Town and Country Crier

A selection of Prop Up Projects from Belltown and Beyond
Buster Simpson

Gallery open Thursdays 12-6pm (with Buster), Fridays 12-7pm, Saturdays 12-6pm, and Sundays 12-7pm.

Belltown Art Walk 2/14 from 6-9pm.

Artist Talk on 2/22 at 2pm.

First Thursday 3/6 until 8pm.

Photograph by Joe Freeman, Jr.

Artist’s Statement

I believe that the work of artists often functions as the equivalent of a town crier, calling out news to the public. Traditionally, the crier's messages are of civic or community importance. The Town and Crier Exhibition presents a range of environmental and social issues, actions that inform and connect indicator, mitigator and storyteller.

In the Slip exhibition, presented are a variety of community and personal projects that have served as social and environmental sentinels, suggesting that art can be both pragmatic and poetic. These projects include a 30-year street laboratory, public works, and design team projects that range from temporary interventions, site laboratories, collaborative civic projects and public commissions.

Art as indicator and/or mitigator suggests an approach that fosters adaptive creative strategies in the face of future extinction. One project is the streetscape along First Avenue in Belltown. This was my neighborhood for thirteen years. Started as a community project in 1979, and intended as a way to create basic street needs such as seating and shade trees, the project evolved to include (for a short time) a composting commode located over a tree pit.

A more recent project, “Migration Stage," was a nine-year project on the waterfront, south of the ferry terminal. The installation references the global use a Dolos as concrete shoreline armor, now a universal form indicating rising sea levels. An anthropomorphic version of fourteen Dolosse (plural for Dolos) has been placed to create a socially engaging gathering place along the Seattle Seawall Promenade.  As the Salish Sea rises Concrete sculptures could eventually submerge or became marine habitat or be repurposed.  This is a decision left to future staging.

Most all the projects in the exhibition share the potential of being dynamic constructs, intended to wear, purge or merge with the advent of the Anthropocene.

Sea change ringing, hear ye, hear ye, see ye.  The recent Federal abandonment of climate change abatement suggests an   inability to perceive of, and equitably address the upheavals of the Anthropocene.   

Democracy trumps authoritarianism myopic thinking.