2012-13 CHBP VISUAL ARTS!

Capitol Hill Block Party (CHBP), Ghost Gallery, Chihuly Garden and Glass, Chihuly Studio, and The Space Needle, are pleased to present the 2013 Visual Arts program.  CHBP introduced the visual arts element in 2012 and have once again collaborated with Ghost Gallery owner and curator Laurie Kearney to broaden the program by streamlining the artistic format for greater impact this July 26 – 28, with an opening party on July 23rd, to highlight artists, and support the 12th Ave Arts program.

The Visual Arts program will showcase a talented group of locally and internationally recognized artists. With a collaboration between three local muralists, the North wall of the Neumos building will be transformed into a collage of large format murals that will remain long after the 2013 festival comes to a close.  Additionally, the art program will feature a series of video projected murals to run throughout the duration of the weekend in the Havana parking lot, large scale street chalk art by Urban Artworks and goCstudio, and several vinyl and scrim banner installations. Complete list of exhibits and artist bios below.

In addition, the 2013 Visual Arts program will host a launch party, July 23rd, at Chihuly Garden and Glass, featuring work by artists participating at the festival, as well as work by a few artists who participated last year. All proceeds from drink sales will go directly to the 12th Ave Arts Program. In addition, CHBP has agreed to match all donations up to 5K, through drink sales, and online CHBP ticket donations. This event is invite only.

“Our hope is to continue this program annually, taking available wall space in Capitol Hill, and producing works of art, that can live on long after the festival has come and gone,” stated Ghost Gallery’s Laurie Kearney.

Amanda Manitach and DK Pan video still, 2013

Amanda Manitach and DK Pan video still, 2013

ARTIST INFO!

  • Amanda Manitach and D.K. Pan will be showcasing a series of short video works which were produced during a two-month residency at Capitol Hill’s PSA.
  • Benjamin Van Citters will be providing live, interactive visuals during the evening hours of Block Party weekend.  Visuals will be projected onto the Havana Parking lot wall. Projector(s), computer(s) and sensors will be located on site. Generated projections will be cast onto the walls from dusk onward each evening with highly detailed and vivid imagery. Large-scale audience interaction will be incorporated into the piece via webcams, microphones, depth sensors and other digital means.
  • Cait Willis will create two large format vinyl banners to be placed on appropriate fencing. Cait continues to tunnel through television and computer programming to capture the glitching of images from pop culture. The television or computer is subjected to hundreds of photos in an attempt to capture the elusive beast. Some turn to paintings, some are photographs that stand their own.
  • Crystal Barbre, Joe Vollan and Ouchey comprise the talent who will be working on the Neumos building, bringing their very individual painting styles, vivid and colorful graffiti writing and personality to the table.
  • Kathleen Warren and Jon Gentry (Urban ArtWorks and goCstudio) will be creating a large format “Street Drawing” near the 10th Ave festival entrance, using eco-friendly chalk to create a design that complements this year’s CHBP color theme.

por·tent

/ˈpôrˌtent/

Noun

1. A sign or warning that something, esp. something momentous or calamitous, is likely to happen.

2. Future significance: “an omen of grave portent for the tribe.

  • Patrick Richardson Wright will be projecting a series of manipulated “fashion” videos onto the Havana Parking Lot wall, along with the other video artists. Videos will be looped and shown during the dusk and evening hours of the festival.
  • Marc Tweed is creating a multimedia painting of CHBP headliners, The Flaming Lips, in all their psychedelic terror, love and glory.

KICKOFF EVENT ONLY ARTISTS:

  • Allyce Wood will present a watercolor painting representing her recent work focusing on the ecological ramifications of human involvement. It is an abstraction of northwestern moss species and a reference to the ancient rainforest that was logged long ago.
  • Michael Alm will install a 3D sculpture entitled “Re-Creation of Friedrich Specht’s Caracals Hunting 1894” Approx. 4’Lx4’Wx6’H, wood, paper, cardboard, wire, glass eyes, 2013.
 
