Thanks to everyone who showed up for last weekends opening for "Keeping Score" and made it an overwhelming success! It was hot hot hot (literally)! Several people have asked me to get them more information about the people and projects on display in the gallery, so here goes! Let us know what you think. We always love hearing from you.

-Jared

(Image: "Jagged", by Joanne Kim)

Anna (Oxygen) Huff

Best known for her aerobic live performances, Anna Huff is a multi-media artist and musician. She has toured Europe and the United States under the name Anna Oxygen, performing dance pop recitals and fantasy-science performance pieces. Backdrops of video animation, made by Huff are frequently employed in her live shows, illustrating such concepts as the girl named Pretty Psychedelic who hallucinates colors, and the adventure of a Calorie searching for the end of the rainbow. More recently she has moved into mixed media audio and visual installations that invite participants to interact with various sounds and spaces.

"A PLACE TO PUT THAT" is a continuation in a series of guided meditation box lanterns. Each lantern is a different space for participants to literally put their heads, their thoughts, their huge feelings, their own experience of privacy (or lack there-of), or reflections on their own inner spaces. Each lantern contains a different audio adventure, ambient sound scape, or guided meditation, and seeks to provide alternatives to the public spaces we are given (and more often not given) to put our complex, private and potentially disruptive emotional landscapes. i.e.: Bathroom stalls, corners of rooms, cups of our hands, etc. All lanterns, sounds and songs are created by Huff with additional sounds by collaborator Karirae Seekins.

Huff has composed and released several albums of electronic music under the name Anna Oxygen, most recently "This is an Exercise" released in February on Kill Rock Stars. She has also been invited by a number of arts institutions to lead workshops in music and video production, and has been heavily involved in the Northwest arts and music community, performing at such venues as The Seattle Art Museum, Consolidated Works, COCA and The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. She won the Iron Composer Competition hosted by The Seattle School in 2004, and is currently getting her MFA in integrated media at CALARTS in Los Angeles.

www.AnnaOxygen.com

Obsessive Consumption wants to know what you buy. Obsessive Consumption wants to know what you owe. Obsessive Consumption conforms to the cliché that shopping is a favorite past time of society. Obsessive Consumption is repulsed and grossly fascinated by the branding of consumer culture. It wants to eat the entire bag of candy and enjoy the sickness that it feels an hour later. It doesn't want to be an outside critical observer. It wants to be an active participant. Obsessive Consumption wants to be serious. Obsessive Consumption wants to have fun. Obsessive Consumption wants to document and create from experiences through this over stimulating, nauseating world of consumer culture. Obsessive Consumption was created by Kate Bingaman to showcase her love/hate relationship with money, shopping, branding, credit cards, celebrity, advertising and marketing. The work is inspired by the ever ubiquitous, generic, delicate, sometimes stomachache inducing credit card statement, craft as activism, and general consumerism. She created Obsessive Consumption in 2002 when she decided that she was going to not only document all of her purchases, but to also create a brand out of the process to package and promote.

Her website, obsessiveconsumption.com, was launched in early 2003 to bring her documentation to a larger audience. She documented all of her purchases for 28 months. The documentation started on January 22nd, 2002 and ended on April 22nd, 2004. She is currently hand drawing all of her credit card statements until they are paid off and also spends her time consuming, documenting and making. Kate is a 28 year old Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Mississippi State University.

www.ObsessiveConsumption.com

Working with the ideas of place, perspective, and presence, I created part of the images in this series during my remaining months in the Pacific Northwest before relocating to Los Angeles. Neither here nor there, in a state of unknown, I was reacting to the intersections of nature and man-made environments around me. Many of the spaces depict areas such as parks, parking lots, construction sites, all fairly close to natural surroundings. It was this artificiality of the natural I was interested in, or its close proximity to the natural. Using the medium of photography, I created large scale color photographs to potentially engulf and engage the viewer into the space, not just as a viewer but as a participant.

Continuing to explore the notions of perspective in seeing, I interspersed these images with close-up photographs of nature in the Los Angeles area. I was interested in the focusing in and then moving outward - taking what we intimately perceive and blowing it up into something much larger than life. It is this moving in and out, between seeing the close and personal to the distant which I was exploring.

Joanne Kim resides in Los Angeles, CA. Currently, she teaches photography to youth throughout Los Angeles. She has shown her work in spaces in the Northwest and was part of the photo collective Thin Ice.

 www.ThinIce.org/Joanne