This August, as part of the Storefronts program, Shunpike will present eight installations in South Lake Union by Washington State artists. The subjects addressed in these artworks range from personal transformations to mapping our city’s ‘in-between’ spaces. The artists featured include Austin Stiegemeier, Stephen Rock, Danielle Foushee, Elizabeth Arzani, Krisha Schumann, Jenny Hyde, Savina Mason, Dara Solliday, Kari Boeskov and Sarah Fetterman.
Take a stroll through South Lake Union in the remaining days of summer and see these public works. All eight pieces will be on display until November 9, 2015.
Visit Shunpike for more information.
Artist and artwork information courtesy of Shunpike.
ARTIST: Austin Stiegemeier
WORK ON DISPLAY: Violet is an Anagram of Love It
LOCATION: John St and Boren Ave N
“Violet is an Anagram of Love it” began as a storefront installation in Spokane Washington. Stiegemeier used drawings of the shopping carts as an investigation of the homeless populations there. Cardboard, scavenged trash, sharpies and paint pens became the language for discussing those who inhabit these streets. As consumers we are encouraged to define our identities and self-worth through the objects we possess. As a society we take our means of survival for granted. Few of us stop to think about actual human needs, (our own, or others) and the complex and absurd strategy our society has developed to meet those needs.
Austin Stiegemeier grew up in Northern Idaho and was educated in the Northwest. He holds an M.F.A. from Washington State University in 2013. Austin’s works focuses on people and their relationship to the modern social environment. As both a painter and printmaker he loves developing layers and uses a wide range of materials from traditional to experimental media including commercial vinyl sticker and scavenged cardboard and trash. He lives in Spokane and teaches printmaking and design at Eastern Washington University.
ARTIST: Stephen Rock
WORK ON DISPLAY: Data Stream
LOCATION: Thomas Street, west of Boren Ave N
“Data Stream” is an installation of digital based imagery, printed on wall covering to fill the wall. The images are influenced by an evolving urban art style that is a virtual mash-up of cultures and conversation, a style of visual dialogue that consumes and re-configures this new language in a hyphenated, abbreviated, multi-lingual world.
Stephen Rock deconstructs the experiences of life and reconfigures the remnants to create work in a variety of mediums. His recent work has included innovative digital works and conceptual large format installations and large and small reclaimed material sculptures. His current work is a developing visual dialogue about the integration of information and the virtual community using digital media and processes.
ARTIST: Danielle Foushee
WORK ON DISPLAY: Surveying the City
LOCATION: Thomas Street, west of Boren Ave N
Danielle Foushee’s “Surveying the City” will react specifically to its location and surroundings in the city. The goal is that the installation will not only be a pleasing and colorful landmark in itself, but that it will also engage with visitors and invite them to explore highlights of the entire neighborhood around them. Foushee has researched the history of the location and the immediate walkable area. The information and stories learned from locals were developed in a series of maps of the neighborhood.
Foushee maps space, gravity, and time through drawing and installations. While her work isn’t always directly about landscape, it is invariably in response to, it or situated within, it. A skilled hiker/orienteer, she has access to inspirational places that are unavailable to many. In Foushee’s words “History is dug from the earth; it’s heavy and grounded. Water is like taffy, sticky. It stretches and flows, connecting and mapping old and new.”
ARTISTS: Elizabeth Arzani and Krisna Schumann
WORK ON DISPLAY: Spaces Between Places
LOCATION: Harrison Street, west of Boren Ave N
In “Spaces Between Places” Elizabeth Arzani and Krisna Schumann have created a collaborative installation that playfully interprets aspects of the city of Seattle. With a collection of shaped panels, cut from the spaces in-between the buildings of the city’s skyline; their compositions are composed of graphite, acrylic, and tin with areas of foil paper and pastel. The puzzle piece like panels function both individually and as a collective set.
