Show: February – March, 2018
Reception: February 2nd, 2018 6pm – 10pm

Artist Statement: Our inner workings are a mystery.  To varying degrees, all of us struggle to express what is going on inside and reconcile that with our experience in the outer world.  What if your inner world were tilted, off of its axis, just enough to make you stumble for no reason.  What if your inner workings were affected by vertigo and didn’t make sense to even you at times.

Mental health/illness is very like diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease or chronic respiratory disease.  It is an illness.  It requires medical care, medications, habit change, diligent self-care and therapy.  No one suggests that someone with heart disease should ‘buck up’ or ‘just get over it’.   Unlike with other illnesses, we can’t do blood tests for depression or biopsy for Bipolar which makes it extraordinarily hard to diagnose and treat.  Medications for depression, for instance, may help with suicidal thoughts or may cause significantly more depending on “if they work for you”.   The experimentation continues until something helps.  And all of that is assuming you have health insurance to help pay for it.Mental illness not only drains those who battle with it, it also drains our economy.  Mental health disorders are one of the five most costly conditions in the US, as much as cancer treatments.  We pour over $60 billion into our mental health systems annually.

Mental health costs are the largest single source; larger than cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease, cancer, or diabetes. Mental illness alone will account for more than half of the projected total economic burden from non-communicable diseases over the next two decades and 35% of the global lost output. Considering that those with mental illness are at high risk for developing cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, and diabetes, the true costs of mental illness must be even higher.3

National Institute of Mental Health. (2011, September 28). Director’s Blog: The Global Cost of Mental Illness [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2011/the-global-cost-of-mental-illness.shtml

• Both ‘Deluge’ and ‘Storm’ are about depression: being unable to feel joy in any experience.
• ‘Unwinding’ is about feeling out of control of one’s mind or thoughts.  The illness will take what it wants and leave you with very little left.
• ‘That’s Mine’ is about loss.  The loss of the future you had hoped for.  The loss of relationships because you can’t do what needs to be done to keep them.  The loss of self as the illness changes you.  And the will to fight that loss with determination and discipline.
• ‘Distillation’ and ‘Alchemy’ are about finding medication that works.  It is so very much like putting lead in a beaker, distilling it and hoping you get gold.
• ‘Imbalance’ is about the frustrations and side effects of medications.   Often medications for anxiety makes you sleepy or dull.  Medications for depression can make you feel apathetic or flat: by trying to keep your chemistry from dipping too low it also limits how joyful you can feel.
• ‘Old Friend’ finds one having accepted the current reality.  That this illness has been and will be hanging around for a while. It can be and must be lived with.
• ‘I’m Fine’ is a piece about how mental illness is perceived by our society and what is going on inside.  This piece was a collaboration between myself and a family member who wrote the text.
• ‘Worries Blind Us’ show the frustration of how anxiety can blind us.  It causes to enter fight or flight, which happens in our reptilian brain.  We can no longer access the frontal lobe where are capacity to problem solve comes from.

Mental illness is an invisible enemy which changes our inner workings.  Perhaps it is time to stop saying “I’m Fine” and start saying “I have anxiety and I am having a tough day.”   Those who suffer and those who care for them need to speak out, when able, to paint the picture for others who can’t see these illnesses.

To fight it we need to see it.

The December 2017/January 2018 show will feature the work of local painter Al-Abboud. Working primarily in acrylics, he creates complex and textural pieces reminiscent of mosaic tile work and often incorporating texts and symbols.

Artist Statement:

After spending two years as an architecture student, I realized that I wanted to be an artist instead of an architect as my family wished, even though it meant burning bridges and relinquishing emotional and financial support. I accepted the sacrifice as a price all artists must endure. I then forged into a new way of living as an artist.

Although I had changed my major, those early years studying architecture came to influence my artwork, which reflects the discipline of geometric patterns within which complex messages can be discovered. Duchamp’s cubist-style “Nude Descending Staircase” and Dali’s “Madonna” inspired me to create images that change according to distance and angle, not unlike one’s evolving perspective of the world across time and space. Such perspective invokes wonder, invites questioning and raises the consciousness of the viewer.

My detailed work is done with acrylic paint except for a brief experimentation with screen-printing, which was influenced by my career as a graphic artist. Working with acrylics fits my style while serving a practical function as I work over the entire canvas and need it to dry fast. Literature, music and travel provide a never-ending source of inspiration.

The March/April 2017 show will feature powerful photographs documenting movements, political protests, and community actions. The three sets of photographs in the show are very different from each other, but all bear witness to the power of the people to rise up against unjust authority and oppression.

Artists and Curators:

Esse Quam Videri of Typonexus brought together a collection of images captured by six different photographers during the Ukrainian uprising of 2014, also known as the Euromaidan Revolution (Революція гідності, Revoliutsiia hidnosti). Each of the images in the collection shows an intimate proximity to intense conflict during a significant period of history in the Ukraine.

Naomi Ishisaka has been documenting the powerful imagery of Black Lives Matter protests in the greater Puget Sound region over the past several years. Each of her photographs is striking individually, and together they form a well-documented overview of movement and momentum in the streets.

Last year Alex Garland spent three days at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, documenting the protests led by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through their tribal lands.

NOTE: 20% of the gross income from this show will go directly to the ACLU of Washington.

October’s show is a remounting of Darius X’s “A Boy Named Soo,” which was presented for the first time at Gallery 4Culture last February. This group of linoleum block prints created over a 12-year period represents an extensive exploration of the various intersecting elements of the artist’s personal identity: trans-racial Korean adoptee, trans* man, Queer Person of Color, Asian-American, resident of the Pacific Northwest.

Artist Bio: Darius X fell in love with the craft of linoleum block printing when he took an art class at his Tacoma, WA high school. He finds inspiration from traditional Japanese woodblock artists, modern pop artists as well as his natural surroundings and communities in the Pacific Northwest. His artwork has been featured on the cover on the Adoptee activist anthology “Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists” by the Vance Twins. He has shown work throughout the Pacific northwest and in S. Korea. He has been a teaching artist at the Wing Luke Asian American Museum. He was a member of IDEA Odyssey Art Gallery, a visual arts collective promoting cultural diversity, community and economic development in the International District. In 2003, he co-founded the Queer People of Color Liberation Project (QPOC LP) and created a mixed media performance series that focused on racial and gender oppression. He has studied at School of Visual Concepts, Seattle Central Community College and University of Washington.

The show will be up for the entire month of October. Join us for the artist reception on October 6th, during the B-Town Beat Art & Music Walk.