IOLE ALESSANDRINI AND ED MANNERY At Push Arts

Ed Mannery, left, and a costumed Iole Alessandrini.

 Alessandrini and friends.

Alessandrini performative with installation.

Iole Alessandrini and Ed Mannery provided a site-specific installation to Push Arts Festival August 24, 2012 at South Lake Union Park.

Despite unseasonably cool weather including a steady 10-knot north wind ripping across Lake Union, dozens of denizens of night art outdoors circulated between the various site-specific artworks comprising Push Arts Festival's debut event.

Alessandrini and Mannery sited a new-media work on the pedestrian bridge which spans the Central Cove, a small inlet from Lake Union resembling a pond.  The non-objective artwork comprising the imagery of the installation involves the use of brilliant green lasers.  This projected light figures significantly in the preceding works of art by Alessandrini, employed creatively a number of times, including a breathtaking site-specific installation in an empty, enormous Volunteer Park water tower. To contrast,  a quaint, petite installation in a stairwell of the Seattle architecture firm Mithun , is memorable for the past use by Alessandrini of this type of laser new media in her artistic expression.

Using the salient angularity of the South Lake Union Park pedestrian bridge as a grid from which to accentuate various geometric patterns, Alessandrini/Mannery evoke a contemporary homage to Cubism, substituting Braque and Picasso's earthy hues for the brilliantly blinding beams of the l.ight a.mplification s.imulated e.mission of r.adiation (laser).  Using planes of light in place of planes of pictures, Alessandrini/Mannery turn the functional fixture of a bridge into a space-age dimensional portal.  The Ponti Vecchio becomes the Ponti Nuovo.

Added to this stabile accoutrement of light is an idiosyncratic, costumed artist performing, at first unrecognizable as the admittedly attractive, raven-haired Alessandrini.  We hear Alessandrini's voice occasionally speaking instructions to collaborator Mannery from behind a costume boundary. The performative image is disorienting, Alessandrini's costume- Venice Carnival mask and orange fright wig- conceal Alessandrini's usual beauty.  The viewer is instead enchanted/annoyed by the costumed Alessandrini catwalking across the bridge/installation, as she creatively manipulates a hand-held laser.  In this way Alessandrini is providing a spectacle of extemporaneous theatre to support the sculptural aspects of the fixed light elements of the installation.  The repeated procession of Alessandrini through the installation with gyrations of the hand laser, produces each time a new moving light projection, and by extension, a new work of art, each pass she makes through the bridge installation is unprecedented and a wonder to behold.

The combined elements of this site-specific installation distinguish the ever-inventive artwork of Alessandrini as assisted by Mannery, as that like no other.  In witnessing the team effort presented by Alessandrini/Mannery, it becomes apparent the collaboration is a very rare gem, the two artist seem to anticipate the thought processes of the other, and the unified mind of two yields an entertaining and original product of non-objective art which plays enormous.

The window of Push Arts Festival has shut, and the short exhibit schedule (one night only) of Alessandrini/Mannery's installation, only increases the value of this time-based installation/performative.  One is in hopes additional impending exhibits of new media can not be far off.

Ms. Alessandrini and Mr. Mannery met in 2001 at the Bellevue Arts Museum.  Mannery was artist in residence.  This is their first collaborative project since “Between Spaces” and focuses on creative and technical innovations involving optics and the exploration and perception of space with light.

ReMix and Push Arts Festival

Splitting time between Seattle Art Museum's ReMix and PushArts Festival at South Lake Union Park made for a full itinerary August 24, 2012.  ReMix featured Julie Alpert's sunset sketching workshop, Sarah Bergmann and Riz Rollins providing captivating programming, the ever-vivacious Sandra Jackson-Dumont hostessing ebulliently, and a crowd of beautiful personages hobnobbing in a quasar of flashbulbs, fashion and flirtation.

Commentaries: Artists Respond to the Land At Prographica Gallery

Glenn Rudolph 's photograph in PROGRAPHICA
gallery's current exhibit "Commentaries:
Artists Respond to the Land"

Kimberly Clark curates the artwork of Glenn Rudolph, Helen O'Toole and others in the theme of environmental change for PROGRAPHICA gallery's "Commentaries: Artists Respond to the Land". Clark also adds her own vital painting to the exhibit.