Thank you to our 2012 Artists:

Allison Kudla
Free Lunch (2012)
*Due to Rain today, Allison’s mural will be installed Saturday morning…We will still have posted information at the entrance to the food vendor lot about her project, so you can learn about what she’s doing!*

Phylogenetic or evolutionary trees are branching diagrams that articulate evolutionary connections or relationships between various biological species. Allison Kudla’s moss mural, Free Lunch, applies phylogenetic diagrams to the exploration of evolutionary relationships found in food. Situated above the food carts in the Poquitos/Havana parking lot, the work playfully traces the origins of the food chain, from the photosynthesizing free lunch of the plant kingdom, to our species’ demand and desire for ever new and nuanced ‘selectively-bred’ food selections. The mural is one part of a larger project to create an interactive software application that applies non-standard data sets to evolutionary tree diagrams.
Bio:

Allison Kudla (US) is currently living in Seattle, Washington. She has recently returned to the States after working at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India. She was awarded her Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) in 2011. She also holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2002. In her most recent projects, she has been exploring the combination of patterns, fabrication technologies and plant tissue culturing to make living installations.

Her work, The Search for Luminosity, was published in “Art + Science Now” by Stephen Wilson. More recently, she received Honorary Mention in Hybrid Arts at Ars Electronica 2010 for her work capacity for (urban eden, human error). The same work also received Honorary Mention in the Vida Competition for Art and Artificial Life. Her work, Growth Pattern, was included in the group shows ”Alter Nature: We Can” at Z33 in Belgium and “When Process Becomes Paradigm” at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Spain. She is currently a part of a touring exhibition called “Intimate Science”, curated by Andrea Grover.

image by Daniel Carillo


Anne Blackburn
Invasive Species Series (2012)

This is an ongoing, site-specific installation consisting of invasive plant species such as ivy, kudzu, and blackberry fabricated entirely out of recycled industrial materials. In this case, Anne uses re-purposed beer cans. Look for them throughout the festival grounds as well!
Existing in-between environmental art and street art, the Invasive Species project is an attempt to bridge the perceived opposition between these two landscapes and arises from a trickster approach to environmental awareness.  Past installations have consisted of used recycled pond liner, bicycle inner tubes, gold leaf, tar paper, and speaker cable.
Bio:
Anne is an installation artist, independent curator, and organizer based in Seattle, WA.  Working primarily in time-based and site-specific contexts and found materials, her work explores the forms and organisms of the natural world and inherent friction with human action and obsession, creating works that interact with or are eroded by their environments, becoming semi-feral autonomous objects.



Benjamin Van Citters and Patrick Richardson Wright
Faces of CHBP (2012)

Always one of the highlights of the Block Party weekend, besides the music, is the people watching. Using a live video feed with face detection capabilities, which is displayed via projection mapping, Patrick & Ben will be showcasing the people that make Block Party such a big event.
Bios:
Ben has been fascinated with computer-generated art and complexity since he got his first taste of algebra in middle school.  After finishing an internship at Zipper Interactive, Ben is currently working in the gaming industry uniting all of his interests in art, design, complexity and interactivity.
Patrick has built on his experience as a developer, photographer, and videographer to expand into projection mapping – the art of projecting images onto 3D objects. From this newfound interest, he’s created several unique interactive installations that helped contribute to the success of various events in Seattle.


Brent Watanabe and Joseph Patrick Gray
CultureVirus 01 (2012)

An arcade box that finds your face and puts someone else’s face on it, then makes an animated GIF and uploads it to Tumblr. Debut of the photo booth is at the Narwhal room, below Unicorn, during Capitol Hill Block Party 2012. Created by Superfad Labs in collaboration with Metrix
Create:Space.
“A meme is an idea that behaves like a virus-that moves through a
population, taking hold in each person it infects.”
- Malcolm Gladwell

CultureVirus is a meta character, or “ghost in the machine”, that
monitors its environment and generates responses to it from the data
it perceives.  The CultureVirus exists as a set of software, a
website, a set of social network profiles and hardware inputs in
physical space which combine to create a virtual presence that forms a
meta-conceptual being, rather than a single concrete entity.
The CultureVirus is given a location, event and/or topic as a
restricted realm to work within.  It observes public social media that
has been tagged with location data, within a set geographic range.  It
can be set to watch for keywords (for instance a twitter hash tags) in
publicly accessible social network messages.  It will also watch the
streams of those wishing to “follow” it on various social networks.
The CultureVirus then alters and combines the information it observes
and posts it back to it’s own website, its own social network profiles
and the profiles/pages of individuals, organizations and events it has
been set to observe.  Observers of the CultureVirus in turn are then
able to share and/or respond to the posts it creates, thereby creating
more data-fuel for its engine.
Bios:
Brent has created computer controlled gallery installations and interactive environments for over 10 years. These installations function much like immersive video games, with living, interacting characters and objects, each with their own logic, intelligence, scoring, and goals. His work has been shown in galleries, museums, and film festivals internationally.
Joseph is a Seattle-based artist and designer.  Joseph earned a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 1999, focusing in video and sculpture. Since then he has worked with digital art and design practices for both artistic projects and commercial design applications. He began learning programming working in the graphic design industry, which quickly led to creating custom software and hardware tools for art installations and visual performances.  He currently works at Superfad in Seattle as their Lead Creative Developer.


