Storefronts

Visit https://shunpike.org/storefronts/ for the latest information about the Storefronts Program!

Shunpike proudly presents eight new installations in South Lake Union as part of its acclaimed Storefronts program, on display July-Sept 2019.

Shunpike presents Storefronts South Lake Union, the first round of South Lake Union artist installations in 2019. Eight selected artists have explored themes of human connection, intersection, and liminality in their work. Over the course of their collaboration with Storefronts and Shunpike, they will further explore these themes in empty storefronts around SLU. Read on for select portfolio pieces and artist statements from each artist.

The Storefronts Program continues to support our creative community and our urban neighborhoods and businesses by providing opportunities for artists to do what they do best – create dynamic, engaging works that reach out to passersby, activate our built environment, and function as an incubator for our arts ecology, entrepreneurial projects, and urban revitalization.

ARTIST: Jasmine Brown
LOCATION: Mercer

Artist Statement:

My paintings, photography and illustrations usually focus on the face. I paint portraits, masks and icons or take photographs that highlight individual beings. I use facial expressions and words that convey messages, illustrate a stream of thought, or give voice to the private thoughts of marginalized individuals. I incorporate poetry, symbols, or landscapes that represent the persona of the models I have encountered during my travels around the world. I am influenced by the sacred art of several world religions. African masks, Voodoo textiles, Buddhist thangkas, Native American carvings as well as Russian and Ethiopian icons have ceremonial significance and spiritual potency that I strive to embody in my work.” – Jasmine Brown

Website: https://jasmineiona.artstation.com/

ARTIST: Paula Rebsom
LOCATION: Mercer

Artist Statement:

My art practice is interdisciplinary and includes site-specific installations both indoors and out, large- and small scale, along with a more direct sculptural practice. Materials include wood, fabric, cardboard, and paper mache. I also utilize motion sensor and infrared cameras for some of my outdoor site-specific projects. In all of my work I am interested in using humor as a vehicle to grapple with realities I’d rather ignore. Sadness, loss, natural disasters, devastation and destruction of wildlife habitat are ever-present realities in our lives, and I frequently use the visual language of the façade as a way to both conceal and reveal these challenging aspects of our life and culture. Additionally, in today’s climate of political uncertainty and divisiveness, it sometimes feels as if there is nowhere left to hide or seek shelter.

I have sewn extensively as a hobby and business for many years but it wasn’t until recently that I began incorporating it into my artwork. I was excited to discover that quilts are a very versatile material to work with, capable of taking many shapes and forms. Quilts, like the wooden façade, have two sides to them, allowing them to provide different experiences depending upon which side you encounter first. They also have the ability to be soft and flexible, warm and inviting, in ways more rigid materials are not as capable of. It seems obvious now, although it wasn’t when I made my first quilt earlier this year, that I can use the visual language of the quilt as a representation of comfort, warmth, and protection in this uncertain time. – Paula Rebsom

Website: http://www.paularebsom.com/

ARTIST: Faith Hagenhofer
LOCATION:Republican

Artist Statement:

I work with textiles and fibers. I’m a feltmaker for over 25 years and over time have switched from bought materials to raising sheep, providing myself with art supplies. I work in both 2d and 3d, I’m adept with plant dyes and surface embellishment: sculptural handmade felt, laminate felt, hand stitching, machine stitching, and block printing. I’m also pretty keen on using these ancient skills in combination with current found/discarded textiles and to investigate the everyday objects that connote inside and outside, and the edges of belonging and not belonging. I use these to facilitate visually exploring and trying to understand the forces of human migration—through history and at present, forced and voluntary, individually and by group.

People(s) and place(s), home and all the forces, phases, longings, choices, movements, and forms that re-locatings take are some of what in the World concerns me. I find people-to-place relationships with each artistic investigation, whether I’m concerned with refugees, migration, borders, tourism, settler colonialism, urban/rural divides, water, or nostalgia. These themes are immanent and simultaneously historical; they reach into everywhere and everyone is touched—whether a stayer or a leaver. I’m pulled toward projects that stretch my art-making skills from foreseeable into invention, form and materials meeting the needs of the work. – Faith Hagenhofer

Website: http://www.herculesfarm.com/cat-s-paw-studio

ARTIST: Paul Mckee
LOCATION: Harrison East

Artist Statement:

