THE WEB: January 2025, Week One

Jan 2

Happy New Year you dazzling art goers. Thank you for visiting art spaces in 2024! Informality is personally looking forward to seeing and covering more art this year. It is beyond about time. You found yourself on the very first post from my new column THE WEB, which features my picks of what to see week to week, month to month, in Seattle and Beyond. If you have been reading Informality Blog since its conception in KC, you can compare this to RADAR. Want to share your show on Informality? Contact me here!

TIMBER!

James Hartunian

January 2 - 30, 2025 | Opening: Thursday, January 2, 6:00 — 8:00pm

4Culture |101 Prefontaine Pl S
Seattle, WA 98104

From the 4culture site: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? TIMBER! is an exploration of perception, existence, and the liminal space where technology and nature meet. See more here.

James Hartunian is a new member of SOIL gallery where yours truly has recently become a member as well. We don’t know each other well, though we gushed about artist Rachel Youn together over Instagram DM’s, who is a huge inspiration for Hartunian while exploring robotics and art. Speaking of SOIL’s new members…

CONTROLLABLES: Work from SOIL’s Newest Members

January2 - February 22, 2025|Opening: Thursday, January 2, 5:00 - 8PM

SOIL Artist-Run Gallery| 112 3rd Ave S
Seattle, WA 98104

This dynamic exhibition offers a new take on the concept of control – when we experience art, who has it? Is it the artist, the viewer, the space, or the work itself? Does the larger cultural context have control of the way art moves through us?

In Controllables, each artist has been brought together serendipitously, previously unfamiliar with each others’ work, presenting us with a scenario, a question, or a puzzle, honoring the possibility of the unpredictable. Controllables is a proposition for an imagined future, full of unexpected parallels and resilient narratives. Together, these works offer joyful defiance while embracing that which cannot be changed. See more here.

broken courage

Joe Bun Keo

January 2 - February 16, 2025 | Opening: January 2, 5-8PM

From Specialist’s site: broken courage features deceptively muted, autoethnographic, and punny new work that unpacks the intergenerational trauma of growing up in Predominately White Middle Class Suburban America a child of Khmer Rouge survivors and Cambodian refugees. Materials used in the work range from traditional Khmer krama scarves to old wooden hat stands. These objects can exist in the past, present and future. We are subordinate to the commodity, the thing, the product. Healing and pain management are derived from sentimental value that resides within each item.

This gallery is run by SOIL Member Phillipe Hyojung Kim and is certainly one of my favorite to visit on First Thursdays.

See more here.

Typically I struggle talking about and being intrigued by photographic work since the extravagantly changed scene of photography in this digital age….this looks not boring, though! And much more corporeal:

rite: this instant

Jack Johnston
C Meier
Annie Reierson
January 2 - February 15, 2025 | Opening: 5pm Thursday, January 2, 5PM.

solas gallery | 300 South Washington Street Unit Z Seattle, WA 98104

From solas’ site: In the diverse works presented by these three artists, we see how the medium of instant photography can be used to express each artist’s particular experience. Be it recasting performance work from their youth to exploring the material and how it responds to drawing and photo methods to animated motion sequences, these works show how the Polaroid can be so adaptive and responsive to the artists’ inquiries. Indeed, by using a restrictive format, each artist works and transcends the medium to their own needs and desires. See more here.

CLOSING THIS WEEK

Three Dog Night

Jhon Doe
Last day to view | January 5, 2025 11AM - 4PM

Eight Roses Gallery | 6206 Carleton Ave S Seattle, WA

This is an acquaintance and friend in the arts I serve at my day job, who shared he was opening up this tattoo shop and gallery. I still haven’t been, because I am bad! I hope to be there this Sunday. Go check it out!