A big indie alternative to Seattle Art Fair opens in Pioneer Square | Crosscut

Forest for the Timber co-producers Hamilton and Dominic Nieri, who runs a Seattle-based artwork manufacturing firm and artist residency program referred to as ARTXIV, have been initially tasked with creating a couple of everlasting installations for the brand new constructing as a part of an art-forward technique by the constructing’s builders, City Villages. However, throughout a tour, an City Villages consultant talked about that development delays had left the constructing empty for now. “Gage and I, naturally, have been compelled to do one thing loopy,” Nieri says. So that they requested the builders: “Do you thoughts if we take over the entire constructing?” 

They agreed. “After which it was like: ‘OK, now, what can we do?’ ” Hamilton says. Since then, Hamilton and Nieri have been working almost round the clock to make all of it occur in a condensed timeframe. (“We’ve bought 4 folks on air mattresses on my flooring proper now,” Hamilton wrote through textual content lately. “It’s like camp.”) “Usually, you [need] wherever from 12 to 18 months for this,” Nieri says. 

Figuring out that they had 70,000 sq. toes to fill, Hamilton and Nieri reached out to half a dozen (principally) West Coast curators, every of whom they gave carte blanche to rework “their” flooring as they noticed match. 

Hamilton is curating the primary two flooring. On the bottom flooring, guests will stroll right into a form of atelier the place, within the week main as much as Artwork Honest weekend, 16 native and nationwide artists — together with Stevie Shao, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Brandon Vosika — can be portray mural-sized canvases on website. The second flooring, for now, is a “thriller exhibit” Hamilton declined to debate, besides to say that there can even be a bar and that it is going to be “a great place to go if you happen to want a break from the reveals and events.”