Seattle Blog Visual Arts

In case you hadn’t guessed from the title, Robert Davidson’s current exhibition, Abstract Impulse, at the Seattle Art Museum is, well, abstract. And it’s apparently impulsive in its confusion of titles, captions, loud colors, and shapeless forms. I walked out of the exhibition baffled.

Robert Davidson began the Northwest Coast Native art revival in 1969, when he created the first totem pole to stand in his ancestral village, Masset, since the 1880s. He has studied the artistic style of his tribe, the Haida, for years, and the exhibit holds a collection of 45 sculptures, prints, jewelry, and paintings by the artist, all based on the traditions of Northwest Native art.

Beauty through fashion photography is the focus of the Henry Art Gallery's new exhibit, Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty. Out [o] focuses on the many nuances of beauty using studio, fashion, and pop culture photography by artists from the 19th to 21st century.

I had the opportunity to walk through the gallery with curator Deborah Willis and a small group. The fluid and open gallery perfectly frames each photograph, which are juxtaposed with multimedia further enhancing the subtleties of Willis' ideas about media, and how different forms of beauty interconnect with each other.