Cait Willis
Weak Signals Series: fairyprincess, twin rock, satanic ritual 1, skyclad dance, and changeling (2012)

Cait’s large format digital prints explore the glitching of images. From weak TV signals to grainy YouTube video stills of rituals, her work seeks out the icon and the magic that lies in the folds of our image-saturated world. All images are caused by weather wreaking havoc on the visual feed, thus causing a temporary pixelated hiccup. Cait attempts to capture these nanosecond mutations by taking up to hundred digital photographs when the weak signal occurs. Usually only a handful of the pictures depict the ideal results. Some are images from television shows; since they are altered glitches they are not a copyright infringement. Some YouTube stills are of VooDoo, Wiccan and Satanic Ritual videos. The worse the quality of video, the better the glitch and resulting image.
Bio:

“I am obsessed with linking the world of pop culture to the academic world.  It is in the tension between the bright world of the painting’s surface and the larger underlying mechanisms of narrative that keeps me painting at a time when many say painting is dead. I believe that is just an idea for those that forgot that imagination creates endless possibilities.” Cait is also the curatorial assistant for the CHBP Visual Art Program!


Celeste Cooning
Untitled (2012)

Celeste’s gorgeous cut paper banners boast intricate, sophisticated designs, laser-cut onto Tyvek material. She has done large format pieces similar to this all over Seattle for various public art shows and private events.
Bio:
Celeste’s pervading interest in pattern and ornamentation led her to explore the medium of cut paper. Working with paper facilitates a particular responsiveness to materiality, shape, light, and physical space. These pieces demand fluidity and attention to detail, which cannot be accomplished in haste. The hand-cut nature is an important aspect of her work, necessitating mindfulness within the process.

image by Lauren Wang


C. M. Ruiz
Goodbye Horses (2012)

C.M. Ruiz will be exhibiting his signature black and white graphic imagery near the Vera Stage.
Bio:
C.M. never went to art school. In fact, he openly admits that he never studied graphic design techniques. With a good eye for composition and a bit of intuition, he often times designs posters while riding the bus, and completes layouts within an a few hours using sharpies, collaged images, and copy machines. His black & white and two-color posters are simple in the sense that they are bold and raw; pixelated and hand-drawn, they have an organic edge that is rarely seen in the work of contemporary designers.


Derek Erdman
YOU ARE UNDER ARREST (2012)

An interactive painting that is a tongue-in-cheek social commentary on the strained relationship between the police and citizens within their community.
Bio:
Derek Erdman went to seven different public schools before graduating from high school near Cleveland, Ohio. The strong but misguided work ethic of the rusting Midwest rubbed off on Derek, who now has a constant need to be doing something or face the overwhelming depression of inactivity, which is usually quelled by TV + bed. He lives with his wife and two guinea pigs a block away from a Safeway where he shops twice a day. Derek Erdman is a painter, telephone rapper, writer at The Stranger and the temporary secretary at Sub Pop Records.

image by Kyle Johnson


Hayley Young
Portraits from the Music Meet Film series (ongoing): Ritchie Young (Loch Lomond), Kyle O’Quin & Sean Nelson, Dave Bazan, Wayne Horvitz, Macklemore and Kaylee Cole (please contact us for purchasing, mounted prints $200-$375)
Bio:
Hayley graduated from Seattle Central’s Creative Academy for Commercial Photography in 2009. She has worked as Photo Editor for Seattle’s former music publication Sound Magazine, and currently holds the position as Photo Editor and Staff Photographer for Seattle Magazine and Seattle Business Magazine. With photography and video, her goal is to connect viewers with the subjects, even if they do not know who the subject is. The hope is that by portraying the musicians outside of the realistic plane, the viewer will have a clear chance at establishing their own idea of who is in the photograph.


