Join us for the opening reception of Campers, a group exhibition curated by Mini Mart’s current exhibiting artist Hank Reavis hosted across the street at the Georgetown Steamplant.
——
Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and Margaret Callahan, artists grouped under the title Northwest Mystics, have taken their place alongside their east coast peers in American Modernist painting. Abstract Expressionism, for instance, mainly staged in New York City, is an example of a school that these artists have been linked to, and yet which they sit distinctly apart from. Kenneth Mark Levine’s 1979 documentary, Northwest Visionaries, points out that both these Northwest painters and their Atlantic counterparts formulated expressionist modalities with nature as a subject; the difference was that the dominant Surrealists and AbEx painters looked at nature within, the mind and the inner spirit, whereas the Mystics looked outwards to the landscape around them. Transposing spiritual readings onto the forests, streams, mountains andshorelines surrounding them, as well as onto their animal inhabitants, these artists inadvertently established a discrete identity for future generations of northwest artists.
To call the Mystics “outsiders” is in one sense accurate, but within the standard art historical nomenclature, is misleading: rather than being an ‘outsider’ to formal academic training, mainstream critical discourse, or the avant garde of technical innovation and trend in American Art, these artists nevertheless consolidate themselves more literally outside, away, remote from the rest of the art world. Like hermit-shamans, many of these artists followed in the paths of romantic painters of the sublime and took to the isolated parts of their landscape to commune with mystical inspiration. Decades later, new generations of NW artists continue to be compelled to find spaces to convene and create as a group, sometimes almost literally digging themselves in at ground level to create DIY exhibitions in dank freeway tunnels, unused ground-floor retail space, and live-work basements.
Set within the industrial caverns of the Georgetown Steamplant, Campers follows in this tradition, drawing on a group of artists and peers who made use of alternative spaces such as Pipsqueak (2014–15), the Basement (4414 1⁄2 8th Ave S), tunnels along I-90, and areas beneath the I-5 overpasses. Working in a manner only possible outside traditional institutions, they established art and living environments in unconventional locations, each shaped by a distinctly PNW approach to DIY.
The title of this exhibition refers to a “campsite DIY,” a self-establishing mode for art and institutional alternatives distinguished from other artist-run movements by an intention of itinerancy. Many artist groups in the U.S. have sought to establish and maintain, in perpetuity, alternative versions of the institutions that fail to serve them in some way. The artists in this exhibition, however, find spatial subjects and sites in the manner of camping: the camper finds a suitable topography and adapts around it, a place as hospitable as it needs to be for a specific moment, or until it’s no longer viable. Afterwards, it’s left behind as it was found. This way of interacting with the Local is an instinct natural to many who were raised in the landscape of the Northwest, some of whom may have been indoctrinated with the eco-activist mantra of “Leave No Trace”. In the scope of this group exhibition, a new generation of northwest mystics form a movement of neighborhood campers, packing in what they pack out.
It will also include artists from places outside of the PNW who share in the same spirit of a rooted DIY.
The exhibition will take place over a three weekends, Sept 5 – Sept 20, in tandem with Reavis’ solo presentation at Mini Mart City Park, located one block away. Visitors are encouraged to move between both venues, experiencing the works as a continuous exhibition across sites.