My artistic mission is to document the subjective experience of my time and place. I live in a 21st Century city, a subject that is in constant flux. The influences and sensations of the city constantly alter my subjective experience. I am aiming at a moving target from a moving platform. I find it useful to work at different rates. Sketching these scenes focuses me on a fast-changing subject. Working slowly helps me perceive all the simultaneous interconnections that I’d miss in a glance. I’m in awe of the interwoven diversity of contemporary cities. Urban life is richer and more dynamic than architecture alone. I use reflections in skyscrapers as a metaphor for the inner lives of urban dwellers. Every grid of windows symbolizes a life story. My paintings of reflections don’t rely on geometric perspective in order to give equal weight to each story. I select and manipulate shapes found in the multitude of reflections. I preserve the original character of the reflections while extracting parts that evoke the cultural and mental life of the inhabitants. My goal is to attach a new layer of meaning to a recognizable place. To manage the grids in the paintings, I adopt lists of words to name rows and columns. These lists are initiated by locations, building names or tenants to form an organizational matrix of words. This word collection becomes an important, if hidden, poetic structure for the themes in my artworks. I use several techniques to capture the experience of constant movement and change in the city. Rhythmic repetition is pervasive in skyscraper reflections and I emphasize this in my paintings. I meld flat reflection shapes into sculptural forms to evoke the original reflection’s undulation. The fluid character of reflections reminds us that even steel, glass and concrete structures are temporary. Culture is so rich and busy in the city that we sometimes miss a neighborhood’s total transformation. I want my work to capture fleeting moments of beauty. This “nostalgia for the present moment” should inspire viewers of my work to be more present in their cities. – Paul Mckee

Website: paulemckee.com

ARTIST: Don Wesley
LOCATION: Harrison West

Artist Statement:

I want to bring people closer to the natural world around them and celebrate its diversity. I do this by spending time with birds, going beyond observation, and attempting to delve deep into their souls for unique insights to share with my audience. I love sharing their playful and cantankerous nature, trying to keep my art relaxed as I shuttle between the illustrative, subversive and at times, purely humorous. Many times, I will assign human qualities to the birds in my work with hopes of engaging my audience on a more personal level. For me, these hybrid souls are the most exciting way for me to express my love for our natural world. – Don Wesley

Website: https://www.donwesley.com

ARTIST: Jennifer Towner
LOCATION: Thomas East

Artist Statement:

Working in diverse mediums, the one thing that has been consistent throughout my career is repetition of forms, shapes, colors, and actions. When I am able to find a meditative space where my hand does what the mind wants, everything seems to flow and anxiety and stress disappears. The work flows freely, it’s neither good nor bad, it just is. I hope that the viewer can get lost in the colors, shapes and joyful feelings conveyed in the work. – Jennifer Towner

Website: www.jenniferltowner.com

ARTIST: Xavier Lopez
LOCATION: Thomas West

Artist Statement:

My name is Xavier Lopez Jr. I am a conceptual, mixed-media artist living in Seattle. I write for the Post Intelligencer’s Art and Culture Blogs and received my MFA in sculpture and painting from the University of California-Davis. I have become known as a writer, painter, muralist, curator, performance-artist and sculptor. I am a second generation Latinx artist. As a child, I watched my father paint murals with the Los Angeles Chicano Art Movement. Issues of gender, race, identity and life permeate my work. I work with materials that have been pared down to their core elements, minimalized and purified so to speak to create fiercely personal narratives drawing from childhood and life events. I am part of a new breed of Latinx artists intent on making our own way as individual artists–as humans navigating the world as we see it. As a child in the seventies, before I even knew what art was, my father was in the Chicano Art Movement in Los Angeles and I would tag along to the Mechicano Art Center on Whittier Blvd mentally devouring the exciting scenes! Days passed as I watched my father paint, day-dreaming of the future. My parents often took us to the LA Museum of Art, where I saw Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and my first conceptual sculptures. Later, in college, my mind was blown by the work of Marcel Duchamp. I have had many mentorships, receiving advice and encouragement from feminist Lynn Hershman, taking performance art classes from theorist Joanna Frueh, sneaking into Wayne Thiebaud’s classes at UC Davis and arguing about art with critic Dave Hickey. I understand firsthand, the power of art to change a person and give their lives new meaning. Beginning at UNR, I have been in many art exhibitions, community events, auctions and live painting events. In the last three years, I have been part of 8 teaching and artistic workshops with the Seattle Art Museum. I write for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, where I cover the Seattle Art Scene and spotlight under-represented groups. Recently, I was given the opportunity to work with La Sala at the La Cocina Seattle Art Fair Satellite and in 2017, my work was recognized by Author Marvin Carlson who added me to the Routledge critical theoretical textbook “Performance: A Critical Introduction–Third Edition, and my work is now part of university curricula across the globe.

Website: https://xavierlopezjr.wixsite.com/into-the-deep-end

ARTIST: Thelma Harris
LOCATION: John

Artist Statement:

When working with Polaroid film, I consciously sacrifice a certain level of control. There will most certainly be a number of imperfections. I allow the film to speak to the ephemeral moment capturing the light and the darkness. Whether I aim to capture a self-portrait or the ever changing landscape, I tend to leave traces of my vulnerabilities on the surface creating emotionally charged images. The photographs I create serve as a sort of documentation depicting metamorphosis and acceptance of those things I cannot control.

Website: http://www.thelmaharris.com/

Two new Storefront installations – Under Maintenance by Nina Vichayapai, and Fertile Remnants by Clarissa Callesen – are now on view at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, WA, now to March 2020.  Presented by Shunpike as part of its acclaimed Storefronts program, the installations have been sponsored by Meydenbauer Center.

