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ConWorks: A Year Later

By Carrie E.A. Scott

Almost exactly one year after the board at Consolidated Works (ConWorks) dismissed the art space's Founding Director, Matthew Richter, the doors to the South Lake Union warehouse have opened once again in earnest.

While there has been some sporadic programming over the past few months, the new series—complete with theater performances, concerts, and six visual art projects—is the first comprehensive use of the interdisciplinary warehouse since the space went quiet last February.

And, as the saying goes, what a difference a year makes.

From the reconfigured entrance that now shows the entirety of Barry McGee's stunning mural to the addition of newly built walls and other structures that make the space more intimate, ConWorks does indeed feel like a different place.

Regrettably however, while the performance and concert schedules are full of strong work, the visual arts aspect of ConWorks' latest series leaves much to be desired.

With no coherent vision behind the show—save the very general theme of 'politicizing'—the whole thing feels a bit untailored. The works do not specifically relate to one another nor does there seem to be a strong spatial flow between the newly separate galleries.

For example, the three rooms filled with work from the famous 'culture jamming' collective Negativland do not clearly connect with one another on a thematic level, and, inviting even more division, the galleries that show the work of the collective are themselves physically isolated from one another.

What is more, jutaxpositions between the different artwork in the series simply do not work.

When Alan Hurley's murals in the ConWorks bar are, for instance, posited against the agressive installation by The Bread and Puppet Theater, the pairing does not invite connection or complement. In other words, the works do not make sense if one is to treat them as a whole. They stand as disparate, singular elements, not a coherent, plausible whole.

None of this is especially surprising as a team of people—rather than a single curator—pulled together the work in this exhibition. While ConWorks Director Corey Pearlstein hoped to emphasize the interdisciplinarity of ConWorks, this first take on a collaborative curatorial model has resulted in fragmentation.

But to give credit where it is due, when viewed as discrete experiences, some of the art works well. This is thanks mostly to Dan Bartell, who is responsible for bringing in both the work of local artist Gary Hill and of Negativland. Not only is this the first time that Hill's Accordions (2001) has shown in Seattle, but it is also the first time a work of art has not been consumed by the enormity of the main gallery, which weighs in at a staggering 4,500 square feet. Hill's five projections breath life into the warehouse. The artist rewards your continued attention as each one slowly builds tender portraits of Algerian men and women through a kind of percussive and somewhat abrasive visual construction.

"Accordions"
The Belsunce Recordings, July 2001
Five-channel video/sound installation
Photo Credit: Paul-Emmanuel Odin and Vincent Bonnet
Installation: La Compagnie, Marseille, France 2002

In another room, Negativland's Deathsentences of the polished and structurally weak is brilliantly tragic. Photographs of crashed cars are paired with notes and letters. We naturally connect the life captured on paper with the destroyed cars. Questions arise: Are the people to whom the letters belong dead or alive? Where did the letters come from? What happened? The piece is part crime scene, part cemetery, with the notes acting as epigraphs on a tombstone.

And so, with Accordions and Deathsentences to visually bookend the rest of the series' programming, ConWorks' reopening is ultimately exciting.

While last year's firing of Matthew Richter and the resulting consequences were incredibly unfortunate, it would have been an atrocity had ConWorks gone belly up.

But it hasn't. The fact that Seattle is still home to the potential brilliance of this 4,500 square foot gallery (and 3 additional exhibition rooms) dedicated to showing contemporary art outside the traditional gallery/museum setting is, in and of itself, worth celebrating.

This center where art of all genres flirts, collides, and converses continues on. And thus, there's ample time for this new curatorial model to be finessed.