Visit Shift Gallery at Booth A43
at the Seattle Art Fair: August 1-4, 2019
CURATOR
We are delighted to have Nichole DeMent curate our booth this year.
DeMent has worked in the arts for almost two decades as an artist, educator and cultural producer. In addition to creating her own artwork and teaching, she empowers contemporary artists with exhibition and career opportunities while advancing contemporary art & culture in the Pacific NW in her role as Executive & Artistic Director for CoCA (Center on Contemporary Art) in Seattle, Washington.
ARTISTS
Jodi Waltier
Jodi Waltier is including new studies of a collection of miniature chairs rendered in oil at this year’s Art Fair. Her varied compositions take color queues from disparate sources as jumping-off points and are used as a way to self-instruct. Known in the community as a ‘collector/distributor’ of art materials, and acutely aware that ‘wherever you go, there you are’, Jodi took personal note when a friend gifted her a huge stack of art books. Intrigued that all of them where dubbed Great Museums of the World, she just had to look thru every last one. This begat stage two of a journey that she started in 2018 whereby she took images from an old Hokusai calendar of various views of Mt Fuji and morphed them with shapes of sinuous tendons from her visceral healing series of 2017. Working in printers’ ink, her challenge was to let Hokusai ‘teach’ her about color mixing and composition. The answers to her questions lie in the doing, the riffing on some tidbit another has left behind for the finding. It was strenuous and rewarding exploration. She craved more.
Current influences are Cranach the Elder, Mayan frescoes, and the Pahari school of painting.
As a creator, Jodi is first and foremost interested in freedom–complete liberation from any constraints. Shift Gallery continues to be an incubator for pushing the confines of comfort in her art practice.
David Traylor
Traylor will be showing ceramic pieces that are inspired by both natural and mechanical forms and patterns.
He very much appreciates being a Shift member as it gives him an opportunity to share new ideas and new works with a wider audience.
Amanda C. Sweet
Tidal motion informs South Carolina-born abstract artist Amanda C. Sweet’s symphonic relationship to nature. The embrace of chance operations combined with recently adopted materials—acrylic spray paint and handmade stencils—has opened new possibilities for her layered and echoing perceptual mark-making. Sweet recycles all material left over from finished works into new paintings and works on paper. All artworks are thus connected, each a part of one cyclical process.
Since joining Shift in 2019, Sweet has shown a new collection of paintings, paper quilts, and gridded collages in a solo exhibition titled “Fugue in Blue” at their Pioneer Square location. As a new member, she appreciates and values her freedom to create and curate work that best represents her artistic vision. The gallery has served as an incubator for new ideas, a window for exposure in the community, and a source of valuable critical feedback. As a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Washington’s School of Art, Sweet thrives on the fellowship of artists in supportive environments rich with interdisciplinary practices.
Anna Macrae
Anna Macrae will be presenting all new work at this year’s Seattle Art Fair. This body of work is complex in its structure and composition as it describes apparently mundane events and narratives. Embedded layers of unconventional materials provide a deep connection between the past, the present, and the inhabitants therein. Her work tells the story of moments in time, valuing those small pieces that make up the seemingly average.
Being a Shift member has given Macrae a strong presence in the Seattle art scene, which has been a great source of networking and opportunity. She enjoys the freedom to experiment with new ideas, and the collaborations that this brings. She sees Shift is a unique gallery where artists come together to explore their creativity in a supportive and nonjudgmental space.
Karen Klee-Atlin
Karen Klee-Atlin is showing Granite Spit at the Seattle Art Fair this year. It is from a new series of twelve linocuts which focus on a ridge of weathered granite near a North Ontario lake. The stone, smoothed and exposed by glaciers and encrusted with lichen and scrub, provided her with a subject that was well suited to the slow work of carving and the accretion of inky layers.
Being a Shift Gallery member has provided Klee-Atlin with community, discourse, and a space in which to present her work and to enjoy the work of others. It has been instrumental in her studio practice by ensuring ongoing dialogues with viewers of various backgrounds and interests.
Karey Kessler
Karey Kessler’s recent work explores the spaces between–between place and thought, between space and time, between the external world around us and the internal worlds within. Using the imagery of cartography, she creates a network of thoughts about the environment, the expanse of geologic time, and the vastness of the cosmos.
As a new member of Shift Gallery, Kessler is grateful to be part of an engaging, welcoming and supportive artistic community. Being in the company of so many talented artists at Shift provides a much-needed camaraderie for artists trying to navigate the broader art world.
Leah Gerrard
Gerrard uses basketry techniques and steel wire to create abstract sculpture, and in doing so, she attempts to achieve connection through form.
She enjoys being a Shift member because it feels like a community where she can learn about herself through working with others. The opportunity to have a guaranteed show every year allows her to pull back slightly from the business of marketing and enjoy making the art.
Cynthia Hibbard
At this year’s Art Fair Hibbard will be showing four paper mosaics composed from bits of fashion and National Geographic magazines. They are glimpses of airport tarmac markings spied out the windows of jets she’s travelled on to various parts of the world. She is drawn to the random and mysterious in both the natural world and industrial landscapes. The cryptic language of striping, numbering and lettering on asphalt byways intended only for pilots is intriguing to her.
A Shift Gallery member since 2013, Hibbard appreciates the artistic freedom of expression, the privacy of sales transactions, the democracy of group decision-making and the unquestioned communal support that each member enjoys in showing their work unencumbered by rules, restrictions or commissions.
Stephanie Hargrave
Hargrave is showing sculptural work at this year’s Art Fair. Biomass was developed at a Brooklyn residency in March. The black crocheted yarn and thread cluster densely with steel wire and dried pods to represent the disproportionate amount humans contribute to the overall biomass. Obeisance is comprised of porcelain, encaustic, paper and steel wire. These works are limited in palette, emphasize materials, and embrace negative space. Her artistic influences include Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse among others.
Hargrave enjoys the creative freedom that her association with Shift provides.
Robin Arnitz
Arnitz wants viewers to be able to put themselves in her works by imagining themselves in the voided figure and to feel the emotion created through expressive mark making. “People are so much alike, so I hope to inspire connection or empathy through highly personal images.”
She loves the freedom and community that comes with being a part of a collective, and feels in power of her art practice and supported by the other members.
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