ARTIST: Nina Vichayapai

WORK: Under Maintenance

Artist Statement:

My work addresses how surroundings come to embody experiences of humans in migration. From representing the private interiors of the home to the ambiguity of wild landscapes I reveal the ways in which environments expose personal and social histories. Drawing upon research and my experiences as a second-generation immigrant to reflect upon the conditions of society as they connect to history, I highlight migrations spurned by trauma, survival, opportunity, and exploration. My work shows that these journeys do not occur without leaving traces upon the self or the places they happen through. I build installations of soft sculptural objects which represent metaphors to these themes. The vibrant displays created are made of textiles associated with domestic interiors and serve as an homage to homemaking. Representing a range of objects with these fabrics is how I express the concept of a dynamic and migratory home. One which travels and evolves with our identities to ground us as we navigate our lives.

http://www.nvichayapai.com/

ARTIST: Clarissa Callensen

WORK: Fertile Remnants

Artist Statement:

My work is grounded in materiality. Interaction with material objects is a part of our daily life. Those items range from deeply symbolic to completely disposable. We are all interconnected through commonplace matter. I create by physically interacting with my materials. I search and collect, inspect and experience, touch, and smell, contemplate and see. The process becomes a kind of meditative puzzle to find the connections between the objects. Looking to the way they communicate, either attracting and complimenting or repelling and contradicting. I wish to see past an object’s original purpose or identifying qualities and see it as a raw material that communicates in shape, texture, and color. I like to think of myself as an alchemist using my caldrons of rust and plants to transform the very essence of a discarded object. I like to fool your eye. Creating illusions of rock and bone from fabric and junk making you question what you perceive. Through this alchemy the meaning of the objects becomes malleable and a new identity is constructed. Both physically and emotionally I challenge myself to look critically at what our culture labels as repulsive, scary, or unacceptable. Finding the beauty and value in the trash on the ground and honoring the fertility contained within messy human struggles. My work is also informed and inspired by the natural world and the inevitable processes of death and decomposition, birth and regrowth. Exploring the parallels between those external processes in nature with the inner environment of our minds and emotions. I am intrigued by the vitality contained within “undesirable” natural environments and processes such as the decomposition of debris into life feeding compost, or the “unsightly” brush and bramble patches that support integral populations. We live in a world of sharp contrast; the beauty of life and creation exists beside pointless destruction and devastating heartache. To live in this world, we must learn to hold the two experiences simultaneously. Currently, recycled textiles are my primary medium. I love the intimate connection to our daily existence. We wear our favorite shirt until it is threadbare. We create life, give birth, and die surrounded by smooth sheets and soft bedding. We use clothing to honor our historic cultures and to identify our social groups. We carefully choose special garments to mark significant milestones of our lives. The very fabric is infused with social practice, history, and human connection.

http://www.clarissacallesen.com/

Shunpike proudly presents three new installations in Renton as part of its acclaimed Storefronts program, on display April 2019. Read on for select portfolio pieces and artist statements from each artist.

The Storefronts Program continues to support our creative community and our urban neighborhoods and businesses by providing opportunities for artists to do what they do best – create dynamic, engaging works that reach out to passersby, activate our built environment, and function as an incubator for our arts ecology, entrepreneurial projects, and urban revitalization.

ARTIST: Rohena Khan
LOCATION: 700 S. 3rd St, Renton

As a multi-disciplinary artist, I make art every day and I am insanely proud of this fact. Art is how I explore my life and past from a different lens. I was once a foreign student, then an expat and now I am an immigrant. I mention this because all these phases have helped create THIS. One theme that binds all my work is human triumph. My art is how I tell my story of a journey against the oceans of normalcy, of a home, history and culture so different. My art is about questioning everything that happens around me, often to the detriment of societal constructs. In my paintings, I explore the weight of being born with a vagina and an inquisitive mind. In my collages and video work, I explore political happenings, sexual desires, misogyny, belonging, patriarchy, irony. My art is best described as abstract expressionism, often telling a big story in rapid movements. It’s chaotic or maybe just the right amount of messy. It’s violent with bursts of color and collage, yet sometimes also calm, with typography in the many languages I speak and think in. As I am growing into this artist who follows up on every idea, I am approaching my paintings, installations and videos with extreme gusto. I am creating a legacy of “YOLO” while commemorating those who have paved the path for women like myself to takeoff. I recognize my role on earth as a storyteller and documentarian. -Rohena Khan

ARTIST: Becca Heavrin
LOCATION: 700 S. 3rd St, Renton

My art explores the strength, connection, and resilience of the human spirit. My portraits blur ethnic and genders lines, hinting at cultural connections, human emotion, and a sense of being that is often seen as meditative and grounded. We are all reliant on each other and on the natural environment for our very survival. Human nature and caring for ourselves, each other and the world are integral to our very existence.