Jess Rees and Jihee Kim
Caves #1 (2012) introduces a new collaborative effort by Jess Rees and Jihee Kim, studying the relationship between the organic and inorganic in positive and negative spaces. Look for their pieces in the trees along the Pike St corridor!
Bios:
Jess is a Seattle-based artist, designer, and all around creator whose work explores the delicate balance between the built and natural landscapes. Through painting, installation and sculpture, she is interested in exploring how a person’s perceived environment impacts their mood and impressions of the world. She holds a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, has shown her work around Seattle, New York, Victoria BC and New Jersey, and has previously contributed to community art projects for Sound Transit, Seattle Artwalk, and The Vera Project.
Jihee Kim is a multimedia and installation artist based in Seattle by way of Chicago. She is fascinated with the simple relationship between negative and positive space and strives to encapsulate the idea of space with color, shape, sound and light. Her aim is to create environments around the curious and often forgotten idea of negative space.


Marc Tweed
Painting series, 2012 (please contact GG for purchasing, paintings are $150 each)
1) A Picture of Dan Right Before God Took Him
2) Song of the Sea Monsters: Blood Fills the Air
3) Beating Rudy to Death With A Banjo
4) I Keep Your Ashes In A Plastic Golf Trophy
5) Unsent Love Letter
Bio:
Marc is a self-taught artist, musician and writer who draws inspiration from dreams, family photographs and encounters on public transportation. Based out of Seattle, he has been exhibiting paintings & drawings since the early ’90s. He failed the last art class he took. Look for his paintings along 11th Ave leading up to the Vera stage!


Mark Baumgarten
The Last Song on Earth: Essays for the End (2012)
Featuring illustration by Kyler Martz
Local author and editor Mark Baumgarten collected essays from local musicians and writers that will be bound into mini-books…Each essay is a response to a prompt: “The missiles are on their way, the plates are shifting, the aliens have landed, the meteor has breached the atmosphere . . .  You have five, maybe 10 minutes left on this Earth. What song is going to play you out?” ~ blurb from Chris Kornelis, Seattle Weekly article
Look for Mark’s books distributed throughout the festival on tables, curbs and hanging from fences!
Bio:
Mark grew up in the small cow-town of Tomah, Wisconsin, where he read lots of science fiction while exercising his creative writing skills by bullshitting his way through book reports. After high school he moved on to Minneapolis where he took up music journalism. He eventually settled in the Pacific Northwest where he enjoys the mild winters, the music and the mountains. In the last decade he has served as music editor of Willamette Week and executive editor of Sound, Twin Cities Metropolitan and Lost Cause magazines. His words have also appeared in Spin, The Village Voice, Seattle Weekly and a few now-deceased publications. He is the author of Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music (out July 10, 2012), the editor-at-large for City Arts and the host of The Song Show.


Meghan Trainor
Animus Carpentry (2012)
“Animus Carpentry is a counterpoint having spent the last several years working on increasingly delicate “neuroprosthetics,” that is, artworks that document my attempt to bodily inhabit kinetic sculpture through brainwave control of these objects, a practice steeped in reverence for the artworks and aesthetics of Rebecca Horn, Eva Hesse and Lygia Clark.

Animus Carpentry consists of a series of contoured two by fours. At first glance you are looking at the iconic beams that form a wall. Each piece of lumber is covered with a undulating topography. These patterns are generated by a series of speedbag sessions, a core element of boxing training, where the wood has been removed via digital machining practices. This fabrication process is not necessarily apparent in the finished work, but it is how the work is constructed.

Animus Carpentry is quite specifically an attempt to invert my practice, to explore another method to transfer patterns generated by the body through systems generated by machines; the micro actions of neurons balanced against the macro motion of a martial art. The feminine iconography of fans against the masculine symbolized by the art of boxing. Detached explorations of abstracted exoskeletons are replaced with the creation of a system that maps fistfalls against leather.

The struggle to maintain rhythm, to hit the bag, to correct stance, are fed into a computer via sensors, the data collected and returned to yet another machine, which translates my actions into a CNC machine, a router zipping across the lumber at 8000 RPM. It counters my struggle to find a way to inhabit the machine, to explore spaces built to research the plasticity of the self in a technologically mediated interface. Am I after true telekinesis, or a poetic system that struggles against it’s purpose? Are any pieces I make any more or less a part of the system of my body, or are all objects equally external? It’s an ongoing process and series of questions, towards a goal I can’t be sure I’ll ever achieve.”
Bio:
Meghan is an artist and Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Washington’s Center for Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS). Her work has long explored the use of emerging and existing technologies to examine the aesthetic space in which the physical and the digital world overlap, resulting in a body of interactive, installation and performance artworks and projects.




