dispatches

Back report

The one benefit, I suppose you can call it that, with having my back go out on me, is that I need to take walks. I can’t really function until I get about a mile or so under my feet, and then my back feels almost normal. Today was one of those lovely, foggy winter Seattle days where anything shot outdoors looks bathed in soft, grey light. You couldn’t take a bad picture if you tried. I went through the Ravenna Gorge, a little greenbelt near the house, where the grid of neighborhood streets gives way to a small, forest and fern filled canyon and a babbling brook. Winter wrens were singing, Golden-crowned Kinglets were flitting through the underbrush. The trees are just beginning to bud, which means the season of my bare, brushy landscape photos will be ending soon. Spring comes early to the Northwest.

It seems the best treatment for my back, besides walking, is working. My clients will be glad to hear that. I had a wedding shoot scheduled for this past Saturday, about which I was anxious on how I was going to function. It takes me several minutes to get myself completely upright in the morning still, which is a great improvement from a week ago when I merely collapsed on the floor, on hands and knees, and for a half hour painfully worked my way upright. I’m improving every day. But by the end of the shoot on Saturday, I felt the best I had all week. Being in constant motion all day (which is my photographic modality) seems to be the best therapy.
 

Making the scene

I hadn’t done a Seattle First Thursday art walk in ages, but then it’s been ages since I’ve had work in a downtown show. Benham’s open-entry group show opened last night, and when you have 89 people in a show, the opening gets pretty packed. The quality of the work is remarkably high, given that the work is completely unjuried. Marita said that she hadn’t done a portfolio review in a couple of years (she thought she was going to lose her lease, so why program?) and this was a way to open the floodgate. It’s a remarkable survey of how people are looking and making images of now.

Over at WallSpace Crista Dix had a jurer mount a truly unusual selection with an attitudinal commonality (ironic, poignant, intimate) of a sophistication rarely seen in the city. Up at G. Gibson is a small group from a Walker Evans portfolio uncomfortably sharing the stage with a brilliant series of bleak, beautiful northern Norwegian landscapey paintings by Mark Thompson. Next door at Davidson Contemporary was one of the lush, disquieting representational painting shows that Davidson is so good at pulling off, this one by Stephanie Frostad. This building is starting to acquire the flavor of a Chelsea arts district building.

First Thursdays are not a great way to see art. Like all such events, the point is to be seen in the crowd, but I feel so marginal to the local scene that I usually feel like a tourist from another city. Some open day in the next month, I’ll make the rounds, when I can share the gallery with only the art, to fill my eyes with sensibilities that aren’t my own. It’s a crucial piece of my own artmaking, not to swipe ideas so much as to be amazed at the range of work with the capacity to move and change how you see the world. And to see that is happening in the "now" moment, not what a museum has conferred curatorial legitimacy upon.

My next such moment is actually going to take place in New York next weekend, probably down in Chelsea. I’m heading back East in a few days. Stay tuned.