Art is the voice of the artist culminating in their life experience and world perspective at the moment and time the art is created. My influences come from my early life growing up in the woods of Maine, my interest in common experiences that represent human existence, and my witness to globalization and current affairs. We are human, fallible and yet intertwined. Let’s not forget how interwoven we are or how important it is to care for ourselves, each other and the world around us. – Becca Heavrin

ARTIST: Paul Nunn
LOCATION: 700 S. 3rd St, Renton

Records form an abstract meandering wave dotted with bursts of colorful labels. The resulting structure speaks to the inevitable unpredictable waves of technology that render each successive generation of recordable media obsolete. The piece also aims to physically manifest the ephemerality of music as well as one man’s musical tastes, as represented by his personal record collection. – Paul Nunn

Shunpike proudly presents eight new installations in South Lake Union as part of its acclaimed Storefronts program, on display March 2018-June 2019.

Shunpike presents Storefronts South Lake Union, the first round of South Lake Union artist installations in 2019. Eight selected artists have explored themes of human connection, intersection, and liminality in their work. Over the course of their collaboration with Storefronts and Shunpike, they will further explore these themes in empty storefronts around SLU. Read on for select portfolio pieces and artist statements from each artist.

The Storefronts Program continues to support our creative community and our urban neighborhoods and businesses by providing opportunities for artists to do what they do best – create dynamic, engaging works that reach out to passersby, activate our built environment, and function as an incubator for our arts ecology, entrepreneurial projects, and urban revitalization.

ARTIST: Angelina Kidd
LOCATION: Mercer East

It is true that there is no scientific proof of life after life and of the human soul. However, I believe there is a soul and it is energy recognized as light. I am drawn to the duality of light and dark–conceptualized as absence and presence. My work focuses on the connection humans have with the natural world. By means of my constructed imagery, I propose that when our bodies die our soul as light energy become one with the environment, leading to the continuation of life.

– Angelina Kidd

ARTIST: Katie Thibault
LOCATION: Mercer West

My recent work draws on blueprints and data visualization concepts as an imperfect method to make sense of our fragmented experiences of the world. Even as these visual structures reach toward understanding, I allow different sections of my installations to overlap and collide, reflecting the inherent conflict in different parts of our internal and external landscapes. I am especially interested in the intersections of mechanical elements and references to the body and language through wall installations, drawings, and sculptural apparatus for the body, exploring the disintegration of the distance between the physical and internal sense of self and external structures. I work across a number of mediums, including mixed media installation, drawing, painting, glass, metal, and performative work. – Katie Thibault

ARTIST: Abigail Maxey
LOCATION: Republican

An unintended knot is an annoyance, an obstruction in a process. It could be a physical knot that forces one to stop and focus on resolving the obstruction. By enlarging a knot, I hope to transform our perspective to explore the path of the tangle. To create a knot, I use basketry techniques and reed as my material of choice. Pliable when wet, reed holds its form when dry. The open weave allows the viewer to explore the path of the knot by seeing through individual layers. The weave creates skeletal tessellations, a repetitive pattern, that I find familiar and appealing. Strong directional light creates an additional layer of intricately textured and distorted shadows adding tension between order and chaos. –Abigail Maxey

ARTIST: Holly Hudson
LOCATION: Harrison West

Artist Holly Hudson’s work explores humanity’s relationship to nature and the repetition of organic forms, patterns, and structures that occur in the world around us as well as the world within us. Hudson examines the likenesses between the natural world and human anatomy. Sticks and root systems mimic arteries, veins, and capillaries. Knots and joints in wood become the knuckles, joints, and phalanges in our hands and feet. Flowers bloom into lungs. On a deeper level, Hudson seeks to engage her viewers by illustrating through these similarities the human race’s interrelatedness and dependence on the natural world. Hudson loves working in media of all kinds including collage, oil paint, encaustic, watercolor, plaster, and wood sculpture. Her sources of inspiration include beach combing, the upturned roots of fallen trees, 17th – 19th century anatomical illustrations, wax anatomical sculpture, and mythology of various cultures. – Holly Hudson

ARTIST: Lily Hotchkiss
LOCATION: Harrison East

“We carry old homes along the spine.” – Wang Ping

“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.” -Maya Angelou

The idea of a home is a longing I have to return to something familiar. The mortar of my home is memory. Or the box of rotating objects I carry around with me that are familiar metaphors for different times. My daughter, when asked what home is, will always answer that it is where I am. The spaces themselves determining how much or little furniture we can have, the scale of art I can make, what is possible. For me this project has been a reflection on her reality, whose home is me, on the uncertain world around us, the asylum seekers, the homeless population here in Seattle, the privilege of white people, and the larger diaspora community around the world. A reflection on both the dreams of mortar and the harder work of defining that as something we carry and how to instill that in my daughter. The raw materials I used embodied a process of reflection. The deconstruction and rebuilding with disparate parts was a kind of meditation. The old doll houses I used were already broken, half formed or falling apart. As I assembled these sketches, 3D, fleeting, already broken, I wondered what images will return to my daughter when she leaves her childhood home/mom and creates her own. We’ve lived in places inhabited by ghosts, attics with secrets in the walls, new apartments with no history save sheetrock dust, rooms we had to turn sideways in, those that slant, and those that seem to grow from trees. I hope Seattle will remain our home.

