Studio 18 Supports Emerging Artists with Shared Delusions
Minion Crucifixtions by Rylee Congdon
The Evergreen Echo
Breaking into the art scene in Seattle presents its challenges, but some emerging artists are pursuing unique avenues to get their art out. Rather than relying on existing galleries to uplift their work, artists Rylee Congdon and Lola Reinhardt decided to make their own art show happen.
Their exhibit opened to the public for a one-day event on Saturday, November 15 at Studio 18 Artist Collective. “This is a very historically [sic] arts building. They used to throw raves here in the ‘90s, early 2000s,” Reinhardt stated. The building is tucked beside train tracks underneath busy roadways—empty and bustling all at once. At the top of a thin staircase was the gallery opening, alive with visitors and music.
The theme ‘Shared Delusions’ was chosen to make people feel less alone in their thoughts. “I feel like there’s a lot of fucked up shit happening in the world right now—locally, globally, everything,” Congdon shared. “I wanted to have the artists reach into their minds and their hearts and find something that resonates with them, that maybe they think is kind of fucked up and weird and just put it out there. Because we all think, and feel, fucked up weird shit.”
Featuring over 20 emerging artists, as well as multiple music and DJ acts, this curation was varied and innovative. There were ceramics, sculptural pieces, paintings, drawings, mixed media art, a projection, and even a chance to have your likeness captured on a document scanner. The only similarity between all the pieces was the obvious stray from the ‘norm’. Congdon emphasized that “the strongest foundation for community is the weird shit because then you’re immediately like, oh, that person gets it.”
Congdon’s art featured the minions from Despicable Me creating a cross, “Jesus sucking his own dick,” and other parodied religious iconography. Congdon explained, “[My work comes from] my Christian roots—growing up in something that I maybe didn’t really have a choice growing up in—and kind of just taking that back and fucking making it gay and queer.”
Reinhardt also had a statement to make with her projection piece. “It’s dead animals, roadkill, that I’ve been collecting [...] for three years now,” she shared. “I think in making it a projection, I was thinking about forcing people to look at it, whereas people usually try to not look at roadkill because it’s gross for them, but it’s just inevitable.” She went on to explain the impacts of habitat fragmentation and the importance of people seeing the roadkill. “There’s something about just making people look at stuff that they don’t want to look at, you know? Just make them face things.”
In addition to her piece on roadkill, Reinhardt discussed her mixed media piece: “I work with found objects. I don’t like to use anything that’s newly bought. I just like to repurpose stuff—kind of like this space itself, it’s just being repurposed. It’s a concept I really like.”
“me when I fucking get you” by Knight Young
The Evergreen Echo
Off in the corner was an artist sitting with a scanner used to take portraits of guests. Vandi, the artist behind the ‘scannography’, explained that he’d been doing portraiture on a scanner for about four years and he would lug the machine around Capitol Hill to take portraits. He said that unlike traditional photography, you only have to take one portrait to have the best one. There is no need to take a bunch of photos and edit them because one scan is cool on its own.
A large wood panel hung, featuring a repeating image of a meme surrounded by anthropomorphic animals in pornographic positions and a piece of silk tethered to a ring. Knight Young discussed how this piece was inspired by the meme captioned “me when I fucking get you” because of its silliness and savage nature: “The idea of just I’m going to get you and I’m going to scratch the hell out of you.”
When considering Shared Delusions, Young “found the theme to really relate to wanting to be with someone in a way that’s loving and sweet, but not getting that and then being very angry and upset with them.” Combining pleasure, pain, and anger drew him to the pornographic imagery.
“I think the lines become really blurred between pain and pleasure, especially for myself. I really enjoy kink as a part of my life and so mixing those two in the medium here was really helpful to just process a lot of that sexual violence, in a way that has been a choice for me that I really enjoy, and then also sexual violence in my past, which hasn’t been a choice.” Young went on, “It’s something that’s been traumatizing, and so then finding it in art to be silly, and weird, and they’re animals, too, so it’s fucking weird and messed up. [It] makes me really happy. [It’s] a way to make something so perverse silly and fun, and process it in that way.”
Young connected the silk tie to softness. “Any sort of physical connection, no matter how intense it is, has that softness to it, and has an element of love and care.”
Speaking with Lee Adams and Angel Romanchuk about their collaborative pieces, they shared their process for the large painted canvases. “I’d never painted in my life,” Adams shared, “so I was kind of doing everything [Romanchuk’s] way.” Adams is primarily a tattoo artist and illustrator. “We approached it [by] sharing both of our styles in the single piece,” he remarked, while Romanchuk added that they’d painted at the same time, side by side.
These pieces shared a similar theme to Young’s—the way it feels to love. “The first one is love as pain and suffering, and the second one is more fuzzy, feel good,” Romanchuk mentioned. He added that he and Adams had modeled for each other for the pieces. Adams was glad to be in the exhibit, explaining that “there’s a lot of connection, which is great. And it’s also just fun; there’s not a lot of fun galleries.”
Co-created paintings by Lee Adams and Angel Romanchuk
The Evergreen Echo