For nearly a year, Elizabeth Arzani and Krisna Schumann have worked intensively on a number of projects. The foundation of the collaboration is curiosity: an investigation into artistic sources, materials, and professional growth. Research and experiment play a large role as ideas are compared, images carefully observed, and studies are traded back and forth. Each artist refers to her unique experiences and technical abilities to push the work forward.
ARTIST: Jenny Hyde
WORK ON DISPLAY: New Ways of Seeing
LOCATION: Harrison Street, west of Boren Ave N
In Hyde’s own words “My current research involves an intensive documentary project of exterior and interior scenes from the American landscape. The subject is photographed in consecutive multiple shots from multiple viewpoints. Using a photomerge application, a group of photos are combined together to depict a multi-dimensional space. I see myself as an archeologist of sorts, but instead of studying evidence of the past, I examine the clutter of contemporary lives.”
Jenny Hyde, born 1975, is a multi- disciplinary artist from Washington State. Her work explores cultural geography through study of landscape and the body. She works with sound, video, digital print and multi-media installation.She is an active advocate for the arts and takes part in curatorial and community projects in her current city of Spokane WA.
ARTISTS: Savina Mason and Dara Solliday
WORK ON DISPLAY: Silver Shoal
LOCATION: Republican Street, west of Boren Ave N
In creating “Silver Shoal” Mason and Solliday selected a reprint of the original Encyclopedia Britannica to form the visual mass of the installation. It seemed fitting to use a book which contains the collected knowledge of the 18th century as a stand-in for all books. The yellowing age-spotted paper reminded them of the occupants of countless library stacks. Now encased in beeswax and pigment, the obsolete pages have new purpose. They introduced aluminum roofing nails, the shoal in a sea of pages, as the dissonant element. The conflict, as it were, in a story. Nails are fasteners; they are heavy, and they are dark. Here, they are a light silver, weigh practically nothing, are themselves fastened with twine, and chime with a silvery cadence in the slightest breeze.
Savina Mason works mainly in encaustic. An editor at heart, her work is often focused on finding the bare minimum of elements needed to give an idea visual form. As she constantly experiments, her palette of technique, color, and materials is broad, and changes greatly with each project. Conception of landform, observed and imagined, is a recurring theme in her work.
Dara Solliday uses encaustic paint as a vehicle for mixed media. Her work combines architectural images of land pattern, structure, and urban development into multi- layered views of home and landscape. She reconstructs historic images of land projects in graphite drawing and encaustic mixed media; incorporating 19th century newspapers, 20th century text, nautical maps, and schematic visuals.
ARTIST: Kari Boeskov
WORK ON DISPLAY: hello, world
LOCATION: Mercer Street, west of Terry Ave N
Kari Boeskov’s installation “hello, world” is composed of thousands of individual bits of translucent painted paper, bringing the sky to street level. Hovering between object and image, it forms a matrix that fills the entire window space and hangs close to the surface, open to the interplay of light, reflections, and shadows.
Kari Boeskov is an artist based in Seattle. With a background in film, fine arts, and landscape architecture, her work is interdisciplinary in approach, conceptually and materially wide-ranging, and often site-specific.
ARTIST: Sarah Fetterman
WORK ON DISPLAY: Muse Catcher
LOCATION: Mercer Street, west of Terry Ave N
In the city of Seattle, surrounded by highly functional tech companies with concrete goals, Fetterman is interested in making a non-functional machine with a purely poetic purpose. Technology enables us to build machines to test for things we couldn’t have imagined, to see what we had never seen before. In her work “Muse Catcher”, Fetterman turns this impressive progress, with humor, to the eternal questions of inspiration from a contemporary scientific standpoint—how to access it, who has acquired inspiration, where can it be found in the body, and how can we test for it.
Fetterman brings the child-like mindset to the present, to the sculpture at hand. She begins with a childhood aesthetic of how to make a sculpture to embody the function she has imagined. The object is left to be found by the viewer—a trail of crumbs to the story and the mindset from which this object sprang.