Lily Hotchkiss

ARTIST: Tiffany Ju
LOCATION: Thomas West

My motivations for my work have been recent discoveries. My artistic journey is new although I’ve been making art all my life. What has changed is that I have been able to reassess the notions of myself that I have held for years as a woman of color to immigrant parents who have lived this particular life and have had particular imposed boundaries. Currently, I work with recycled materials and using the craft method of weaving. My work explores my own personal history, revisiting my earliest memories of making. I also explore the dichotomies of craft vs. fine art, low vs. high perceived and cost value, the juxtaposition of familiar and new, traditional vs. modern forms and aesthetic. These topics have remained consistent and forefront in all of my previous work. – Tiffany Ju

ARTIST: Soo Hong
LOCATION: Thomas East

“Mol-La” is a Korean expression meaning “Don’t know”. I often used this word since early years of age. I have lived in several different countries since childhood and therefore had been cast into environments I am not familiar with. I experienced ambiguity through incomprehensible language and local people around. My art work explores such vague psychological state of human by using visual elements.

– Soo Hong

ARTIST: Kelly Mitchell
LOCATION: John

My art practice began in my home growing up. I learned to draw and to stitch from my mother. My family’s homes–there were many over the years–were always filled with handmade quilts from great grandmothers and great aunts, handmade toys and clothes from my grandmother, and my childhood wardrobe was almost entirely made by my mother’s hands. These objects are very important to me, they are physical ties to past generations of women in my family, things I can hold and smell and feel that remind of the women who made them. But more important than the objects themselves are the skills these women passed down to me through these objects. Stitching is what tied us all together and keeps us tied together even as some pass on and leave this world. I bring the skills they handed down to me into my art practice to memorialize them and to pay homage to them, but also to use those skills as a means to express ideas in ways they never had a chance to. -Kelly Mitchell

Two new Storefront installations – We Are One by Lawrence Pitre, and Measured Entropy by Savina Mason – are now on view at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, WA, now to February 2019.  Presented by Shunpike as part of its acclaimed Storefronts program, the installations have been sponsored by Meydenbauer Center.

ARTIST: Lawrence Pitre

WORK: We Are One

Artist Statement:

“I create visual art to evoke the mind, body and soul, which calls upon memories related to our past, present and contemporary life. Within this scope I probe links between our union, separation, parallels and contrasts. We are one is totally driven by the context of urban renewal and the relationships of personas and displacement related to the central axis of our city. Each approach starts with an open mind and a variety of perspectives. I use my own constructed images as a vehicle for questioning concepts about the role of current traditions, the nature of family and our spiritual connection to the earth. In addition my creative approach underscores the problem and solutions to countless boundaries while exposing the limits of tradition. Just as Jacob Lawrence brought an enormous amount of dignity to his work, I mirror this dignity and create visual art which compels us to stop and think: “Is visual art met to be decorative or a symbol of the culture which we live in”.

lcpitre.com

ARTIST: Savina Mason

WORK: Measured Entropy

“I work as an encaustic painter and occasionally installation artist. Working now in two dimensions, now in three, allows me to express a wider range of ideas, experiment with materials, and utilize the engineering part of my brain. The periodic changeover strengthens and informs both sides of my practice. An editor at heart, my work is often focused on finding the bare minimum of elements needed to give an idea visual form. As I constantly experiment, my palette of technique, color, and materials is broad, and changes greatly with each project. Previous work as a designer informs my approach to working with color. Conception of landform, observed and imagined, is a recurring theme in my work”.

savinamason.com

Shunpike proudly presents eight new installations in South Lake Union as part of its acclaimed Storefronts program, on display October 2018-February 2019.

“Storefronts South Lake Union presents the last round of installations in 2018- The year is comprised of three rounds themed around the concept of building relationships with cities, people, and nature. In this third round we explore the works of artists exploring issues related to nature – a study of terrain, habitat, and the systems that support or degrade the very ground we stand on. Join us in reflecting on the strength and fragility of our shared Earth” – Hanako O’Leary, Storefronts Program Coordinator

All SLU Storefronts Locations are at the corner of Terry or Boren on given cross streets:

ARTIST: Carolyn Hitt

LOCATION: Mercer 

Artist Statement:

ARTIST: June Sekiguchi

WORK: Water Flow

LOCATION: Mercer

Artist Statement:

I make sculptures and large scale immersive installations that involve intensely manipulating material that is pattern based, modular and site responsive. My practice processes, deconstructs, and re-structures a form, focusing on metaphorical rather than literal interpretations of the source material. Each project addresses new concepts leading to experimenting with new materials. I am particularly interested in metaphors that lead to the intersection of science, spirit and art. The primary medium I use is engineered wood panels using a scroll saw to cut pattern with which I create forms that address cultural identity, cross cultural exchange, and personal narratives. I explore diversity and commonality of cultures through the interplay of surface pattern and structural form with a deeper meaning of pattern in humanity, and more intimately, personal patterns of habit. My work is a way of processing significant personal rites of passage and concerns about the world around me.

