July 3 – August 29, 2025 at A Gallery, 117 S. Main Street in lovely Pioneer Square.
Opening reception: 1st Thursday, July 3, 6pm – 9pm
Hours: 9am – 5pm M-F and during Seattle Art Fair, July 19/20, 1pm – 5pm
The installation will be lit and visible from Occidental Square 24/7 during the run of the show.

At the beginning of the year, I was contacted by someone at Integrus Architecture about installing a show in A Gallery, the space adjacent to their Seattle office. I said yes, of course, because filling a 9-foot wide by 15-foot deep by 15-foot tall blank white cube with floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, with whatever I want is exactly the kind of assignment I live for these days, somewhat inexplicably.

I say somewhat inexplicably, because I spent so many years doing more or less the same thing: representational paintings that exposed the uncomfortable underbelly of the American Dream. That underbelly now being the overbelly, those days are over and that gently satirical representational artist is out of a job. Partly because of those circumstances, and partly because of an independent, deep-seated need of an artist to periodically shake things up, I now approach every project almost as if none of my previous work existed, even the recent work. I have to re-invent my own wheel every time.

Naturally this causes me some anxiety, especially when there are deadlines, and daunting technical challenges that come up with each iteration of an idea. The scary, wobbly, uncertain feeling that replaced the relative purposefulness of the representational painter I used to be sometimes feels like a problem, i.e., that I’m doing it wrong. And it sometimes feels like the point.

This piece was especially technically challenging to execute due to its scale. There won’t be pictures of the final work posted until it’s installed and open. Assembled, it would be too large to fit in my studio. What I can tell you is this blurb I managed to eke out: A twelve-foot-tall translucent corrugated wall of geometric pattern traverses the gallery. Kinetic colored lighting projected across its angled surfaces illuminates both the unreliability of perception and the relative nature of color and movement.

Here are some photos of the various stages of the process of making it.