2ND AVE SIGN PROJECT
The 2nd Ave Sign project utilizes CAM’s front window space and the illuminated sign that hangs above the storefront of our 2nd Avenue Belltown facade to promote local artists.
Five years ago, when we first rented the space, the sign was in disrepair — a skeleton frame with disconnected electrical wires. We saw this as an opportunity to create the highly visible exhibition space for artists that it is today.
So we repaired the sign, upgraded the elements to more efficient LED tube lighting, and began The 2nd Ave Sign Project.
It stays lit every night, a curious addition to Belltown’s streets and a rotating exhibition space for local artists. To provide texture to the Seattle’s public art landscape, viewers need only walk by and look up at what glows above them.
ASHAAUNG HELMSTETTER
AshaAung Helmstetter (She/Her) is an oil and mixed media painter who was born and brought up in Seattle’s Central District, where she is still based today. In 2017, AshaAung realized that she would dedicate very much of her life to art, and has spent the years since actualizing that reality for herself. Having left school early to manage chronic health issues while focusing on her personal and artistic development, she has very little formal training.
While she has many mentors, and takes inspiration from art that exists everywhere, her style shows the independent exploration that comes with somewhat isolated learning. Her paintings reflect her imagination, and perseverance: two things that are difficult to miss when encountering her person, or any of her creations.
MITA MAHATO
Mita Mahato is a cut paper, collage, and comix artist and educator living in the unceded ancestral homeland of the Duwamish People. She assembles fragments of used and discarded materials in poetic experiments that dramatize entangled processes of death and renewal, specifically within the context of ecosystemic loss under capitalism.
Her collected book of poetry comix, In Between, is listed inThe Best American Comics: The Notable Comics of 2019. Other works are published in Iterant, Shenandoah, Coast/No Coast, ANMLY, AModern, Illustrated PEN, and Drunken Boat, and her current book-in-progress is supported by a CityArtist Project Grant from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.
This exhibition, which includes the 2nd Avenue Sign Project and the continually-evolving storefront installation, takes its title from a quote from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.
Interview between Mita Mahato and Whitney Bashaw
As part of her residency, Mita hosted “Wild Caught” a comix and poetics workshop where 16 participants considered how words, images, and waste materials are in dialogue with the food we consume.
The results of this workshop were made into a limited run of zines that were designed, printed, and assembled by workshop participants and CAM artists.
LAUREN IIDA
Second Ave Sign Project with an original work from cut-paper artist Lauren Iida.
“The Artist” depicts a Japanese-American artist at work during a figure drawing session while interned at Tule Lake during World War II, inspired by a photograph found by Iida in Densho’s extensive archives of life before, during, and after internment. “The Artist” is proof of the role of art as both resistance and healing, and a means to maintain one’s identity and self-expression against oppressive circumstances.
In her intricately cut paper works, Iida explores constructs of history, family, and objects that express the lived experience within these conditions through engagement in the everyday that make it both universal and particular.
Much of Iida’s work is influenced by her family’s Japanese-American heritage and incarceration during World War II and her work in Cambodia, where she lives part time and founded the arts collective Open Studio Cambodia. The organization, located in Siem Reap, supports eight emerging Cambodian contemporary artists while organizing exhibitions, art workshops, and contemporary art tours.
Represented in Seattle by ArtXchange Gallery, Iida’s work has been collected by the City of Seattle Portable Works Collection (2016), King County Public Art Collection (2019) and the Washington State Arts Commission (2020). Iida has been commissioned to create temporary and permanent public art by The City of Seattle, The City of Shoreline, Washington State Convention Center Addition, The Office of Arts and Culture/Seattle Department of Transportation, The City of Bellevue, Plymouth Housing, and Sound Transit.
Erin Shigaki and Lauren Iida interview
CHRISTINA CARLYLE REED
Christina Reed, a former CAM member, is our first participating artist in the sign project, in conjunction with her exhibition in our storefront gallery in 2017.
Her print work, “WhiteWash: Amplify", dozens of suspended handprints glowing yellow, hung above our studio sidewalk for four years. The work is part of a larger series titled “WhiteWash,” a meditation on exploitation and representation as tools of white supremacy.
We are eternally grateful to Christina for her work and participation in kicking off this project. Her sign will permanently occupy a wall space inside of our studio.
Christina Carlyle Reed is a multidisciplinary artist whose conceptual work explores social, political and cultural issues. Grounded in historical research and through her own background of social justice engagement, Reed draws source material from American history, the media, documentary photography and her own photographs to address issues of race and oppression.
Common AREA is able to build and maintain our programs with the proud support of our sponsors: Four Culture, The Office of Arts and Culture, Trial and Error Productions, Artists & Craftsman, Densho, TAP Plastics and Alphagraphics.