www.junesekiguchi.com

ARTIST: Henry Cowdery

WORK: Interglacial

LOCATION:  Harrison East

Artist Statement:

My current body of work considers the relationship between the natural world and the built environment. I explore the scaled structure of the universe as well as the earth’s impact on human-made objects from all time periods and locations. I seek to create works that underscore the brevity of human existence on this vast, prolific, but ultimately apathetic earth. Working primarily in large scale charcoal drawings and sculpture, I am inspired by the crippling scale and strength of the ocean and its water cycle, the eons of erosion and tension that form mountain ranges and the opaque, mysterious weight of human history. I am also intrigued by the relationship (or contradiction) between nature’s chaos and the Platonic ideals of humankind, such as the right angle or systems of measurement. Against the backdrop of the infinite and fecund indifference of the earth, I explore fragile human constructs of value, meaning and creation with intention.

hjcowdery.com

ARTIST: Beth Howe

WORK: Iona Drawings

LOCATION: Republican

Artist Statement:

The Iona Series is a collaborative project combining computer coding and drawing. Artists Beth Howe and Clive McCarthy want to bridge the creative work of coding with the creative work of visual art practices that engage with materials (like wood, paper, clay or paint). Can we make the code ‘material’? Can the metaphor of the hand of the artist be extended to the writing of the code?

To translate between the realm of code and the realm of ‘stuff’, we’ve written custom code to build images from digital photographic data. The code-derived images are output on our CNC machine. Designed for milling hard materials like wood and plastics, we switched the cutting tools with an ink pen and draw directly onto paper.

Underneath the permutations of code, the images are of commonplace, and yet monumental, human interventions in the landscape: bridges, warehouses, and piles of navigational debris pulled out of the Fraser River on Iona Spit in British Columbia. Our culture is increasingly shaped by the essential – but invisible to most of us – algorithmic infrastructures ‘underneath it all’. How does this ‘hand’ guide the way we visualize the world? How can artists guide this hand in making objects for the material world?

In the process of making – coding, cutting, printing, drawing, re-coding, and re-drawing – we see translation generate noise. From the eye surveying a scene, to the capture by the camera, to the algorithm, to the line-code of a milling machine, to finally ink on paper, there are many opportunities for mutation. The image passes through a string of languages like a game of telephone and the image is rearranged, degraded, glitched, transformed. The most exciting moments for us are the drawing ‘decisions’ that betray the machine at the helm, but don’t look rational.

www.beth-howe.com

ARTIST: Graham Murtough

WORK: Resisting development, resisting ruin

LOCATION: Thomas East

Artist Statement:

Environment is one of the largest influences in my work. Wherever I may be working, the colour palate, the local plants or municipal structures quickly get absorbed into my visual vocabulary. My time in London can be encapsulated by ‘The Relative Value of Convention II.” The title of this work refers to the implicit violence of our accepted cultural values and unquestioned social norms. The ever-obsessive drive towards new urban development and expansion is an example of this violence, and has become a particular preoccupation of mine. As we face environmental catastrophe, I find the two are completely at odds, and the dissonance is observably remarkable. I use some of the visual language of the construction site to refer to this stark absurdity. Our day to day tension is physically interrupted by a collapse of ideals or some sort of life changing event. What follows is a surprisingly uplifting sense of renewal and hope.

In many of the works I create there is a sense that an event has already taken place, and I am interested in creating a kind of material and affective aftermath. By combining everyday materials with found objects, plants and idiosyncratically crafted sculptures, I seek to create an environment where the viewer can experience conflicting sensations, where there is protection, interruption and exclusion all at once. The vibrant plants serve as a living return to civility. I aim to create a kind of material tension, a physical dissonance and unease which gives way to something greater.

grahammurtough.com

ARTIST: Joy Hagen

WORK: Variations on a Theme

LOCATION: Thomas West

Artist Statement:

The daughter of a forester, my childhood was spent exploring logging roads and hiking and camping deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. It also provided the opportunity to live in the Philippines and Panama. Surrounded by a forest of significant trees in my own backyard, I use encaustic medium to depict environments that speak to remembered moments through selected bits and pieces from the natural world, usually with a reference to trees. Forests are my sanctuary and inspiration and artmaking is my visual song of praise. Encaustic medium is my preferred method for capturing moments from the natural world. I use reclaimed wood cut to various sizes as a base for creating assembled landscapes. Each piece becomes a means of capturing favorite elements from my natural surroundings. Wax, resin, and wood are more than simply the materials used to create my product. They are of the forest and provide the complexities of emotion inherent in their use.

www.joyhagenart.com

ARTIST: Melanie Masson

WORK: Passage

LOCATION: John

Artist Statement:

“Passage” is a survey of leading lines on the North American landscape. Every glacier, wheel, and footfall that carved these lines bore a purpose, the sheer repetition branding a deeper promise of worth into the soil. Following these pathways, which by nature branch one to another, similarly connect us to past travelers while guiding us toward the futures we seek – each generation driven by the same prospects as the one before: change, destination, hopes we intend to plant at the end of the lines.

melaniemassonphotography-blog.tumblr.com

ARTIST: Danielle Dean

WORK: We are Salt Water

LOCATION: Harrison East

Artist Statement:

An Island can be a refuge. Evoking feelings of escape and solitude, beauty and abundance. For eleven years, I lived and worked on San Juan Island, a seven mile stretch of land in the Salish Sea. In creation myths, islands portray the beginnings of consciousness. On San Juan Island the native tribe, the Coast Salish, believed that Mitchell Bay, located in the northwest part of the island, was their Garden of Eden. It is a thin place – a Celtic description of a place where the veil between heaven and earth seems thinner.