Nichole Rathburn

Catacomb (2012)
“Standing in the Atlanta airport, my sister tries to gently brush a piece of hair away from my face. Without thinking, I violently shove her hand away. Shocked by my knee-jerk reaction to her affection, I have started to wonder if we are to be judged by our distance from other people instead of our proximity.
I work with the urge to encourage empathy; to put in physical form the feelings and sensation of what even the smallest moment of understanding between human beings can be. Not to cheapen them, but in the hope that a physical touch can resonate emotionally within the viewer and spread to the actions in their life, adding bit by bit to the world those moments that drive the human race forward.(Please touch the art.)”
Bio:
Nichole is a Seattle-based animator and sculptor, primarily working with ideas and forms that encourage interaction with the viewer, whether it be through a tactile experience or a subtle moving image. She received her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 2010, and recently completed a four-channel animation for 4culture’s media arts gallery, e4c, with a soundtrack created with assistance from the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.


Keith Whiteman and Rachel Ratner
The Seattle Band Map - A Cartographic Study of Musical Incest: Capitol Hill Block Party Edition (2012)
The Seattle Band Map explores how bands from the Pacific Northwest are interconnected through personal relationships and collaborations. Bands are connected if a) they share band members or b) two artists have collaborated on a project. For the purposes of this map, to qualify as a band, a project must have recorded and publicly shared at least one song and/or played a public show. This is a community project, so please feel free to add your own connections.
Bios:
Rachel is an on-air host on KEXP 90.3FM (2003–present). She has spent the past 10 years in Seattle working at record stores, booking shows, planning events, and performing with Seattle bands Partman Parthorse and Butts.
Keith Whiteman performs with three local bands and operates a screen print press and poster/art design company, Real Fake Productions. His poster and design work has been shown at the 2009 Seattle Theater Group Bumbershoot Poster Exhibit at Grey Gallery, the 2009 Stranger’s Poster of the Week Exhibit (five pieces hung) at the Vermillion Gallery, and the Bad Ideas Art Exhibit at the Society and Co. Gallery.




Renegade Planners Collective

Skewing Queuing: Cassette Tape Awning (10th Ave entrance) and Exquisite Corpse Scroll (located in the seating area on Pike) (2012)
The gateway to the Block Party should be celebrated as a threshold into a new experience, instead of just a barrier to entry. Serving not as a crude barricade, but as an invitation, the joy held within the Block Party should spill out into the entrance. The scroll is interactive! A new ink color will be provided each day, and each day the scroll will start anew, creating a layered composition of drawings, tags, stickers, etc.
Bio:
Renegade Planners Collective is a group of disaffected urban designers, interested in activating the latent potential of public space. They seek to provide methods of invitation for neighborhood residents to claim agency over the streets, to collaboratively interact, and to share in the joy of urban spaces. The RPC is Seth Geiser, Kirk Hovenkotter and their revolving crew of like-minded pals.


SPECS Wizard
Party Blocks (2012)
SPECS will be exhibiting his large format mural work here on the exterior of the Nuemos building.
Bio:
After getting into comics when he was 7 or 8, Michael decided this was what he wanted to do with his life. In 1983 he moved into the world of graffiti and started calling himself SPECS. He released an 80-page comic called MUX ADAPTER in 2008, and in 2011 completed a mural on Broadway as part of the Capitol Hill Wall Project. He is also part of the creative collective known as New Mystics.




Stacey Rozich

Untitled (2012), Enjoy Stacey’s mythical, folkloric designs on the two 23-foot Main Stage Banners!
Bio:
Stacey is a Seattle-based Illustrator and Graphic Designer. Stacey studied Illustration at California College of the Arts as well as Design at Seattle Central Creative Academy. Her client list includes The FADER, The Stranger, K Records, Fleet Foxes, Southern Lord, and more. Not only does her work appear commercially, it has shown in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Milwaukee and Berlin. Most days she can be found watching 30 Rock and daydreaming about cats.

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