Town and Country Crier
A solo exhibit by Seattle artist Buster Simpson
Town and Country Crier
A selection of Prop Up Projects from Belltown and Beyond
Buster Simpson
Belltown Art Walk 2/14 from 6-9pm
First Thursday 3/6 until 8pm
Gallery open Thursday through Sunday from 1-6pm
I believe artists’ work often functions as the equivalent of a town crier, calling out concepts in public. Traditionally the crier’s message is of civic or community importance, here we add construct. The Town and Country Crier exhibition presents a range environmental and social issues. These issues often inform actions creating artwork that connects indicator, mitigator and story teller.
The artwork ranges from an assortment of public art infrastructure projects, often through work that has taken a long view approach. These include a 30-year street laboratory, public works and design team projects. Other work ranges from personal interventions and community efforts or having your work repurposed knowingly or unknowingly. All share some level of social / civic engagement with consideration for site context and complexities.
In this exhibition, there are a variety of community and personal projects that have served both as social and environmental sentinels, suggesting that art can be both pragmatic and poetic, indicator and mitigator. Projects in the Slip Gallery 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. Two examples in the exhibit present a “long view” approach to public artwork. One project is the streetscape that was my neighborhood for thirteen years along First Avenue in Belltown. Started as a community project in 1979, and intended as a way to create basic street needs such as seating and shade trees, the effort evolved into a bottom up street design approach. This included, for a short time, a composting commode located over a tree pit as well as providing basic services to the Belltown street population.
The other “long view” project, “Migration Stage,” is a nine-year process completed in 2024. This iconic installation references the global use of dolosse as concrete shoreline armor. Dolos (singular) has become a universal form indicating rising sea levels. These dolosse have been modified to resemble anthropomorphic forms, a monument to the anthropocene.
The installation presently offers a series of stages, that could vary with sea rise. Presently the installation serves as a socially engaging gathering place along the Seattle Seawall Promenade at the foot of Yesler Way. As the Salish Sea rises the concrete sculptures can remain in place and serve to anchor washed up logs and root wad to enhance habitat. Eventually the dolosse would submerge becoming marine habitat. Or, the stage is set elsewhere, and the installation migrates and repurposed by future generations serving as they see fit.
The future of this artwork relies on its happenstance engagements, and the community’s imagination for repurposing and re-envisioning the next stage of the sculptures dynamic intent as mitigator to the Anthropocene.
Sea change ringing, here ye, hear ye, see ye
Photo of bells by Joe Freeman, Jr.