Nik Weisend

The fall of the Shoe Building left a gaping hole in the Seattle arts community, forcing many artists to search frantically for affordable studio space and for spaces to meet and exchange ideas. ArtStar has created such a space. Located next to Safeco Field on First Avenue South, ArtStar gives artists the opportunity to create art affordably, offers the possibility of public exhibition, enables artists to be in the company of fellow artists working in a wide variety of mediums, and enables artists to work in a supportive environment deeply committed to the greater Seattle community.

The first public exhibit opened November 3rd, 2000, featuring sculptures by Nik Weisend. Weisend, a Seattle artist, works with the Degenerate Art Ensemble; he uses a surprising variety of found objects and unorthodox materials in his assemblies. Live music will be provided by HighRize, a Seattle jazz band, as well as other performers.

The organization is based on the values of community and creativity. Following these tenets, we will advocate on behalf of Seattle's artists and its arts, and contribute to the Seattle community by offering educational programs--beginning with a photography class offered jointly with Coyote Junior High School. Our exhibits will draw from both local and national artists, including both emerging and internationally known figures, working in all mediums.

We're excited by what we can contribute to our community. We invite you to be a part of it.

First public exhibition and artists reception is Friday, November 3rd at 6:00 p.m.
Live music, performances, and open studios.
Exhibition ran from November 3rd till December 16th, 2000

Auburn Lahoski

For the previous two years Auburn decided to focus on the process of painting.
Her artist statement:

"Instead of approaching a painting with a preconceived idea, I allow the piece to lead me a bit. I bring to the painting my exterior influences ( what I see, what I read, etc. ) yet also allow the piece to take it's own path."

Christopher Rico

Crisper Rico, formerly a southern artist, makes his Seattle debut with a solo exhibition at L’il Red Shack Gallery entitled "Cartography". Rico's controlled oxidation painting on sheet copper, fuse together techniques of both metalsmithing and expressionist painting. The metaphor of map making is an apt one, with the works taking the viewer on a journey to imagined landscapes of depth and mystery, as if directing us to a place we have known somewhere inside ourselves from long ago.

Opening Reception: Thursday February 8th, 2001, 6- 9pm.

Raymond Kempe

Raymond Kempe, presenting "One Was Lost", is a self-taught Seattle artist who combines found objects and mixed media into compelling sculptural forms. His works often incorporate objects, which evoke the notions of decay, and the cycles of life and death. With these objects, he creates compositions and forms that give a sense of order and understanding to these cycles, that everyone must inevitably face.

Opening Reception: Thursday February 8th, 2001, 6- 9pm.

Deconstruction/Construction

In the aftermath of the 6.8 earthquake that rocked the Northwest, the ArtStar Project brings DESTRUCTION/CONSTRUCTION to the Li’l Red Shack Gallery. Evolving over a five-week period, this project encompasses performance, installation, and collaboration. The show culminates in a miniature reconstruction of Seattle’s 1st Avenue in the gallery space. The ruble that littered Pioneer Square after the earthquake inspired the reproduction of thousands of miniature bricks that over the course of the show will become 1st Avenue again.
Cycles of destruction and construction outline history be it from natural disasters, at the hands of humans, or technological progress. The bricks serve to remind all of us, of the fragility and impermance of our history. Individuals from the ArtStar Project, Northwest artists, and members of the community will collaboratively create this installation, which will evolve over the four weeks of the show. This exhibition responds to the impact that the earthquake had and will continue to have on the community.

April 5th thru May 12th, 2001: The opening reception was on April 5th, 2001, from 6 pm – 9 pm with performances and live music. The closing reception was May 12th, 2001, from 6 pm – 9 pm with performances, music, and destruction. The ArtStar Project and Li’l Red Shack Gallery opened this past November with a mission to create a space where the arts and artists can flourish, to establish an artist driven gallery, and to extend the arts into the greater community.

Fritz Westman

The Li’l Red Shack Gallery is proud to present new works by Boston artist, Fritz Westman. This body of work transforms traditionally "non-art" materials into explorations of light on a physical and conceptual level. Seemingly mundane materials, such as pushpins, road paint, and photocopies are manipulated into sensuous objects. These materials are altered not only by their recontextualization into "high art" mediums but also by the obsessive control of the materials and light.

Fritz Westman has a degree from The Museum of Fine Arts with an emphasis in sculpture. He is currently a teaching assistant in the sculpture department at Harvard University. He has shown at Gallery NAGA Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Gallery at the Piano Factory Boston, and Warde-Nasse Gallery New York. Westman will be giving a figurative sculpture workshop in conjunction with the show, on the evenings of May 22nd and 23rd.

The Polaroid Show

The Li'l Red Shack Gallery is proud to present a juried show in which the artworks incorporate the Polaroid as a medium. The process of taking a Polaroid photograph and anxiously watching it develop right before your eyes, is incredibly satisfying. This instant gratification is poignant to contemporary lifestyles where so many things are now so immediate. The concept of instant photography was developed in 1944 by Edwin H. Land, and has been fascinating people around the world ever since. This show seeks to highlight how Northwest artists are incorporating and exploring the Polaroid as a medium in their artwork.

National Poetry Slam 2001

Tuesday, July 31st thru August 5th, 2001

ArtStar Project — Li’l Red Shack is proud to host
Poetry Slam Photo Exhibition, David Huang
Photographer David Huang curated this collection of works by documenters of of the poetry slam movement that detail it’s rich and vibrant history.

National Poetry Slam Schedule of Events

Tuesday, July 31, 2001

3pm-5pm
Early registration for participants and volunteers ArtStar Project [free]

Thursday August 2nd, 2001

Noon-1pm
Workshop: Monologues
Presenter: Ray McNiece
A descriptive writing exercise-meeting with remarkable people-provides an opportunity to write from their shoes to experience the same scene from their perspective. We will then find the center of that character and explore the dynamics of a mini-play.
ArtStar Project [pay what you can, $10 suggested donation]

2pm-3:30pm
Panel Discussion: Coaching a Poetry Slam Team
Panelists share their experiences with and tips for coaching a poetry slam team. Q&A to follow if time allows.
ArtStar Project [free]

Josie Bockelman and Roger Book

The Li’l Red Shack Gallery is proud to present new works by Roger Book. He combines action painting with the emotion of Renaissance imagery to create luscious paintings that are derived from the subconscious mind and spiritual forces. He unifies these painting, which have both a strong sense of realism and abstraction, through the process of action painting. Nature, spirituality, light and color are the driving forces behind Book’s paintings.

The Li’l Red Shack Gallery is also proud to present becoming/unseen, new figurative sculptures by Josie Bockelman. These works explore the effects of our fragmented society on one’s psyche and its manifestation on the body. These raw and distorted figures confront you with the hidden emotions that are so often expressed on the physical level, quietly being performed on the body. Bockelman received her degree from Whitman College in 1999 and has been working as an artist member at Seward Park Art Studio since September of 1999.

Jon Howe and Joshua Weintraub

that's what i let myself
think
until i was able to
think
about it rationally

"It’s Just Like The Movies"

The World Trade Center crumbled before our eyes. Not so unbelievable. We’ve seen an asteroid take out whole cities. A tsunami….. aliens….earthquakes and even God level places on our big and little screens. Two or three hours later and were watching the credits roll, taking inventory of our feelings and wrapping them up before the house lights brighten. What happens when the special effects people have nothing to do with it? What happens when the credits never roll? What happens if the house lights were never down to begin with? How do we feel? How do we take inventory? When do we stop? Should we ever stop?

ArtStar Project & The Li’l Red Shack Gallery wants to help expose and explore personal responses to the shattering of our sense of safety that occurred with the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11th. The exhibition aims to open visitors to a dialogue with thoughts and feelings they may not have previously considered. This show presents the works of a variety of artists from the northwest and around the country that are responding to the World Trade Center tragedy and the world events that have followed.

Colleen Hayward, Mark Zirpel, and Claudia Hollander-Lucas

"Explorations In Drawing" presents three visual artists whose works represent personal applications of drawing as a guiding framework for a body of work. Each singular angle on drawing distinguishes the unique set of strategies by which each person manifests works in every other medium. Together they cannot but contribute to that primary and revealing activity: drawing.

All three artists are fascinated with the phenomenal: Hollander-Lucas questions cultural perceptions from her interior, driven to articulate an intellectual dialectic via codes and patterns. She rephrases her findings and propositions with a vocabulary that derives from printmaking. Hayward applies gesture as a means to an image. The structure that becomes a motif mirrors the systematic participation in acts of collecting, sorting, and layering into solid and reduced abstract forms. Zirpel investigates phenomena themselves, as elemental methods and substances. Nature comes through as magical and bound to mechanics, inspired by the beauty of the mineral and organic.

The works on view may or may not fit one's concept of "drawing", but instead they may represent the kinds of questions that lead an artist from observation to recognition and finally to creation.

Exhibition ran February 14 thru March 31st, 2002
Opening reception: 2nd Thursday, Feb. 14th 6-10pm

Marc Lawrence

Marc Lawrence's work obsessively explores the signs and symbols that decorate the city by integrating light, composition, and color with these ordinary visual elements that permeate a city existence. These sculptures are not replications of a contemporary downtown setting, but rather reconstructed samples of our surroundings.

Marc presented a series of backlit pieces that incorporate neon lighting into fine art projects, as well as series of paintings on wood.

Exhibition ran May 18th thru June 30th, 2002

"It's Just Like the Movies" The Sequel

Eleven months previous, the World Trade Center crumbled before our eyes. Not so unbelievable. We’ve seen an asteroid take out whole cities. A tsunami….. aliens….earthquakes and even God level places on our big and little screens. Two or three hours later and were watching the credits roll, taking inventory of our feelings and wrapping them up before the house lights brighten. What happens when the special effects people have nothing to do with it? What happens when the credits never roll? What happens if the house lights were never down to begin with? How do we feel? How do we take inventory? When do we stop? Should we ever stop?

ArtStar Project & The Li’l Red Shack Gallery present a second series of art pieces motivated by the events of 9/11, in advance of the emotions of the first anniversary.

Junko Yamamoto

In the The Li’l Red Shack Gallery, Junko Yamamoto presented her series of oil paints entitled Shuynata.
Exhibition ran August 24th thru September 29th, 2002

Liz Tran and Jenny Heishman

The The Li’l Red Shack Gallery presented the work of recent artists in residence at 1020 First Avenue South.

Liz Tran pieces together her surroundings to create new urban landscapes inspired by ones she has experienced. For the show, she created a series of paintings influenced by Seattle buildings.

Jenny Heishman's sculptural work is fueled by a spiritual connectedness of humans past, present, and future. For the show, she created large-scale works that described space in relationship to the viewer's body.
Exhibition ran October 3rd thru November 17th, 2002

Keith Tabellione

Keith Tabellione's newest work delved into the relationship between the objects an individual collects throughout their lives and the memories that stem from them. Tabellione contains and seals personal objects and consequently memories into jars, which create an enveloping environment that allows the viewers to examine their own memories and history. Tabellione graduated from the Musuem School in Boston and founded the ArtStar Project in 2000.

Exhibition ran December 5, 2002 thru January 12th, 2003

Patte Loper

Patte Loper's practice began exclusively with conceptually based figurative painting and the work morphed over time into an experimental practice that utilizes painting, drawing, video, installation, and performance. Her early work involved re-creating masterworks with an eye towards feminist re-interpretation. Deeply rooted in painting’s discourse, her current practice uses painterly logic to create three dimensional structures that evoke landscape and still life and link early and midcentury formalism, architectural theory, and utopian idealism. Recent exhibitions have considered the ethics of architecture, the relationship between social justice and climate change, sustainable energy technology, and intersectionality in Arab and Western identity.

Exhibition ran March 6th thru April 20th, 2003