Results tagged “popsurrealism”

Roq La Rue remains our favorite local gallery, still going strong after 10 years in business. They were closed all last month after their anniversary show, undergoing some remodeling and giving owner Kirsten Anderson time to relax (and travel to Amsterdam). Tomorrow, though, the gallery reopens with a new show: the return of Roq regular Brian Despain and the debut of Victor Castillo. In honor of the occasion, we interviewed her (again) about lessons learned and what's new.

      

Nothing says "Happy anniversary" like a group show, so that's how Kirsten Anderson and Roq La Rue are celebrating the gallery turning 10. Anderson didn't have any experience running a gallery when she started Roq La Rue, but she loved lowbrow (we don't think she'd coined "pop surrealism" yet) and thought it deserved an awesome venue.

If there's one thing you can say that the artists whose shows opens tonight at Roq la Rue have in common, it's that they both really like women. Esao Andrews, an NYC-based artist, likes to contort the feminine form into the oddest situations: stuck inside the bowl of a flower vase, riding a giant swan, or with a head blasting hot air into the sack of a hot air balloon. Japanese artist Fuco Ueda is a bit dirtier: many's the knock-kneed girl in a, shall we say, situation, whether stroking a unicorn's horn or sleeping while a shrimp swims by, emitting a blooming cloud of semen.

We've been delinquent.

Kirsten Anderson, owner of Roq La Rue and all-around supreme being, is lecturing on Pop Surealism and the rise of tonight at the Seattle Academy of Fine Art. Lectures are what made me drop out of school, you say. But this lecture is about Lowbrow art which you love, we respond. Pop art is for freaks and the Academy of Fine Art is not the right venue to talk about it, you say. "The movement is now getting grudging, if bewildered, respect from the 'High Art World,' and while it remains slightly vilified, is voraciously collected by forward-thinking collectors," the Academy says. I'm deaf, you say, what good is a kick ass lecture going to do me? There are slides, we say.

Yeah, yeah, Amazon is using tags. But Amazon.com is soooo 20th century.

Let's say you're on an airplane, sitting next to someone completely unfamiliar with Pop Surrealism or Lowbrow, but who's curious about what you do. Without using any visual aids, how do you explain the movements to her -- in such a way that the Lowbrow fan sitting across the aisle learns something, too?