Currently On View

A Video Residency

Mini Mart City Park is trying something new this January! We’re hosting a rotation of external-facing projections that activate our park and expand our programmatic offerings, all while supporting artists. We have a curated selection of three artists, whose respective artworks will be visible from dusk to dawn over the residency viewing periods listed below. Our intent is to create accessibility by bringing artworks outside of our space and normal viewing hours, and to unexpecting audiences.

Ash Frantz

January 8–11, 2026

Channel 1:

hi·dax̌
2 minutes 56 seconds (looped footage)

Channel 2:

Water Quilt V3 (Cape Flattery)
3 minute 1 second (looped footage)

hi·dax̌
Single-channel video, 2025

hi·dax̌ , meaning “ready to be,” draws from nontraditional methods of learning shaped by digital spaces and is inspired by Nadia Myre’s Acts That Fade Away. This video projection functions as an abstracted tutorial, reflecting my process of reclaiming knowledge of cedar work that has been obscured by settler colonialism and intergenerational trauma. Through woven and mirrored footage, the piece considers the barriers to learning customary practices like cedar basketry and how those traditions are reassembled from fragments and memory.

Material practice here becomes both personal ritual and political act, speaking to the resilience of Indigenous knowledge systems. Layers of opacity and partial visibility echo how certain teachings are protected or misunderstood, yet slowly pieced back together in my ongoing process of reclamation.

About the artist:

Ash Frantz (Makah) is a Seattle-based multidisciplinary artist and curator graduating this spring from the MFA Studio Arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Working across video projection, installation, and photography, their practice explores the body as an extension of land, engaging Indigenous feminism, queer temporality, and cultural resurgence shaped by distance, longing, and reconnection.

Robert Zvernia

January 15–18, 2026

Title:

robZtv: The Recent Past Is A Distant Time

Synopsis:

robZtv is the ongoing street videography project of Robert Zverina, who since 2003 has shot tens of thousands of candid micromovies using the same cheap digital pocket camera (the legendary Canon PowerShot S200 Digital Elph). Custom curated for Mini Mart City Park, this selection focuses on Seattle in the early 2000s, from cherished landmarks to vanished hangouts. Mixing public events and private moments, this chronologically organized compilation presents a time capsule of that familiar but distant world before smartphones, social media, and "artificial intelligence" rearranged our culture. Artist Statement: "The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." -Milan Kundera I'm not saying hold on to every grudge and trauma, but don't be too quick to normalize changes that might not be in our collective best interest. For those old enough to have lived it, I hope my work serves as a bridge to their own memories. For those too young to remember, I offer this idiosyncratic pastiche as a glimpse of a simpler time.

About the artist:

Robert Zverina was born in Liberty, NY to recently emigrated Czech political refugees. He grew up in various Long Island suburbs, straddling two cultures in a household that mixed immigrant aspiration with Old World defeatism, the latter compounded by a series of calamities which dogged the family and kept it bouncing from one precarious circumstance to another. Like many coping with dislocation and alienation, he turned to art at an early age in an unconscious attempt to craft his own narrative. After studying literature and creative writing at Cornell, he received an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College under the mentorship of Allen Ginsberg. Initially skeptical about computers and the internet, in 1997 he launched his ongoing Picture of the Day website (www.zverina.com), paving the way for future bloggers with an autobiographical mix of creative nonfiction, photography, and multimedia elements. Embracing the DIY spirit of the punk rock ethos that saved his life as a dispirited youth, he has self-published a novel (BUZZ), produced a series of cinema verité DVDs (robZtv), single-handedly made a feature film (One’s A Crowd), and is a founding member of absurdist musical art collective 4Shadows. Zverina lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife Sarah Kavage and two glorious cats, Sunny and Patchouli. He supports his mostly non-commercial art practice by working as a self-employed carpenter.