Seattle P-I April 23, 2004
by Regina Hackett
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Seattle Weekly April 14, 2004
by Elise Richman
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The Stranger April 4, 2004
Mandy Greer's Fairy Tale
by Emily Hall
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The Stranger Jan 29, 2004
by Emily Hall
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The Stranger September 10, 2003
by Emily Hall
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OUT OF FRUSTRATION
The Priceless Works Gallery Springs Forth from Fremont
by Emily Hall
Sometimes in order to see the art you want to see you have
to start your own gallery. This is a pretty drastic measure,
of course, but it is what Ragan Peck has done.
"There were all these artists I knew whose work I liked,"
she told me, "but they had no venues to show it. There
aren't enough places like SOIL and the Pound"--and now, of
course, the Pound has closed. Priceless Works, the gallery
that arose out of this frustration, is not a cooperative,
but it has a distinct alternative-space feel: a series of
linked rooms on the ground floor of a newish Fremont
building that's not particularly easy to find (the gallery
entrance is in the alley between North 34th and 35th
Streets, and Evanston and Fremont Avenues--the address isn't
much help). When I visited the gallery recently, the rooms
had been painted the bright, slightly acidy green, pink, and
yellow of a Peter Max poster--quite a departure from the
venerable and ultrarespectable Elliott Brown Gallery (now
open online only), which once occupied the space.
Peck mounted her first show last April, with the intent to
borrow the space until it could be leased. Then she decided
not to become yet another artist brightening up a space for
prospective tenants, and she took the lease herself. The
gallery's aesthetic is evolving but distinct, and it has a
kind of urgency about it, as though tilted toward a kind of
work that Peck wanted to see but wasn't seeing. The August
show featured three artists whose work drew freely from
cartoons and graphic design as well as more traditional fine-
art forms. It's a little like Kirsten Anderson's excellent
Roq la Rue, although without the lowbrow slant; like Roq la
Rue, and like Bluebottle on Capitol Hill, Priceless Works
has what might be called a gift shop, full of
extraordinarily tempting items made by artists. (I'll be
back for the "dangerbunny" underpants.)
Peck, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design
in 2000, studied sculpture and glass art, and has gone
through the paces of a glass-blowing career, with stints at
the Pilchuck Glass School and working for someone who worked
for Chihuly. Her pedigree seems to make her open to artists
who do more than one thing, who freely jump from medium to
medium, as well as to young artists who are in the process
of figuring out what kind of work they want to make. This is
a risky proposition--there's a reason galleries wait for
artists to develop--but Peck handles it with a great deal of
respect and charm. Devi Pellerin, an artist in her early
20s, was represented last month by a handful of paintings,
some glass vessels, and a small army of little sewn bunnies
that put one in mind of voodoo dolls (Pellerin is the
originator of dangerbunny). Some of Pellerin's paintings
were clearly better than others, but there is something to
be said for seeing an artist find her feet. By the time you
get to the paintings inhabited by rabbits, collage, and
traditional Japanese elements (the game of go, kimonos,
cherry blossoms), you've seen an idea hatched, explored, and
developed.
August's show also featured Zoe Dawn Wilson's deft, furious
paintings on paper, in which certain images repeated
insistently: a skull, a remarkable hunched-over vulture, a
buzzard with a long, naked neck. (I had to admire the way
Wilson protected the opacity of these personal symbols--she
declined to provide any sort of artist's statement, and none
of the work was titled; it was impossible not to think of
Basquiat and his crown, a kind of frantic waving gesture
from the artist to the world.) And finally, there were
enormous and fantastical papier-mache garden animals, in
searing colors that complemented the walls, by Francesca
Berrini (who had some torturously cut-up and amazingly
reassembled maps in SOIL's Speak 'N' Spell a few months ago).
For now, Priceless Works is open only on weekends while Peck
makes a living as a freelance glass blower. "But I'm
thinking," she said, "of putting an end to that."
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