Just this side of Snoqualmie Pass on I-90, there is a wooded park visible from the highway.  Seattle Savant Richard Peterson and I made one of the last trips to this park in the Buick Regal which had been donated to me by Glenn Rudolph's close confidante Steven Schrock .  Mr. Peterson had been perseverating on the idea of a trip to Tradition Lake, what he called "the haunted woods" of this park and also made mention of a "ghost bus".  Richard's idea of using video footage taken by me as part of a new movie he envisioned, meant squeezing the last gasps of my automobile addiction, the head gasket had blown on the Regal, I knew how to limp a car for YEARS if necessary.  Soon after the ghost bus trip, I opted to participate in the City Of Seattle's One Less Car program, and I still have a pretty good supply of transit vouchers, being that I ride a bicycle everywhere I need to go.  Turning from that perhaps morally righteous self-disclosure to the topic of ghost bus footage in the haunted woods of Snoqualmie Pass, Richard led me to the abandoned bus, which if memory serves, is the selfsame bus which appears in my sister's boyfriend's confidante Glenn Rudolph's photograph in the Prographica exhibit curated by Kimberly Clark (understand?).  If it is the same bus, pending an inquiry to Rudolph, it will give me a great sense of unity and community in the art cosmos I orbit within, and the world of the mundane can accompany the story if it so happens.  Keep watching this space for an update on the potential relativity of ghost buses my friends know.  I always like to tie things together.

UPDATE: Turns out the buses are two different machines. Rudolph answers the inquiry into the location of his bus:  "This is up Silver Creek enroute to Mineral City. Not too far from Index. Miners use it as a shelter. The road and bridges are washed out and collapsed. A great place to hike."  Rudolph refers to Mineral City and Index, Washington.  Richard Peterson's bus resides near I-90 in close proximity to Tradition Lake at High Point Way Trailhead.

I attended the lecture "Evolving Interpretations Of Wilderness" given by Phillip Govedare
August 16,2012 in conjunction with Prographica's exhibit Commentaries: Artists Respond to the Land. Mr. Govedare, UW SoA Faculty, a two-time recipient of NEA recognition and represented by Francine Seders Gallery, is a painter composing images of post-apocalyptic landscapes and alternate palette representations of brownfields and scarified environments.
Mr. Govedare's lecture was framed by the stifling heat of a 90-degree evening and the confinement of a full space. Often during the lecture, global warming was mentioned, and so cued, the audience would mop a soggy brow, eyelids drooping. A slideshow accompanied the lecture, and featured images from landscape artists Albert Bierstadt (German-American, 1830-1902) and Frederic Edwin Church(American, 1826-1900). The premise posited by the images presented by Mr. Govedore in his febrile mutimedia spectacle was that of the historic legacy of artistic depictions of civilization's attempt to dominate nature, a standpoint which hurtles unflagged, and certainly has intensified in relation to the steady march of conspicuous consumption and the depletion of natural resources therefrom. Following the lecture, dialogue was expanded to include the perspiring audience, and one fellow (positioned smack in front of an electric fan) disgorged the frantically amusing chestnut that global warming wasn't yet proven. I laughed into my hand and sipped a little water.

In summation, Ms. Clark shows courage in organizing this exhibit, boldly uttering the mention of climate change and the resulting imminent mass extinction of humanity; now certain, scientifically assured and true, verifiable and foregone, the veracity of which cannot be refuted, except mockingly, conspiratorially, shamelessly attempted by the stark raving mad, the "fascist avaricious fossil-fuel death's head deceivers" as they are sometimes referred to. We are all dead, our bloodlines blotted out by bloated black oil insanity, obliterated by a bathtub brimming over from an annual buildup of FIVE BILLION METRIC TONS OF CARBON INTO THE ATMOSPHERE EVERY YEAR, year in year out. Mass extinction !X STINK SHUNNED! from driving cars, and burning coal to run hair dryers and tingling-finger massage chairs, for our massive, corpulent asses. I, for my part, can vouch for Curator Clark, she owns no car and rides her bicycle at least as much as I do. She is a wonderfully talented painter, also.  

Artist Ari Graynor's Ascendance

Artist Ari Graynor, second from left, recently debuted as a lead in the romantic comedy For A Good Time, Call  giving her audience a more significant expression of her art in film.  Ms. Graynor's considerable skill as a comedic actor is well-suited to the literary content of the story, and tempts viewers to draw comparison to Bette Midler.

Previous works of art by Ms. Graynor include Holy Rollers , where her characterization of Rachel Apfel as party girl shows her range of expression as an actor, relative to the smaller parts which comprise her art thus far.  An animal magnetism resides with Ms. Graynor, as plain as the nose on one's face, being revealed in this film importantly, marking perhaps a benchmark in the throughput of the artist's portfolio mid-point.

In conclusion, Ms. Graynor's acting in Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist , shows the nascent underpinnings of talent and potential greatness which has now begun to aggregate Ms. Graynor to  artists of her ilk; Scarlett Johansson, Michelle Williams and Elizabeth Banks.