An Island can also serve as a canary in a coal mine. Life is directly tied to nature on an immediate measurable scale. Changing tides erode the land. Ocean acidification shifts a delicate balance, affecting food sources for all. Most residents know the current head count of the megafauna, celebrating births and mourning deaths. It is a sense of place directly connected to events in nature, a form of immersion, a language and culture of the earth. I use to swim in the sea. I would get suited up for long periods in the cold waters. I would set my eyes directly on the water line; the ocean expanding below and the sky stretching above. The two elements blending in harmonies of blue.

I want my work to inhabit the threshold between vastness and intimacy. I am interested in working with the dimensional space of photography in new ways by combining traditional photographic techniques with painting, printmaking, and small sculptures. My images begin with black and white film exposed through antiquated lenses. The old optics allow the light and atmosphere to impress themselves on the silver of the film. With the steel and lead, I am working in collaboration with the sea and earth of the island to patina the objects. The work is about light, the elements, the alchemy of nature and chance.

www.danielledean.com

Shunpike proudly presents eight new installations in South Lake Union as part of its acclaimed Storefronts program, on display July 3rd – September 30th, 2018.

“Storefronts South Lake Union presents three rounds of installations in 2018- each round is themed around the concept of building relationships with cities, people, and nature.

In this second round we explore the works of artists incorporating the human figure into their works. Reflecting the faces, bodies, and silhouettes of those around them, these artists build up themselves and the community around them.  Join us in engaging with themes of power, identity, history, community, and all the intricate human connections which frame who we are today and how we relate to each other.” – Hanako O’Leary, Storefronts Program Coordinator

All SLU Storefronts Locations are at the corner of Terry or Boren on given cross streets:

ARTIST: Robert Sparrow Jones

WORK: We are One

LOCATION: John St. Window

Artist Statement:

Well beyond a pastime, nature is a way of life for me. It is a library and a teacher. Color, texture, movement, space, time, and scent; the elements of the natural world mirror my practice as a painter. The wild landscape of the Seattle coast; the physical and aesthetic properties, connects directly to my painting because it embodies many passages of time. Within materials, and layering are metaphorical places that hold culture; light and life, as transparent layers—like a small town edging off into spectacular wind-swept cliffs, and, further up, melding into the hedgerows of a rural countryside. For subject matter I will be contemplating a landscape that has been incorporated architecturally into community and gardens that grow into the environs of the rural life. Merging life with nature is where the haunt of storytelling take bloom and the bold arc of history becomes experienced as layers.

robertsparrowjones.com

ARTIST: Infinite Milam

WORK: The Queens Project Book

LOCATION: Thomas St. East Window

Artist Statement:

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life:

“A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy,

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued,

“The other is good – heis joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather,

“Which wolf will win?”

“The one you feed.”

website

ARTIST: Berette Macaulay

WORK: memory of nothing, but the soil from which we sprung

LOCATION: Thomas St. West Window

Artist Statement:

The portrait series, ‘memory of nothing’, was inspired by resilience of my own intercultural partnership in the wake of recent racial tensions in the US. I wanted to counter my own fears of the dangers of racism with a visual conversation of unity. It was after I began this work that I learned that 2017 marked the 50 year anniversary of the landmark US Supreme Court case of Loving vs Virginia that reversed “anti-miscegenation laws”, making it legal for human beings in the United States to simply love each other, raise families, bridge communities, blend cultures, while building lives together. But still – skin, nationality, and cultures continue to be painfully political, and radical to some when they are mixed, spurring violent clashes we see in our world today.

This project celebrates the infinite shades of humanity and offers hope. Exposing multigenerational intercultural stories is aspirational, beckoning us to try harder to heal our collective scars, so we can remember only that which connects us: Love.”

ARTIST: Robert L. Horton

WORK: Stories…about Us!

