Visual Arts & Spectacles

A sampling of this Brooklyn-based sculptor’s large-scale kinetic artworks, his work has centered on the crossroads where biology, engineering, psychology, and art meet. He has concentrated on large-scale, engineered, technology-based artworks that find their inspiration at the foundations of function and recognition. His work is often focused on entropy and decay, work that becomes most alive just before it ends. Many of his ideas are derived from media but the work is physical, live, and irreproducible. For Bumbershoot, he is creating new piece that will be an artificial and continuously changing environment based on trash, salt, human will, and hot water bathing.

Can a machine make art? What happens when an artist builds a sculpture that is a machine, then leaves the machine to its own devices? Or leaves the machine for the public to interact with? The Enigma Machine asks these questions by sharing experimental and experiential works that produce art or ask for participation in the process.

Through the creation of workroom style vignettes, this exhibition presents three galleries of tear sheets, visual materials, and video that will interpret, through documentation, emerging trends in Illustration and African and Asian style. Hung salon-style, attendees will be able to comprehensively experience the latest in fashion drawing, photography, and textile/surface design.

Found and Unbound is a group exhibit of artworks that explores the use of found and repurposed objects. The relationship of mass-produced objects to our natural world and landscape is explored through this collection of sculptures, collages, and videos. Participating artists include: Sayaka Ganz, Shaun Kardinal, Guy Laramee.

For After the Riot, Reel Grrls will bring a group of artists who work primarily in combined video and performance mediums, and who are all exploring facets of gender identity, feminism, and body image with a spirit of creativity and inclusion, as well as a sense of humor. Each day, Reel Grrls will present a participatory workshops, conversations, and performances. In between workshops and performances, Reel Grrls’ participants (youth filmmakers and performers) will screen and show their work. Participants in Wynne Greenwood’s Video + Performance classes will open for each of the visiting artists’ programs. After the Riot is coordinated for Bumbershoot by Betsey Brock, Reel Grrls Director of External Relations, and Clyde Petersen, Reel Grrls Technical Director.

Magic Sync is an interactive installation of music, light, and sculpture. By manipulating a control panel, the viewer animates both sculptural and audio elements—in effect, producing a unique re-mix of the piece.

The Seattle Zombie Walk is a large flash mob that has been surprising Seattle for the last seven years. Starting as a political statement and a pub-crawl by Cleo Wolfus, the group has gathered many zombie tribes, including Seattle Thrillers and Ryan Reiter’s ZomBcon. The zombies gather several times a year to break world records, crash weddings, invade movie theaters, and startle commuters on the light rail and ferry. At Bumbershoot, they’ll be surprising festivalgoers throughout the weekend.