolic still life tableuax that peaked in popularity in Northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. The imagery served as a sensuous if morbid reminder of the vanity and brevity of life and usually comprised a mashup of fruit (fresh or in stages of decay), flowers, skulls, mold, soap bubbles or smoke. Sometimes lemons were thrown in for good measure, on account of their bitterness.  For "Vanitas" six artists (Brandon Aleson, Jim Demetre, Alice Gosti, Sean McElroy, Anthony Sonnenberg and Sam Whalen) re-imagine and re-image the traditional vanitas, sometimes stretching the concept to the point of exquisite (and messy) slippage. 

Join us for refreshments and a reception on Friday, April 17th, 5:00-7:00 pm at Hedreen Gallery. 

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Q&A with artists in VIDEO LIBRARY, Vol. 1: Erin Elyse Burns (www.erinelyse.com) DO YOU WORK PRIMARILY IN VIDEO? I work primarily in video and still photography. WHAT INTERESTS YOU IN VIDEO AS MEDIUM? I am interested in video art's ability to experiment with the viewer's expectation of a moving image. I often work with long takes that allow an action to unfold for the camera slowly over time. I use repetition, delay and a denied sense of filmic climax to entice the viewer to actively look. My approach to video is from a still photographer's perspective and often occupies territory between image, performance and artifact.  NOTES ON 'LITANY' Litany is a 3-channel immersive video installation. The Hedreen Gallery is screening a 4-minute one-channel excerpt - a "teaser" of sorts. The project Litany came about when musical polymath Jeremiah Cawley approached me to collaborate around a piece of music: John Cage's 1980 work "Litany for the Whale." Cage's work has a call and response structure written for two voices that is reminiscent of religious chant. Cawley performs this music for Litany. The video imagery draws on winter in the Northwest and analogies of the mind during meditation. The video is meant to complement the repetition of the sound through a series of repeated short vignettes and visual pairings that build upon each other over time. This includes depictions of steam, fog, smoke, whispers, screams, light and line. When presented as an installation, the three channels of video are sequenced to highlight these complements and counterpoints.

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Q&A with artists in VIDEO LIBRARY, Vol. 1: Saskia Delores (http://sdelores.com/) DO YOU WORK PRIMARILY IN VIDEO? I work in a variety of mediums—whatever inspires at the moment—but the main ones are video, costume, persona and music. Music is the dominating thread in much of my work. WHAT INTERESTS YOU IN VIDEO AS MEDIUM? I tend to think of video as a way to capture and distill my creative ideas and process as well as document the landscapes and people that I meet. I think of most of my videos as studies or rough drafts and in the past tried to create them work that is both emotionally compelling as well as accessible to the viewer, such that they could imagine themselves as the creator. This is changing, however, as my artistic approach and level of (dis)satisfaction with regard to capturing things like light, line and composition are shifting. NOTES ON 'GET YOURSELF TOGETHER' Get Yourself Together is part of SHUT UP DREAM CRUSHER, a 10 year music, video, and film project that is ending in 2014. Shut Up Dream Crusher was inspired by what I originally thought was a creative block but turned out to be performance anxiety. It explores the dialogs (both internal and external) that either prevent people from doing what they love or propel them into action. DIY: I made the video for Get Yourself Together in front of my desktop in a single day in my studio where I was secretly living at the time. All of the lighting was recorded live and I viewed it on the monitor as I captured. The track was recorded by singing and playing into a Snowball mic attached via usb to my laptop that was placed inside a cardboard box.

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Q&A with artists in VIDEO LIBRARY, Vol. 1: Kat Larson (www.katlarson.com) DO YOU WORK PRIMARILY IN VIDEO? Painting, assemblage, sculpture, printmaking, performance, video. WHAT INTERESTS YOU IN VIDEO AS MEDIUM? I love that I can apply collage aspects to video editing.  Working on a timeline is almost synonymous with a two-dimensional working plane with the defining difference being the time based platform of which I paste video clips to.  Instead of paper or canvas protruding with imagery, I have a time-based moving image of collaged/montaged clips.  I love that I can apply vintage applications of collage/assemblage in a technologically advanced way. NOTES ON 'CHARRED' AND 'THE GOOD FIGHT' This particular video of Charred is an outtake version of a piece I was invited to collaborate on for MadArt with Jon Gentry and Kathleen Warren (prolific artists!). The installation is located in South Lake Union on the facade of MadArt's soon-to-be headquarters. The theme of the show is more or less about creation and destruction (in this instance applied to the politics of gentrification and the nature of urban landscape) and I chose natural elements to exemplify this theme. I chose fire, air and water as symbolic images of cyclical change. The Good Fight is a piece that comes straight from a warrior heart. I chose to open this piece with the landscape of my father's ashes (his name is Daniel David Larson). He committed suicide when I was sixteen and his death has been a well of continual catharsis for me. There is a teaching that was passed to me from healers Dariusz Rawa and Char Sundust about "the light wolf and the dark wolf." Every day we wake up and we are called to answer to our life. Every day there is a negative force that can compel us—the dark wolf who growls—or a positive force that can compel us—the light wolf who howls. The Good Fight is about being militantly positive everyday. It’s the number one lesson my father imparted to me by his untimely death is that I can fucking fight for the goodness in life...And I do. This video has no sound. I've always been incredibly hyped by Brian Eno's Video Paintings. In my early twenties I was heavily focused on painting but found the static quality of such work to be sort of lackadaisical to technological advancements and modern receptivity of art (considering we've evolved to respond most viscerally to movement/sound.) Using Eno's work as a conceptual platform, I decided to create my own variation that I have called...well, video paintings. My earlier video works are void of sound because, in my head, paintings aren't auditory. These days I'm very much into incorporating sound layers with video layers. It’s an evolution and a matter of confidence. I'm more confident now to be heard, not just seen.