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Gentrification and Appropriation, the Tagger and the Voyeur: Chinatown in Transition

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The walker in the city is an innocent and a dreamer. The walker in the city is a tourist, a voyeur, an appropriator and thief. Always with a camera, alert to the capture.  And now run home, to flaunt the souvenirs of beautiful decay.

Little Cuba At Jackson, © Iskra Johnson
Little Cuba at Jackson © Iskra johnson

And if the walker has no home but a shopping cart and a space under the Dearborn exit ramp, the walker in the city is a “vagrant,” a word that seems like it should come from the same root as “vacant” but does not.

This person asleep unconscionably at 1 PM under loud traffic is also a thief, stealing a sense of comfort and safety from the other walker, the one with the cellphone held up looking anxiously sideways and sniffing: homelessness doesn’t smell so good.

The support system for the first walker is an entire technopolis devoted to the instant global image stream and the fine distinctions aficionados can make within the pungent hashtags of #ruinporn, #beautifuldecay, and #grime_nation. The support for the second walker is thin, but offers here and there the generosity of climate, a spare dollar, free food or a freestanding and temporarily private toilet. [Read more…]

Surface Queries and Technical Notes on Wax and Vanished Colors

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Attempting to mix a true match to the vanished quinacridone gold.
Attempting to mix a true match to the vanished Quinacridone Gold.

There are certain colors that just made life so much easier. Not to mention more luminous and radiant with saturated contentment and possibility, as if one were looking through a glass of lillet from a cafe in Firenze, just before dinner. Or surveying the vineyard from the ramparts, in a good year. And this color was not a cheap trick, although it could be used that way.

I am speaking, of course, about the dearly departed Quinacridone Gold, taken from us by unknown and sudden circumstance when I wasn’t looking. [Read more…]

In Defense of the Back Yard: Urban Density and Urban Eden

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Watering_can_spring

If I start this little essay with a Latin name will you stop reading? If I say “cornus controversa” for instance? I could say “dogwood” of course, but since this piece is not about dogs and only indirectly about “wood” why not go bold, if obscure? Common names can be so misleading, rather like those movie reviews which prevent you from weeping at the heroine’s tragic fate because in the back of your mind you keep hearing the movie was just a “tear-jerker.” I sometimes catch myself wondering if my favorite tree is really as beautiful as I think, or if it is in fact just a frantic panting mess, a dog slobbering on my knees and ripping up the Irish Moss. But then I go back to rolling its proper title under my tongue.

As in, “the other morning I had my back turned to the cornus controversa when I heard a sound of wings.” [Read more…]

“Making and Breaking” at Linda Hodges

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I am excited to be part of the December show at Linda Hodges Gallery, curated by Dale Cotton. The artists gathered for this exhibition share my fascination with the aesthetics of the urban industrial landscape and its emotional undertow, the demolition of place and sense of home.

“Making and Breaking”

Dec 4, 2014 – Jan 3, 2015
1st Thursday Artist Reception, Dec 4, 6-8 pm

316 First Ave. S. Seattle, WA 98104
Gallery Hours: Tues. – Sat. 10:30-5:00
Tel: 206-624-3034
www.lindahodgesgallery.com

“Making and Breaking” is a group exhibition of paintings, sculpture, and photography devoted to things that are built and then erode, are altered, or destroyed over time. We are very much aware of this in the rapidly growing city of Seattle. Change is the operative factor, and technology, economic decision-making, and time are the implements that guide it. From Kevin Wilson’s steam shovels and Dan Webb’s wooden tools, to the weathered and abandoned barns of Daphne Minkoff and the proliferating housing developments depicted by Ryan Molenkamp, to Dara Solliday’s Regrade images, each artwork tells a story of growth, destruction, and change.”

Other artists in the show include: Patti Bowman, Laura Hamje, Daniel Hawkins, Jeff Mihalyo, Michael Paul Miller, Daphne Minkoff, Ryan Molenkamp, Jeff Scott, Dara Solliday, Timea Tihanyi, Sylwia Tur, Thuy-van vu, Dan Webb, Kevin Wilson, Dane Youngren

Below, one of the prints I will be showing. This piece is part of a series looking at the construction projects at the University of Washington. I stood for many hours on the University Bridge studying this dormitory as it went up. The complex is now finished, but I dearly loved the tarps and scaffolds: the “making” phase revealed, and here frozen in time.

Invisible Children, Archival Pigment Print
Invisible Children, Archival Pigment Print, © Iskra Johnson

Jim Dine at Wright Gallery | The Last Days of Dexter Avenue (As We Knew It)

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It’s a day when the news provokes long discussions of despair and bewilderment on my social media feeds. I find myself in a desperate ricochet between fear of plague, spreading wildfire and epic drought, and I can’t stop thinking of the numbers in Gaza, numbers attached to bodies, bodies attached to the fact of children and hospitals and schools and what can only look to me like slaughter of a trapped people. I hold up a dollar bill and consider what part of it to tear off to protest my taxes going to mortars and grenades.

As I sit in miles of hot stalled traffic I feel increasingly bludgeoned by things beyond my control. This traffic jam is brought to the Emerald City by the Blue Angels. Each summer the freeway closes to honor the Navy’s elite flight squad and the quaint ritual of military preening that carves the sky with white ribbons and shatters eardrums of those below. All I feel as I watch the jets dive between skyscrapers and lilt upward from my rear view mirror is dread. Gaza seems right here, right here in my lap.

I am on my way to see the Jim Dine exhibit at Wright Gallery. [Read more…]

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