Currently on display at Gallery4Culture is an exhibition of new photographs by Seattle artist
Adam Satushek.

These large scale photographs arise from the artist wandering the landscape and discovering oddities. The found arrangement of houses and trees, two major elements of the modern domestic landscape, is isolated and preserved.

Houses shelter us from the elements; they are vessels that enable us to live comfortably in the landscape and represent our occupation of the world. Trees live among us and exist in various forms and permutations: as thriving organisms, as raw materials, and in images. In these various forms, trees manifest nature in the landscape. Houses and trees intermingle across the landscape, and exemplify the knitting of humans with nature. As we look closer, these houses and trees become transitory, illusory, and ultimately, our ideas of them become disconnected from their functions.

July 3 - August 1, 2008
4Culture Gallery
For more information, visit 4culture.org

“I’m an enormously talented man, and it’s no use pretending I’m not.” “She stopped the show. But the show wasn’t really traveling very fast.” “I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.”

ACT Theatre will be kicking up some devilishly good times with the Seattle premiere of A Marvelous Party. A musical tribute to one of the most celebrated and versatile talents of the 20th century, this energetic revue showcases more than 34 Coward tunes along with comedic sketches, anecdotes and musings—all delivered by a cast of Seattle luminaries.

Words and Music by Noël Coward.
Devised by David Ira Goldstein, Carl Danielsen, Mark Anders, Patricia Wilcox and Anna Lauris.
Running Time: 2 hours, 5 minutes

June 13 - July 13, 2008
In The Falls Theatre

For more information, or to purchase tickets, visit acttheatre.org

Unveiled for the first time, Dare alla Luce is Greer’s largest and most intricate artwork to date. The room-size installation is featured as part of a larger selection of works drawn from the artist’s last decade of activity. From Skin Tight (1999) to Small But Mighty Wandering Pearl (2006), this survey highlights Greer’s recurring themes of romantic love, eroticism, fetishism and motherhood.

Greer’s exploration of the sensuality of life is reflected in the sensuousness of her medium. The materials mirror the body in its dual reality of emotional and corporal: soft vs. hard, vulnerable vs. strong, huge vs. delicate. Her formal realm is a soft one, made of crocheted and stitched fairy tales and archetypal myths, addressing the commonality of feeling and thinking of the human condition. Meaning is embodied in the narratives and yet embedded in the very material.

Mandy Greer is a Seattle-based sculptor and mixed-media installation artist, who has earned an MFA in ceramics from the University of Washington. Her work has been shown at the Tacoma Art Museum, Kirkland Arts Center, The Henry Art Gallery, 4Culture Gallery, Soil Gallery, and the Tampa Museum of Art, FL, among other locations.

For more information, please visit: bellevuearts.org

Bellevue Arts Museum
May 6 - August 3, 2008

World-renowned sound artist Janet Cardiff created this sound installation based on Spem in Alium by the English composer Thomas Tallis. Written for a forty-voice choir in 1573, Spem in Alium is one of the most intricate and beautiful compositions of the English Renaissance. In Cardiff’s installation, eight groups of five speakers arranged in a large oval allow visitors to experience the choral composition from the vantage of individual performers.

Cardiff received the Millennium Prize in 2001 for international excellence in contemporary art from the National Gallery of Canada, and Artforum magazine featured the work in the “Best of 2003” issue. Editions of the Forty Part Motet are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and it is a promised gift from the Pamela and Richard Kramlich collection to the Tate, London. This exhibition will be Cardiff’s first solo exhibition in the Pacific Northwest.

Tacoma Art Museum
June 28–September 7, 2008

— Related Programming —

Second Tuesdays: The Musical History of Renaissance Composer Thomas Tallis
Tuesday, July 8
10:30 am

Douglas Fullington, Director of the Tudor Choir in Seattle, discusses the historical context of Thomas Tallis’s sixteenth-century forty-voice musical composition featured in Janet Cardiff’s sound installation.

Seattle’s Tudor Choir Performs Works by Renaissance Composer Thomas Tallis
Saturday, July 12
6:30 - 7:30 pm

Enjoy a spectacular musical survey of choral works by Thomas Tallis, composer of Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui, which is featured in The Forty Part Motet, by Janet Cardiff. Tallis was the only sixteenth century English composer to have worked under four monarchs—Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I—during decades of political and religious upheaval. The Tudor Choir is a professional a cappella ensemble that has been acclaimed by The New York Times and Gramophone magazine. Tickets are $5 for members; $12 for non members (includes museum admission and members’ opening reception to follow). Seating is limited. For advance tickets, call 253.272.4258 or e-mail programs@TacomaArtMuseum.org. NOTE: Late arrivals will be seated as concert breaks allow.

The Seattle Art Museum salutes Gay Pride Month with three outstanding films on June 13, 20 and 27 that explore the gay image in mainstream cinema. In Gods and Monsters, Ian McKellen portrays the aging James Whale, director of Frankenstein, whose eye for male beauty remains undimmed. Directed by Bill Condon, 1998, with Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, Lynn Redgrave. In color, 105 min.

