 Front Gallery Installation Center Gallery Installation |
604 Second Avenue, Seattle, Washington 98104 http://www.howardhouse.net Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:30 - 5pm, and by appointment  Mark Takamichi Miller: Abandoned and Thieves Sean M. Johnson: Love Seat August 28 - September 27, 2008 Opening Reception: Thursday, August 28, 6-8pm Artists' Talk: Saturday, September 6, 12 Noon
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Click here to read Regina Hackett's review of Love Seat and Abandoned and Tieves in the Seattle PI
Click here to read Joshua Lynch's write up of Abandoned & Thieves at The Seattle Weekly
Click here to read The Stranger Suggests for Abandoned & Thieves
Howard House is delighted to present two solo shows by Seattle-based artists Mark Takamichi Miller and Sean M. Johnson.
Abandoned and Thieves continues Mark Takamichi Miller's exploration of found imagery and the relationship between small scale snapshot photography and the large scale monumentality of painting. For the last few years, Miller has been using discarded and abandoned photographs as sources for his paintings, allowing him to free the work from personal references as well as enabling him to explore the way portraiture functions at a time of inexpensive and ubiquitous snapshot imagery. He invents a new method of paint application for each roll of film, resulting in drastically different looks for each series. The images in the Abandoned series had been abandoned at a photo development store that eventually went out of business. A handful of characters are depicted in several in near-identical poses, and the paintings are uniform in size and oriented vertically in classic portrait style. The acrylic paint is poured thickly only the unprimed canvas, and the portraits seem to emerge out of the abstract fields of pooled paint.
The roll of film used in Thieves was left behind by someone breaking into a car and contained images of party scenes, people high on various drugs, gang signs, and a pitbull. The paint application reflects the subject matter; it is raw and aggressive, some of the paint is burned while other areas have been thickly sculpted out of pure oil paint and then cut out leaving sharp changes in depth. Miller's paintings are both intensely abstract and figurative, and manage to be richly conceptual and materially inventive, while retaining a strong link to the tradition of portrait painting.
The building blocks of Sean M. Johnson's precariously balancing arrangements are common every-day objects; tables, chairs, ladders, books and bottles, but they function as markers for deeply complex and emotional narratives. The sculptures are still and solid but always hover on the verge of dissolution; simultaneously elusive and iconic. The fragile and tenuous set-up is never far from tumbling down, loudly and violently; an implicit danger that adds tremendous force and tension to the work. The title piece, Love Seat, is a loveseat split in half and reassembled, armrest-to-armrest; a gesture both heartbreakingly tender and dramatically disruptive. Johnson's work seduces the viewer both by the seeming magic of the set up and by the implied narrative; personal and intimate memories are displayed, as powerful and elusive as a familiar smell or sound. We are given hints of specific people and events in his life, but never specifics; he points us in the right direction but leaves it up to us to do the rest.
A recent graduate from the University of Washington's MFA program, Johnson exhibits a confidence and maturity well beyond his 27 years. Johnson has exhibited at various venues around Seattle and beyond. This is his first solo show with Howard House.