Curator / GRR

Catalog

leneb
Dawn Cerny + Alice Tippit
Rutherford Chang
Celeste Fichter
Heather Hart
Diane Jacobs
Ron Lambert
Allison Manch
Edward Ancher Nelson
Karen Reimer
Ariana Page Russell
Dan D Shafer

December 1 – December 31, 2005
Reception / Thursday, December 1, 6–9:30pm

Catalog is an exhibit of work that engages with lists, enumerations, classifications, and categories, curated by the artist group GRR: Adriana Grant, Kristen Ramirez & Dan Rhoads. Twelve talented artists (including one artist team) from six different cities, Seattle to Beijing, are participating in this exhibit which includes photography, embroidery, watercolor, video, and installation. 

The diverse work in this show is connected by the theme catalog. Sometimes this cataloguing is done to better understand the components that make one thing whole, while other artists simply indulge their own compulsive need to bring order to their world. Through a wide range of compelling work, the artists in this exhibit show the diverse ways in which art work catalogs.

The work ranges from delicate, yet playful embroidery pieces, like Allison Manch’s Jolene depicting the lyrics of Dolly Parton’s song in orange thread, to Rutherford Chang’s video of words in alphabetic order, clips spliced from a 2004 broadcast of the NBC Nightly News. Diane Jacob’s work is comprised entirely of human hair, rolled into balls which are then presented in a grid. Heather Hart’s installation is a set of artists’ faces, mapped out, connected by the words they use to describe their work. 

leneb (Hollywood, California) is a filmmaker, writer and photographer whose work has screen internationally. He earned his MFA from UCLA Film School this past June. His documentary Growing Hope, Homeless Garden Projects was narrated by Harrison Ford and broadcast nationally on PBS. 
“I've been collecting. On walks in my neighborhood I've been taking photos of broken, missing and empty things.” — lb

Dawn Cerny + Alice Tippit are Seattleites who collaborate to make art. Tippit’s work is part of Proposed Land Use Action at Bellingham’s Whatcom Museum and Cerny will have a solo show at Gallery4Culture in 2006. In July 2006, the two will install An Artful Scheme of Happiness at SOIL. The work included in Catalog is a part of that upcoming show, a sort of process piece. 
“The Artful Scheme is a project about eccentricity, particularly the eccentricity of a fictional millionaire created by the artists themselves.” — DC & AT

Rutherford Chang (Beijing, China) has shown work in Berlin, Germany; Boulder, Colorado; London, England and New York City. 
“NBC Nightly News (June 14,2004) is a video work in which all words from an evening news program are re-arranged in alphabetical order. The alphabetically categorized content provides insight into the nature of contemporary media as well as our political and cultural vocabulary itself.” — RC

Celeste Fichter (Brooklyn, New York) has a solo show at PH Gallery in NYC in 2006 and her work is available through galleries in San Francisco and Berlin. She has been artist-in-residence at Centrum and the MacDowell Colony. 
“Spoken in the visual language of the doodle; the vernacular, off-handed and absent-mindedly made drawing, ‘Spanish Orange’ thematically explores the impulse to create order from chaos and revisits the practice of exploring particular formal elements through excessive repetition.” — CF

Heather Hart (Brooklyn, New York) is faculty at the Brearley School in New York City and will be artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2006. Her work explores the dichotomy of identity, and perception versus reality. 
“Semantics is a wall diagram drawing based on words that a group on unrelated artists used to describe their work. I used a line of association to connect the artists in the group that used a word in common despite the diversity of their ideas, style or medium.” — HH

Diane Jacobs (Portland, Oregon) has shown her work from San Francisco to New York, at such venues as the SFMOMA Artists Gallery and The Getty Research Institute. She teaches letterpress printing at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. 
“Color grid is 121 different people’s hair rolled into balls…The extraordinary color range, diverse texture, and power human hair holds amazes me. I find the relationship we as a society have to our hair fascinating. The fact that our DNA make-up lies in a single hair adds to the mystique.” — DJ

Ron Lambert (Seattle) is part of Cornish College of the Arts’ Art Department. His work was most recently shown at Catherine Person Gallery and was included in CoCA’s People Doing Strange Things with Electricity II exhibit. 
“Places I’ve Watched People Sleep consists of several half spheres made of acrylic mounted to the wall. Under each sphere is a different image of a place where in one week I saw someone sleeping. Most are of places where homeless people have slept.”— RL

Allison Manch (Seattle) is Art Director for Rivet Magazine. She earned her MFA candidate in Photography, and is a photography instructor at the University of Washington. Her work has been shown at Zeitgeist Coffee, Threadshop and in Works on Paper at the UW’s Jacob Lawrence Gallery, curated by Greg Kucera. 
“Interviews conducted with the subjects of my photographs influence these handkerchief samplers. I have not yet befriended any public figures, but I own a TV and read tabloids. Occasionally these strangers influence my work as well.” — AM

Edward Ancher Nelson (Seattle) His work was part of a Seattle Print Arts exhibit in Shenzhen, China this year. He has been part of Art Detour and Little Things Count at CoCA. 
“Each person in the picture has one tag connected to them, saying various things like The Hungry, The Compassionate, The Moody, The Shy, The Exalted.” — EA

Karen Reimer (Chicago) earned her MFA at the University of Chicago and has shown her work extensively, at such places as The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Chicago Magazine named her an “Artist to Watch." Karen Reimer works in fabric, often manipulating the image of college-ruled notebook paper, in various colors and textures. In one work she employs green fabric for the body of the paper, while another uses a sheet, onto whose upper left-hand corner is stitched the lines and margins of notebook paper. Reimer transcribes a mundane object into something both tangible and immediately larger than itself.

Ariana Page Russell (Seattle) earned her MFA in Photography at the University of Washington and her MFA thesis work was named a Seattle Weekly Pick. She has been involved with Rivet Magazine, Strange Co., and has curated shows at CoCA and Sand Point Gallery. 
“As it happens, my own skin is extremely sensitive and reactive—blushing easily and swelling at the slightest contact. Although it may appear to be, it is not painful as this surface swells with intense pinkness. I trace a corporal record directly onto my skin, then use mirrors to afford different points of view as I document the puffing process. I am model, photographer and marker.” — APR

Dan D Shafer (Seattle) teaches in the Design Department at Cornish College of the Arts. His design work was given honorable mention by the Adobe Design Achievement Awards (2004) and has appeared at adbusters.com. 
“I have been recording the places I go around this new town on a sheet of paper layered over a map. Each day of the week gets a different color, and the marks are different whether I walk, bike, drive or ride the bus. The whole idea is to catalog the routes I typically take and see how they change over time.” — DDS

Catalog has been produced with financial support from Art Patch.