Watch the trailer:

June 27, 2008
7:30 p.m.
Plestcheeff Auditorium
$7 for everyone, sold day of show at the auditorium, cash only.

Skibska molds thin, transparent glass bars into ribbon shapes, which are then fused together to form larger pieces and eventually structures. Her stunning and complex constructions defy the notion of the fragility of glass, showcasing the incredible strength in Skibska’s structural adhesions and firmness in her filament – a skeletal logic that is more grounded than our senses can reckon. This installation will be on view in The Pilchuck Glass School Gallery of Bellevue Arts Museum.

Exhibit runs through September 21, 2008

For those who love the show, there is also an opportunity to meet the artist during a small gathering at her studio in Seattle. Visitors will hear from the artist and get to see some of her other works during a personal tour.

Thursday, August 21
6:30 - 7:30 pm
$15 members/ $20 non-members

Visit Bellevue Arts Museum for more information.

While defining the specific characteristics that, in its time, made Impressionism provocative and new—a focus on everyday subjects, spontaneity, luminosity, loose brushwork—Inspiring Impressionism launches an in-depth exploration of the links between the Impressionists and the major European art historical movements that preceded them.

Beneath the Impressionists’ commitment to capturing contemporary life, there lay a deep exploration of the art of the past, as well as of their more recent early-19th-century predecessors. The Impressionists learned from art historical sources by making painstaking oil copies executed at such museums as the Louvre. These copies, as well as drawings and sketchbook studies by the Impressionists, are shown with the Old Masters works they copied.

The exhibition then unfolds into a series of subject groups—portraits, still lifes, landscapes, interiors and nudes—with specific comparisons drawn between Impressionist works and the art of the past, as well as broader connections related to issues of subject, composition and technique. These thematic groupings are punctuated with small dossier sections on three artists who drew most heavily on art historical sources: Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne.

June 19–September 21, 2008
SAM Downtown

The Artslink blog has been around for about six months now and during that time, we have collected quite a passionate, engaged and interesting community of readers. Though it’s summer and school is mostly out, we’d like to continue the blog, and hopefully, to improve it before the next school year.

Originally we began this blog as a way to list and host discussions of arts related events that were going on via the initiative of UW students. However, over the school year, primarily due to the guidance of our fabulous blogger and fellow Artslinker, Jessie, the blog has expanded to include information and discussions about art events all across Seattle. And might I say, it has been a continually surprising and exciting experience to see our traffic continue to improve dramatically from month to month.

In an effort to continue building this online arts community and improve the blog, we’d like to hear from you about what matters. Tell us in the comments what you currently like about the blog and what you want to see more of in the coming months. If you’d rather send your thoughts via email, that’s fine too. You can reach us at artsl@u.washington.edu.

Happy summer everyone!

The violet hour is dusk, a temporal bridge from the clarity of daylight to the obfuscation of night. Borrowing a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land for its title, this exhibition presents art about a twilight time that may be our immediate future. Artists Matthew Day Jackson, Jen Liu, and David Maljkovic imagine alternative realities that could emerge from the socio-political strife and environmental degradation now accumulating on the global stage. The Violet Hour features video, sculpture and two-dimensional works that address the physical and emotional weariness of our time in an attempt to overcome the cultural amnesia preventing us from learning the lessons of history.

Matthew Day Jackson debuts three new works, including a sculpture consisting of a crashed race car frame lit with low rider effects and an immense wood panel “painting” depicting the constellations of the night sky, made from the coin currencies of many nations. Jackson’s work explores events in American history and envisions a future of uprisings rectifying past injustices.

Jen Liu’s videos and large scale watercolor drawings feature the “Brethren of the Stone,” a back-to-nature cult that clashes with modern industrial society. Beyond the battle between nature and technology, her work underscores issues of state power and civil disobedience, modernity and nostalgia, and a comical take on science fiction and recent pop culture.

In his videos and collaged photographs, Croatian artist David Maljkovic depicts his generation as lost and listless souls unmoored from their own heritage by years of warfare. Maljkovic finds inspiration for his work in the nostalgic desire for the socialist system at a time when his country is entering the increasingly globalized European Union.

The Henry Art Gallery: Stroum Gallery
June 21 – October 12, 2008
Free for students.

The Latvians: Fifty Years in the State of Washington
Friday, June 6, 2008 to Sunday, July 27, 2008

In the years following World War II, immigrants from the Baltic State of Latvia found home and work in the state of Washington. Photographs, textiles, folk costumes and and fine art tell the story of the 50-year history of their daily lives, work, and accomplishments, and the cultural traditions they have kept alive in their new home.

Nordic Heritage Museum
3014 NW 67th Street
Seattle, WA 98117

With your Husky Card: $5.00/person