COCA's 1998 Season

Carlos Mollura	Love at the End of the Tunnel, or the Beginning of Smart New Day: New Art from LA February 7-April 4, 1998 Official Opening: February 7, 8-11 p.m. Gallery walk-through with the artists: February 7, 6-8 p.m. The exhibition, curated by Marilu Knode, will be the first to present a hot new group of younger or emerging Los Angeles artists to a broad audience in the Pacific Northwest. Artists include: Maura Bendett, Andrea Bowers, Sally Elesby, Chris Finley, Terry Friedman, Michael Gonzalez, Doug Hammett, Joyce Lightbody, Carlos Mollura, Patrick Nickell, Michael Pierzynski, Kenneth Riddle, George Stoll, and Pae White. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 32-page, color catalogue that will feature essays by Marilu Knode and Los Angeles Times art critic Susan Kandel. The artists in this exhibition explore social and cultural shifts in contemporary life by breaking down the barriers between artistic categories and genres to create hybrid objects made of funky materials. These materials include creamy, high-end cake icing (Doug Hammett, Taming the Bull from the Ox Herding Pictures: 10 bulls, 1997), Wonder Bread bags (Michael Gonzalez, Theme Sampler No. 2, 1997) Prozac, (Kenneth Riddle's Whiskey Fountain, 1997), postage stamps (Joyce Lightbody, Mummer I, 1997), and black leather (Pae White, Untitled (mobile), 1997.) Susan Kandel, art critic for the Los Angeles Times, says "Implicit in this [exhibition] is a devotion to detail -- in terms of the perfectionism of handicraft, certainly, but also in the service of visual delight. Delight is too often given short shrift, dismissed as the lightweight cousin of jouissance. The artists in this show redeem delight: delight is its engine."
Kenji Yanobe	Survival System Train and Other Sculpture by Kenji Yanobe April 24 - June 20, 1998 Opening : Friday, April 24, 6 - 11:00 P.M. Lecture by Kenji Yanobe : Saturday, April 25, 1-2 p.m. University of Washington, School of Art, Room 3 (In the Quad) Family Day Performance :Sunday, April 26, 2 p.m. Born in Osaka, Japan in 1965, Kenji Yanobe is part of a new generation of Japanese artists currently gaining increasing international acclaim. His works are based on the same visual style as manga otaku, the sophisticated and outrageous Japanese comic book and animation culture. Made from scavenged machinery and industrial materials, Yanobe's imaginative suits and vehicles are intended for a variety of purposes. Often they are supposed to protect the user, as with Yellow Suit. Sometimes Yanobe's objects are tools for conquest, as with Foot Soldier (Godzilla), a work that can be ridden to presumably crush and annihilate one's enemies as the original Godzilla did to Tokyo. Others are used to nurture inner well-being, such as Tanking Machine, an early work that induces meditative states with its sensory deprivation tank of heated saline solution. Since these sculptures are functional and interactive, they are as technically convincing as they are absurd, displaying a fascination with gadgetry and technology's fantastic uses often found in science fiction. And, like the best science fiction, the work's initial implausibility only accentuates sobering themes beneath the surface. CoCA's presentation of Kenji Yanobe's Survival System Train and other Sculpture represents the artists' introduction to the Pacific Northwest. The exhibition was organized by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California, and curated by Renny Pritkin, Chief Curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. CoCA's plans for the exhibition include bringing the artist to Seattle.
Jet Construction	Stick Bladder Jet Construction July 25 - September 12, 1998 Jet Construction is a team of three artists and various combinations of multi-disciplinary collaborators who have been building site-specific installation projects and performance works since 1982. Sculptor Cam Schoepp and architects Mark and Peter Anderson all share extensive experience in projects which integrate art, architecture, and the construction industry. Jet Construction's CoCA installation will focus on physical sensations and the inner workings of the human body in relation to spatial environments by requiring the participant/viewer to interact with new technologies in the gallery space. Jet Construction will build a sensually interactive space, constructed of mud, rubber, steel, glass, and video projection equipment. The space will be the site of a series of collaborative performance and public experience events exploring potentials for the human body to flow outward into new forms of technology-enhanced spatial inhabitation. This project expands on a series of recent projects including a performance installation, HotPlateColdPlateMudMapSnowBlindBladderBladder, by Jet Construction in Anchorage, Alaska.
H. Sandaljian H. Sandaljian	At the Threshold of the Visible: Minuscule and Small-Scale Art, 1964-1996 October 17-December 12, 1998 This exhibition, organized by curator and critic Ralph Rugoff, for Independent Curators Incorporated, examines the uses and the value of tininess in contemporary art practices during the past thirty years. It focuses on artworks that are so slight -- generally less than three inches in diameter -- that they embody some of the specific qualities and issues associated with the extremely small, in particular, intimacy. Work by 27 artists is featured. At the Threshold of the Visible will trace the recent interest in very small size back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when artists such as Joel Shapiro created minute sculptures that activated vast areas of gallery space, and Yoko Ono evoked the infinitesimal with tiny text-and-object works. The exhibition will also focus on the exchange between viewer and object. Indeed, upon entering CoCA's 3000-square-foot exhibition space, visitors will initially confront what appears to be empty wall and a non-existent exhibition. Drawn into intimate investigations, viewers are reminded that meaning can only be constructed through their active participation.

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