Issue 42.1: Materiality Launch Party & Loom Art Exhibition

Issue 42.1: Materiality

Issue 42.1: Materiality centers on a critical discourse about the built environment, materials, and sustainability. It addresses tactile engagement with the natural world, craft as a record of time, the roles of ethics, history, and technology in material choices, and Indigenous fables about timber, territory, and extracivism, among other topics.

Materiality is a rich, sweeping theme which can’t be contained by one literal definition. It can include the ephemeral—scent, a shadow, an echo. It can be the poetry of architecture, or a photograph that leaves a trace of a history—or obstructs it altogether. It can be a clay vessel casting an incantation, acting as both a transmitter and receiver, or the discolored patina on a hand-painted cabinet after years of wear, each door a slightly different shade than the rest.

Our contributors—architects, artists, and writers from London, New York, Boston, Phoenix, Berkeley, Portland, and Seattle—have shaped the spirit of this issue: Saul Becker, Kim Clements, Madeline Cotton, Lisa Di Donato, Marjorie Dial, Lydia Felty, Rocky Hanish, Nooria Hiyeri, Peiting Li, Claire Needs, Garrett Nelli, Meg Partridge, Andrew Rabeneck, Anne-Catrin Schultz, Madeleine Stearns, Loren Supp, and Nina Wigfall.

Loom Art Exhibition (July 25th - August 3rd)

ARCADE is delighted to present Loom, a five artist exhibition of work by Saul Becker, Imogen Cunningham, Marjorie Dial, Lisa Di Donato, and Jessie Homer French. Loom expands ARCADE’s Spring/Summer print journal theme “Materiality.”

Materiality is both invasive and elusive. Commonplace, substantive, and tactile, yet inherently expanding into immaterial realms. Materiality can be ephemeral—a scent, a shadow, an echo. Light turned to physical matter, texture and form captured in a photograph. It can be a distorted image imbued with traces of our present or past, obstructing our understanding of Earth and how we inhabit it. Materiality can be a vessel casting an incantation, contained to its earthly origin yet rising upwards, acting as a transmitter or receiver. It can be the discolored patina of hand welded spoons, each surface a slightly different texture than the next. It can be a hand-embroidered map tracing local fault lines, “earthquake-proof art,” meant to withstand a deteriorating and exhausted world. Our material and immaterial world woven together, echoing a peripheral yet pervasive something, a looming center without a trace.

Also check out other Arts events in Seattle, Exhibitions in Seattle, Literary Art events in Seattle.