March 23 – 30: Kevin and Jennifer McCoy present Northwest Passing, an exhibition and performance featuring completely improvised tours of Northwest master works.
Northwest Passing in an exhibition that presents work from six classic Northwest Artists as a way to ask what we mean by that very phrase “Northwest Art”. The works in the exhibition, borrowed from local government, corporate and private collections, will be paired with a series of improvised stories performed by actors and other community participants who attempt to interpret the works on display.
In this project, passing has several connotations. The performers stories pass as legitimate accounts, even though they lack any foreknowledge of the work in question. As in the transgendered sense, they are passing for experts that they may not be. Passing also points to the eclipsing of this great, first generation of Northwest Artists. The exhibition asks if their artistic ideas have passed, or if they are still in play. Finally the show is about our relationship to the Northwest. I was born and raised here, went to school here. Jennifer and I were married here and lived here for a time. Do we pass as Northwest artists?
The exhibition includes works by Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, Helmi Juvonen, Mark Tobey, George Tsutakawa.
Improvised Tours: March 23 and 24 at 6pm
Open Hours: March 27 - 30. Extended through April 6! Tuesdays-Fridays, 10am-3pm. During open hours, the artworks are on display alongside video footage from the tours.
All events are free and open to the public; tours last one hour, so arrive at 6pm sharp!
Special thanks to Douglas and Mary-K McCoy, Perkins Coie, LLP; Woodside/Braseth Gallery; and King County Public Art Collection & 4Culture for the loan of artwork for this exhibition
About the Artists:
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are Brooklyn-based artists who make projects about how our thoughts, experiences and memories are structured through genre and repetition. In order to focus attention on these structures, they often reexamine classic works of science fiction or television narrative, creating sculptural objects, video projections, or live events from what they find.
Their work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Metropolitan Museum (New York), MUDAM (Luxemburg), the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Speed Museum (Louisville), the Henry Art Museum (Seattle), La Maison Rouge (Paris) and the collections of many private foundations and individuals in the US and Europe. In addition to the above institutions, their work has been exhibited at P.S.1, Postmasters Gallery, The New Museum, the Ronald Feldman Gallery and the James Cohen Gallery (all in New York), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Miami), The Renaissance Society (Chicago), the Palm Beach ICA (Palm Beach, Florida). International exhibitions include “Future Cinema” at ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany),”Animations” at Kunst Werke (Berlin), “Villette Numerique” (Paris), PKM Gallery (Beijing) and solo exhibitions at FACT (Liverpool), Sala Rekalde (Bilbao), Gallerie Guy Bartschi (Geneva) and the British Film Institute (London).
They are 2011-12 Guggenheim fellows. In 2005 they received a Rave Award and were named Artists of the Year by Wired Magazine. In 2002 they received a Creative Capital Grant for Emerging Fields and in 2001 they received an award for New Media from the Colbert Foundation. Articles about their work have appeared in Art News, Art In America, Artforum, Flash Art, Frieze, The Wire, dArt International, Spin Magazine, Feed, and The Independent, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Liberation (Paris), and el Pais (Madrid).
Their work is represented by Postmasters Gallery in New York and Gallerie Guy Bartschi in Geneva, Switzerland.