Gallery 110
September 2009
September 3- 26, 2009
Preview Reception: Wednesday, September 2; 6-8pm
First Thursday Opening: September 3; 6-8pm
Main Gallery:
Steel and Concrete: Molly Magai and Alec Huxley
Molly Magai and Alec Huxley share a fascination with the bones of the city - the unseen infrastructure that makes the rest of the city possible. Exploring Seattle's industrial neighborhoods, they seek out the fundamentals – light poles and overpasses, concrete, brick, and steel. They depict environments made not for humans but for machines – roads, airports, warehouses, factories. This can be a dark subject, with its implications of decay, ugliness, pollution, and noise, but both artists find beauty and drama in these landscapes, with their huge scale and strong lines, seen boldly against the sky. 
Molly Magai paints scenes of urban highway infrastructure: roads, vehicles, overpasses, and bridges. Her work also involves photography, albeit in a more casual way: she takes photographs from her car and creates paintings based upon them. Painting intuitively, without preparatory drawings, she emphasizes the sensual side of travel – vision and motion. In the ultimately mundane scenario of the highway, she finds darkness and decay, as well as positive things - the beauty of light and skies, and a sense of speed, distance, and escape – the pleasures most of us take in being in a moving vehicle.
In his paintings, Alec Huxley offers a series of high contrast snapshots of the traditional structures of transportation and industry and their environments. They allude to scenes from science fiction in a stylized, slightly abstracted realism. These paintings are reinterpretations of photographic images digitally merged with watercolors. The process of transforming the original image - through camera lens, to computer, to paper, then by hand to canvas - reflects the weathering of these locations; the memory of all that have layered upon and re-molded the natural landscape. Still and moody, the brick, steel, and stone, both strong and brittle, stand before gasoline skies as they are worn back into the elements.
Both artists' work is a palpable reflection of Seattle's industrial landscape. It shows the city's present and allude to its ambitious “Jet City” past. The artists document the old infrastructure as it decays, and before it is replaced with something new. These works may be seen as an elegy for the present and the recent past.
Image:
Above right: Molly Magai, Viaduct Sunset, oil on linen, 20" x 22", 2008
Above left: Alec Huxley, Georgetown Landing, acrylic on canvas, 30” x 54”, 2008
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Loft Gallery:
Stephanie Wilken: Exile and the Kingdom
In this exhibition Stephanie Wilken presents a body of work titled after a collection of stories by Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom, illustrating Camus’s ideas of existentialism and the philosophy of the absurd. According to Camus, despite the universal human need for meaning, purpose and refuge, the universe is in fact silent and unknowable. Concepts of teleology and eternal life are wishful thinking, constructions; there are no gods or god-given laws; we have only our finite lives. For Camus, the proper response to this state of exile is not succumbing to nihilism and despair but meeting this reality head-on, living with active consciousness of the absurd, reveling in the sun, the sea, the stars, and experiencing the dignity and creativity of human life without the crutches of illusion and false hopes. This is his Kingdom.
The etchings and monoprints in this series evoke the void and ache of the human condition but also offer reminders of those aspects of life that can help transcend that state--human connections, the natural world and the life of the mind.
Image: Stephanie Wilken, We are All and Nothing, Intaglio, 13” x 12”