Image of the Day

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Still from Martha Colburn's One and One is Life, 2009 (16mm film converted to DVD with sound, 5 minutes) – currently on view at Ambach & Rice gallery in Ballard. I haven't seen the show yet but Emily and I saw Colburn's Myth Labs at James Cohan in New York awhile back and it was mesmerizing, so I'm gonna go ahead and recommend it. Visit Ambach & Rice and marthacolburn.com for more.

Myths Of The Near Future

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In the shuffle of moving I forgot to mention that Emily and I saw a really good exhibition at James Cohan Gallery before we left New York:
Martha Colburn's handmade 16mm animation Myth Labs.

It's essentially a stop-motion collage that Colburn pieced together using drawings, magazine cut-outs, historical images, and flat puppet-like constructions, and then filmed through stacked glass to distort everything slightly. The extremely high-speed story connects the pilgrims and the conquest of North America to the current epidemics of meth and religious fanaticism.

I found the content extremely unsettling and was completely blown away by the attention to detail that went into crafting the whole thing—it took Martha Colburn nine months to complete it.

The show is over now but I recommend visiting marthacolburn.com to view a short excerpt and more stills.

James Cohan's current show runs through November 15th and features the work of Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes, who also kicks ass at art, so if you're in New York go check that out.