LOCATION: Harrison St. West Window

Artist Statement:

A series of paintings, “Stories…about Us!” depict the rich lives of key people in African American history. Storylines from slavery, specific significant historical events, to iconic leaders are featured in visual format. My recent focus has been the production of art exhibits, which demonstrate how little known African American history impacted the course of American history. My exhibits, “Un-Chained Underground” and “American History…X” allowed me to promote these stories by showcasing the imagery of the people who played a strong role in American culture. Art patrons viewing these exhibits responded favorably to the educational value, as well as, artistic execution of the images.

website

ARTIST: Jean Bradbury

WORK: On my Head, in my Heart

LOCATION: Harrison St. East Window

Artist Statement:

In response to the current political climate in the United States I have chosen to celebrate the diversity and specificity of the human culture. “On My Head. In My Heart” is part of an ongoing exploration of clothing as a language that expresses the apparently opposing values of tradition and individuality. It asks the question “Who are we and how do we express that?” and answers with both our relationships to our group and our own uniqueness. While we are products of our family, group, religion, culture, sports interest, and workplace the truth about who we are lies in our specific stories. For this reason I incorporate interviews with my portrait subjects about how the item they wear on their heads expresses what they hold in their hearts.

jeanbradbury.com

ARTIST: Suze Woolf

WORK: State of the Forrest

LOCATION: Republican St. Window

Artist Statement:

Suze Woolf has watched glaciers shrink and burned-over forests increase. At first, she painted whole scenes of fire-affected landscapes. Then close-up studies of individual trees became a metaphor for human impact: our predilection for cooking the planet. Yet for all her distress, she also sees unusual beauty. Fire-carved standing snags are known as “totems.” At once all the same – carbonized, eaten away; yet each different – the physics of the fire and the tree’s biological structure create unique sculptures. Each ridge, fissure, and layer becomes a landscape unto itself. Char remains iridescent for up to a decade, reflecting local light and color.

www.suzewoolf-fineart.com

ARTIST: Synvia Whitney

WORK: I want to be here with you, I want to change

LOCATION: Mercer St. West Window

Artist Statement:

I dreamt of the the possibility of Mount Rainer transitioning into the Puget Sound, of the gallery floor speaking it’s mind. It’s this kind of thinking that inspires me, especially in our current cultural climate when it seems change is so necessary yet so difficult to achieve, my gender-queer self yearns for the opportunity to imagine what could be no matter how impossible it seems. This work is a reflection of my desire to re-imagine myself my relationships and the spaces we all live and work in together. I want to be here with you now and I want to change. I want this freedom for all of us.

www.syniva.weebly.com

ARTIST: Jite Agbro

WORK: Armor Stories

LOCATION: Mercer St. East Window

Artist Statement:

My work focuses on non-verbal communication, the process of exchanging shared cultural, psychological, and imaginative cues between people. Specially, I’m interested in the way we as human beings project ourselves and our identities into the greater public space.

My most recent prints incorporate dress forms and garment piece. I use dress forms as visual representations of non-verbal communication because clothing is a familiar instrument for unspoken exchanges. Clothing conveys self-image, aesthetics, interpersonal allegiance, and even citizenship, lineage, and social status. Each of us is deeply knowledgeable in this subtle language of presentation and able to make lightning-quick judgments, even where our awareness of what we are judging is subconscious.

My interest is in creating visual representations of status and using them to capture stories and un-cover the subtle experiences of symbolic expression. I wish to exhume the buried and unexamined assumptions by which we negotiate culture and construct our images of other people and ourselves.

http://jiteagbro.com/

Two new Storefront installations – Bike Date by Laura Curry, and Ensembles by Becky Frehse – are now on view at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, WA, now to September 2018.  Presented by Shunpike as part of its acclaimed Storefronts program, the installations have been sponsored by Meydenbauer Center.

ARTIST: Laura Curry

WORK: Bike Date

ARTIST STATEMENT:
Bike Date is a research-based project that documents the experiences of the cyclist while on the road in South and North American cities.

For Storefronts, I choose to uncover the drama – the romance – and intrigue of the cycling experience that is typically invisible to the hell bent motorist.

Because Bike Date is a dialogic project, I am using 2 large format QR codes that also act in dialogue with each other.

At undisclosed times during the 6-month Bike Date installation, unique visual and audio experiences will be accessed by scanning the QR codes with smart phones.

And at undisclosed times, links will be provided for the audience to upload comments to me, and content of your own.

I invite the audience to enter into this dynamic, digital experience framed in cycling.

www.lauracurry.com

ARTIST: Becky Frehse

WORK: Ensembles

ARTIST STATEMENT:
ENSEMBLES is a mixed-media installation that features boisterous acrylic paintings, reconfigured musical instruments, tree branches as musicians, and whimsical ceramic parts in two tableaux referencing birds in a “green scherzo” and a raucous band of makeshift instrumentation. Becky’s juxtaposition of objects within a framed display window invites the viewer to experience her visual interpretations of waggish musical ideas.

www.beckyfrehse.com

Shunpike proudly presents eight new installations in South Lake Union as part of its acclaimed Storefronts program, on display through June 2018.

The theme of Storefronts XV is “Exploring the architecture which shapes our lives.”
In this collection of installations, artists respond to architectural spaces and concepts though emotional, utilitarian, or aesthetic gestures. They reference structures—everything from our bodies to buildings to hidden corners of our mind—places that shape and or contain our lives. These works will snap us out of our everyday routines and push us to recognize the psychological and physical space we occupy.

All SLU Storefronts Locations are at the corner of Terry or Boren on given cross streets: