Daniel Carillo is the Seattle photographer who makes portraits of artists using an antique technique that "makes you look like your own ancestor," says our own Bethany Jean Clement. So many local artists have passed through his studio that it's becoming a rite of passage—and he's developing a local catalog of creators. When a major artist stopped by unexpectedly, he flew into action.

Kiki Smith and Greg Kucera came by the frameshop. Greg showed her some of my work and she agreed to sit for a quick portrait. I had no warning but I was able to take two shots. I kept this one and Kiki took the other plate back to New York. The original plate size was 11 x 14 but I didn't have enough silver nitrate in the tank to soak the whole plate. the final size of the glass plate is 10 x 12 and this is 95% of the image.

[shot with window light and the monstar3 with the wolly vitax at f3.8 for 4 seconds]

Check out more of Carillo's wet plate collodion portraits on his Flickr page.

Check out this great essay about older women saying fuck-you to the tradition that they have to cut their hair for the sake of "appropriateness."

And heeeeere's Kiki.

• A Polaroid of the artist's fingerprint while he was listening to soul music, created by sending a jolt of energy through his finger while it touched the photographic paper.

7 Minutes showed at SAM in 2008; now he has a small show of sculpture, photography, and video at Lawrimore Project called Single Channel Higher States. He's once again working with the premise and promise of altered states.

Austere minimalism is the foil and the reference for Untitled (Home Deprivation Study), a sculpture of the white bones of an unfinished sensory deprivation tank the artist built using an online kit. It resembles Sol LeWitt's white geometrical lattices, and evokes number one in LeWitt's "Sentences on Conceptual Art": "Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists."

• Untitled (Home Deprivation Study)

In the lower-left corner of a video showing flickering green lines across a black grid, there's a stack of text: the name of the song and artist being represented—like an MTV video. But there isn't any sound, and the green flicker looks medical. Shaw is taking soul songs and trying to see whether their vibrations alone, presented visually, provide any inspiration. What is it about these songs that people like so much—do the songs have a shape? Polaroids next to the video screen depict the "aura" of the artist's fingerprints while he was listening to the soul songs. The Polaroids were made using a technique called Kirlian photography, where you send a jolt of energy through something while it's touching photographic paper in order to create the image.

What all this reminds me of is Seance: Albert von Keller and the Occult, the show of late 19th- and early 20th-century paintings at the Frye, in which science and mysticism dovetail. Shaw seems to position himself as a white-coated lab scientist—or at least it's easy to imagine him this way, carrying out these experiments in building, measuring, and recording. In a 2004 project, DMT, he made video and text portraits of subjects while they took the fast-acting hallucinogenic drug.

The DMT videos (find them here) show the subjects, dressed in white and on white beds, during their brief (6- to 20-minute) high; the texts that appear on the screen are the words they used to describe the experience later. (There's also a book with the texts over pictures.) Shaw documents the gap between the memory and the experience, in addition to the gap between the regular state and the high, during which eyeballs rise up into the head and the eyes show only white. Gaps, whiteness—it's perfect, then, that when you look up at the high ceiling in Lawrimore Project's new space, what you find is a stark white fluorescent rectangle.

Just do it then. Every wall is changeable now. (Funny correction on this story.)

In Columbia, South Carolina, today, streets will be closed as partiers wait for the strike of 4 pm. That's when a $25,000 monument to Hootie & the Blowfish will finally be unveiled. There aren't pictures of the piece yet, because it's been kept very secret. But it's coming.

Hootie, you always seemed like a fine fellow. And this, clearly, was genius.

Her new installation, Pools, is at the bar The Living Room (a place where the owners dearly care about art—they're also starting an artist residency in New Mexico; more on that soon). Pools has many parts. It started with Google Earth satellite images of the outdoor pools in her hometown (including this gorgeous one). She made prints of those, and puts those prints through a photographic print-washing machine that sits in the bar as a sculpture of its own. The machine is fed by humidity from the room—Carson Romano is using the water in Seattle's air to wash the Arizona pool colors. Bouquets of dried papers are set around the room, blending decoration and documentation.

Gregory Schaffer, showing 21 small portraits at Gallery4Culture through October 29, is involved in deliberate placemaking. Unlike Seattle photographers who work more abstractly, conceptually, privately, or remotely, Schaffer takes pictures of the local unseen, broadening our collective self-portrait.

Below is Schaffer's Somali Grocery Store, MLK Jr. Way S., Seattle (2009) (for students of contemporary photography, comparisons to the iconic "99 Cent" photograph by German pop-gigantist Andreas Gursky are fun). See more of Schaffer's pictures here.

Luke Haynes is a quilting fool, and now he's got a space you can visit, where he also works. He's taken up residence at the former Howard House on Second Avenue (604 Second Avenue; look for the word "LUKE" sewn across many T-shirts in the window).

There aren't many quilts at the space—possibly they are already lying across far-flung beds—but here are a couple seen on Haynes's web site.*

Based on Grant Wood's American Gothic:

And from his Iconography series, Spatula:

^{*UPDATE: Haynes emailed to say that there are now lots of quilts hanging in the space.}

In reading about JR in the New York Times, I couldn't help but think of Seattle's own Lorenzo de Medici, who has recently been responsible for two giant portraits of local men pasted across from The Stranger's offices on 11th at Pine: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes and, now, John T. Williams.

Chris is an artist and curator. He used his own name to disagree with me about my column, and he makes some good points. Here is what he says, and my response is on the jump.

Jen,

It is natural and reasonable to question the process and the ultimate decision. However, I believe your rash judgments seem more like emotional outbursts than constructive criticisms, and I think it was in poor taste to belittle the winners and to insult the panelists since you can't possibly know what they learned during the extensive selection process.

I imagine we both would have come up with a very different list of finalists and winners than the one this panel selected... but we weren't on the panel.

We didn't see the complete list of nominated artists or know which of those nominated artists decided to submit the full application. We didn't get to review those applications or take part in the interviews & studio visits. We weren't part of the deliberation process that must have gone on between the 5 very qualified arts professionals that were on this diverse panel.

Who knows, if we went through this process maybe we would have ended up with a similar list of finalists and winners?

I am happy for these artists and thankful to Artist Trust and the Dale and Leslie Chihuly Foundation for creating this award.

Posted by Chris Weber

Curran's version—an inversion (an inversion of a perversion? the inversion of your perversion is your friend? I digress)—was a hit at the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival this year.

Instead of one swan, there are two, their heads and long necks resembling Leda's spread legs, the couple becoming one body. The double-crotch is a furry toy lion with a blooming rose for a head.

The whole thing is mechanized, gyrating as you walk in and out of the gallery, dripping with feathers and jewels. You see it in broad daylight, but by rights it should be in a dark room of its own, under a faint spotlight, doing its thing.

• STEVEN MILLER
• Pol Rosenthal and Rachael Ferguson in Implied Violence's The Dorothy K: For Worse, For Better, and Forever

In this week's paper, I take a stab at talking about what the hell it all might mean. IV is literal and low-tech, American and resistant in all directions.

Throughout Saturday's performance of The Dorothy K, Mitchell stood at a microphone and evenly told the others what to do—"Larger bounces, please," "Thank you, archer," "More, Lily," "Start the sequence, please."...

The performers followed every cue, but struggled as they grew more tired, colder, and wetter. Were they overly obedient—broken, like horses?—or super-strong? Framed by the concrete columns of the museum building, the choreography often dictated that they move in synchronized pairs or groups, calling to mind contemporary Chinese performance art. How is "breaking" a group different from "breaking" an individual? What about "breaking" an audience? The onlookers stood in the rain for hours.

The Heidelberg Project is, by all accounts, unbelievable, and it's 24 years in the making—and keeping on. Here's how DP describes it all (photos by DP, more on the jump, and even more here.)

I forget which friend told me about the Heidelberg Project, but I decided to go by once I got into Detroit, because I got there hours before I thought I would. As I was driving up, it was just typical Detroit, meaning some abandoned buildings right in the middle of otherwise populated neighborhoods. I pulled up to Heidelberg Street, and made the left, and the whole street was just an explosion of color.

I got out of the car and didn't really know where to start. Walked by a house covered in...stuff, and a homeless guy asked me for money. I told him I'd get him before I left. He asked if it was my first time there, then told me the artist would be by in a few. I then left him there and walked around for a bit.

When I came back to him, Tyree was there. He was just walking around at that point. I walked up and started asking him questions about the project. He was an incredibly nice guy, almost all smiles, and he didn't blow me off—I was worried I'd be just some annoying tourist to him. But while he said hellos to everyone and gave them pamphlets as they walked through, he kept coming back and talking to me.

At some point I mentioned that I came to Detroit every year for the Detroit Electronic Music Festival and the whole thing really resonated with me when he was telling me about the artists that have come through and supported the project (Derrick May, Carl Craig) and how he used to listen to the Electrifying Mojo on the radio (the guy who jumpstarted techno).

I felt silly asking him, but after 24 years, I asked him if this would ever be "done." In what was ultimately a theme for the day, he described the Project as being an expression of life—"and is life ever done?"

Looking around, it was all a bit overwhelming. There's just so much to it all, and he described how he got started. The polka-dotted house is where he grew up. That whole neighborhood went downhill with drug traffic, and he decided to change it up. So he went up to the drug dealers in the park and said he was going to start doing art there, asking if they would have any problem with that.

They said no. As soon as he started doing art, they stopped dealing in the park. Instead, they began calling him the "Voodoo Man" once he started painting crosses on the sidewalk.

Given that Seattle now has approximately 20,000 art walks, one in every conceivable neighborhood, and given that in some of them I'm really not sure there's much art at all, I've had to ask myself this question, too. Certainly there are good arguments on both sides. L.A. has the Great Artwalk debate over here.

Yesterday I got a sneak peek at Noah Davis's show at James Harris Gallery, which opens tonight. Davis grew up in Seattle. He started out taking classes in realism at the early version of Gage Academy on University Ave, then headed to the prestigious Cooper Union school in New York to study conceptual art, then dropped out, moved to LA, and eventually just decided finally to become the figurative painter he'd always wanted to be—and pretty much rocketed to the top of the art world.

He'll tell his story in next week's paper; see the paintings now, starting with this one, based on a photograph of Langston Hughes. It's called I Wonder As I Wander, and it's oil on canvas, 36 by 54 inches.

Vomit.

“What is paramount,” [Jota] Castro says, “is that [my] installations do not exist as a work of art without the participation of the public. They live because the people give them life. Generally spectators are ‘voyeurs’; With this installation, spectators can also be actors.”

This is BS because the setup is boring and obvious. It's a cross-shaped bed. In a church. That you can use. It is simply not clever.

It's good that nobody wants to be a white-cube snob anymore and everybody wants to touch things and get down in it and whatnot-have-you-and-et-cetera, but passing off mere interactivity as an end in itself is lazy.

Interactivity hereby joins such debased categories as nature, the subconscious, shock, and whimsy.

When you drive across the border into the United States from Vancouver, B.C., at Blaine (the main passageway), this is what you'll see.

That's a digital rendering of the new Lead Pencil Studio artwork Non-Sign II, which is just what it says: A non-sign. The sign part is empty air; the rest is a web of metal pieces.

I talked to the artists recently about this piece, which they were commissioned to do by the federal government as it renovated the border-crossing station. Placing an artwork on a border is a great opportunity, but a weird one, too, since something like 90 percent of people will be driving by and not able to stop for an extended look. (The piece is situated on the American side of the border, just after you cross back in, along your route back onto the highway from the checkpoints.)

They noticed the way the area is packed with signs—advertising billboards, and then, closer to the border, a proliferation of government signs. Their hope is that their sign, flying by enigmatically ("What was that?"), will add a little bit of awareness to the whole signage landscape in the border zone. Just open up a free space, really. How very American. The empty rectangle frames only a view of sky as you drive by, nothing else.*

The artists are giving a talk about Non-Sign II at 4 pm on Thursday, October 28, in the Old Main Theater at Western Washington University in Bellingham. The lecture's free.

^{*Trivia: The Peace Arch at the border was designed by Sam Hill, the creator of the Maryhill Museum of Art, which Lead Pencil Studio created Maryhill Double in homage to back in 2006. They can't seem to get away from Sam Hill.}

• Aaaaaaaaaah!

The one at right is a lithograph that costs $8,000 in an edition of 60 (it comes framed). How many you think will sell on name alone?

For the love of god, if you must take in all ancillary Picasso material, skip this tripe and visit the Picasso prints at Davidson Galleries and the Picasso prints and contemporary artists following in Picasso's footsteps at Greg Kucera Gallery—where at least the dealers support contemporary artists working in Seattle.

I don't know all of what's in the exhibition. The toughest Clarks I've seen are from the Tulsa series (1971) (but here's a tough one from Teenage Lust (1983), definitely NSFW). He's not a flincher, that one.

• Blakemore, Duncan

Here's what I wrote about it in this week's paper:

The field [of photography] is already teeming, for example, with the following: crystal-clear prints the size of cars. Pictures made of hundreds of images painstakingly compiled into one. Authoritative pictures, decisive pictures. Instant-icon pictures. Photographs made to look like paintings or act like sculptures. Picture-concepts, which are graphs rather than photographs. Photographs having an identity crisis and acting out by being antiquey, or high-techy, or overly ugly, or overly pretty.

In actual fact, it is hard enough to take just one photograph that's imperfect and alive in all the right ways.