Seattle, WA. Things are getting closer to normal at The Henry Art Gallery. Visitors no longer have to register in advance, they can walk-up and buy tickets. Mask and social distancing requirements remain in place regardless of vaccination status. Here’s a link to visitor guidelines.
The Henry Art Gallery is part of the University of Washington and is currently showcasing Will Rawls: Everlasting Stranger which is featured in the image above. The exhibit, in collaboration with Velocity Dance Center, runs through August 15th.
In Everlasting Stranger, New York-based choreographer and writer Will Rawls (b. 1978, Boston, MA) activates relationships between language, dance, and image through the fragmentary medium of stop-motion animation. In his installation, time and movement slow as a live, automated camera photographs the frame-by-frame actions of four dancers. While the performers occupy the labor of becoming images, visual capture is staged as an obsessive process that is constant yet compromised by the movement it aims to fix.
Here, as in previous works, Rawls develops strategies of evasion and engagement within systems that mediate, distort, and abstract the body.
Rawls’s exhibition takes inspiration from the work of Guyanese writer Wilson Harris and his surrealist novel The Infinite Rehearsal (1987). In the book, the constrictive projections of the colonial gaze manifest as a child’s fever dream where ghosts reinterpret time, genealogy, and identity as unstable matter. Harris’s novel serves as a conduit through which Rawls addresses the misrepresentation that haunts all forms of capture, including photography and choreography. Within the temporal delirium that marks existence in quarantine, Rawls animates the life that appears between frames.
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE:
Saturdays: July 17 – August 14, 12 – 3 PM
Will Rawls: Everlasting Stranger is a collaboration between Henry Art Gallery and Velocity Dance Center and is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Henry Curator, and Erin Johnson, Velocity Interim Artistic and Managing Director. It is presented in conjunction with the Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation, with project support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support provided by UW Department of Dance, and by John Robinson and Maya Sonenberg. Costumes complements of womxn’s rites.
The exhibition is presented in conjunction with
Murmurations, a Seattle-wide arts collaboration featuring a series of exhibitions, performances, screenings, community conversations, artist talks, and other programs co-developed between cultural organizations.
Other exhibitions are continually available this summer. For an online opportunity, Henry Art Gallery is hosting Sonolocations: A Sounds Works Series from June – August 2021.
Partnered with the Jack Straw Cultural Center, The Henry has commissioned a three-part series of audio artworks, to be released free and online throughout the summer of 2021. The participating artists were invited to consider the theme of place, and its unique resonance throughout the pandemic, to offer directed sonic experiences for listeners wherever they might find themselves. Participating artists are Byron Au Yong (b. 1971, Pittsburgh, PA), Chenoa Egawa (b. 1964, Ellensburg, WA), and Bill Lowe (b. 1946, Pittsburgh, PA) and Naima Lowe (b. 1979, Middletown, CT).
To get a preview of Sonolocations, listen to Byron Au Yong’s “Pomelo” here:
Audio artworks will be available on
SoundCloud, and on the Jack Straw
website. You can also subscribe to
Sonolocations as a podcast to receive each piece when it launches.
The Henry is also hosting Gary Simmons: The Engine Room through August 22, 2021. The work of Gary Simmons (b. 1964, New York, NY) explores racial, social, and cultural politics, interrogating the ways in which we attempt to reconstruct the past via personal and collective memory. For this commissioned exhibition at the Henry, the artist created a large-scale wall drawing, a suite of new paintings and sculptures, and a sculptural installation, drawing together disparate components to create space for new interaction and invention.
This piece has been utilized in Jambalaya Jam at the Henry, a night of music celebrating Seattle’s recent musical past.
The installation will function as an interactive space, riffing off traditional American suburban garage architecture and referencing the garage as a site for invention, creativity, and experimentation, particularly for music/bands. As both a private laboratory and a public stage, the garage sculpture will be activated by a series of musician residencies, drawing on unique areas of the Seattle music scene, both historical and present, and tapping into the lesser-known, yet equally influential, genres and practices.
Simmons researched and archived band and concert posters from around the world to create this piece.
From Henry Art Gallery:
The Henry is internationally recognized for bold and challenging exhibitions, for pushing the boundaries of contemporary art and culture, and for being the first to premiere new works by established and emerging artists. Through individual experiences with art, we inspire visitors to upend their expectations and discover surprising connections.
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