Exhibition review
Arts communities are often called “ecosystems,” and true to the dynamic nature of ecosystems, arts entities come and go. Some simply don’t survive changes, while others choose to end on a high note. MadArt in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood fortunately falls into the latter camp, which has allowed the team there a swan song of a show that many arts organizations don’t get to have.
More than 50 artists have work in this final show, “MAD STUDIO,” all of whom have participated in MadArt’s programming since the contemporary arts organization’s founding in 2009 by Alison Milliman. Most of the works in “MAD STUDIO” are not small — MadArt has enough space to allow artists to build large-scale installations — so the venue feels rather crowded, and these works in diverse media were not curated to a theme. Someone walking into MadArt for the first time may wonder what ties them all together, even if they delight in the objects. Put simply, the show succeeds as a fan-service anthology, in which audiences can relive experiences they’ve had with MadArt’s projects.
That said, only a minority of the artists in “MAD STUDIO” have work that directly references their past installations, such as Troy Gua’s “Chrysalis Maquette,” a tiny plastic-wrapped model of a house, referring to a full-sized house that he wrapped in plastic for the “Mad Homes” show in 2011. In the same small room, a digital screen shows sprays of color and illuminated silhouettes of people waving their hands against a black background — an artifact of Maja Petrić’s 2018 installation “We Are All Made of Light,” which used motion sensors to project the movements of visitors in a vast array of 63,000 reflective threads.
Newcomers to the space have to rely on their own imagination to understand how the original installations might have felt, as no explanation is given about what the artists created in their past work with MadArt. No amount of wall text or miniatures could adequately capture those experiences, but they at least might do more to explain the ways artists’ careers got a boost through their work at MadArt. For one, Petrić received the 2019 award for interactive art from The Lumen Prize for Art and Technology.
Rick Araluce, who would be another example, calls his 2014 installation “The Great Northern” “a watershed moment” in his career. Araluce primarily creates tiny, uncanny dioramas, and his representative work in “MAD STUDIO” is one of those dioramas. But he went big with “The Great Northern” — a half-scale facsimile of Seattle’s Great Northern train tunnel. Attention for “The Great Northern” got Araluce an invitation in 2017 to the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery to create “The Final Stop,” the gallery’s first-ever immersive installation.
He is not the only artist to have worked with the Renwick following MadArt. MadArt Studio’s inaugural exhibit, “Middle Fork” by John Grade, traveled to the Renwick, then to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and now hangs in the lobby of Seattle Art Museum. It’s a salvaged wood sculpture of an actual tree near the eponymous Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River, and that piece set the tone for MadArt in a critical way by inviting members of the public — some of whom just happened across the art space as they walked down Westlake Avenue — to participate in its creation.
For “MAD STUDIO,” Grade has contributed an ovoid sculpture made in a similar fashion of reclaimed wood chunks. It’s a medium and style that Grade used even before “Middle Fork” but has since become his calling card, in works large and small. It hangs in pride of place near the front of the exhibit.
The “ecosystem” of SLU will be a little less vibrant with MadArt’s disappearance, but Seattle’s broader arts ecosystem continues to adapt. Nothing is currently set to fill the void of large-scale installation art, though the small-but-scrappy METHOD Gallery in Pioneer Square shows exclusively installation art in its corner space at the Tashiro Kaplan Building. Meanwhile, Base Camp Studios 2 and the new Bumbershoot arts center in Belltown have the square footage for those kinds of installations, even if they are not exclusively made for that.
For the uninitiated, going to “MAD STUDIO” might feel like being a plus-one at a wedding — not getting the inside jokes or even knowing the people getting married — but it’s still a fun party. And the show succeeds as a celebration of MadArt’s tenure here, and the success of the artists who have made MadArt a place worth visiting.
