Small is Dynamite!

...Or should we say TNT? The News Tribune arts writer and critic Rosemary Ponnekanti wrote about the Telephone Room on the GO Arts blog:

"Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Small art, fun space - the Telephone Room

Posted by Rosemary Ponnekanti @ 09:54:20 am

Laura Komada, "Untitled (bigfoot and tree)." Photo courtesy The Telephone Room.

It may be tiny, but there's a lot of art going on at the Telephone Room over the next week.

The one-room gallery inside the North-end house of artist Heide Fernandez-Llamazares is having two open houses: one today, to close the current show, and one next Wednesday, to open the next. The gallery, which Fernandez-Llamazares and co-organizers Ellen Ito and Marty Gengenbach call the world's second-smallest gallery (what's the smallest? The Tollbooth, of course), measures just 12 1/2 square feet. It's an original room in the Dutch Colonial house, built with curvy shelves to accomodate those wishing to have a private conversation on the black rotary dial phone (which still works, by the way.)

Since the room is pretty unusable for anything else, the artists decided to convert it into a gallery. It can fit about three medium-size flat works, lots of small ones, or maybe one medium installation (can't wait to see that, maybe the tiny room crammed with giant balloons a la Western Bridge?!) And since it's in Heide's house, you have to email to set up an appointment - unless there's an open house.

Which there is, tonight. The current show "Home Sweet Home," featuring Laura and Paul Komada of Seattle and Noal Nyland of Lakewood, is almost over - last chance to see it is from 5-8 p.m. Paul Komada's hand-knit Mondriaan-ish geometry mixes cozy texture and strict form in a pleasing way. Nyland (brother of Nicholas) creates a mapped landscape of greens and gray-blues with quilted fabric, the pieces chopped out like deer-bites in a rose bush, calm but disconnected. Laura Komada's watercolors are simple but strong: My favorite is the untitled Big Foot next to a fir tree, their shadows looming far beyond the reality.

Next open house is for Jeremy Mangan, who just won the Greater Tacoma Community Foundation Arts Award, and who'll be creating a life-size 3D painting of a shot-dead old-west gunfighter in a pine box. (That'll make it extremely crowded in the Telephone Room, which fits about two viewers at a time.) Rumor has it that he'll also be leading a beer mug ice-carving session in the backyard, complete with local microbrews. That's 5-9 p.m. June 17. I'll be there.

So where is the Telephone Room? Email thetelephoneroom@gmail.com to RSVP and find out the address. You can also visit http://www.thetelephoneroom.blogspot.com/ for info."

We have officially become citizens of the Greater Blogosphere. Thanks, Rosemary!

What will you do this summer?

Upcoming November 2009 Telephone Room exhibiting artist Kristen Ramirez was selected by the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs to be the artist in residence in Seattle's Fremont Bridge tower.
While some of us will be draped across kiddie pools in the throes of Otter Pop induced brain freeze, Ramirez will be creating a public art project inspired by the venerable drawbridge. Find out more in this article and this episode of Art Zone from the Seattle Channel.
Here at the Telephone Room Gallery, we'll be using our trusty namesake rotary dial to leave our Fremont Bridge thoughts and memories for Kristen's consideration at 206-455-9983.

UPDATE: Kristen's blog about the residency can be found here, or bend an ear to her feature on NPR's All Things Considered!

Vast and Incalculable

We stole this from Ryan Branchini's Facebook page because it is awesome:

"How important are the visual arts in our society? I feel strongly that the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance. Of course I could be prejudiced. I am a visual art." - Kermit the Frog