MYSTIC DUMP

Art is a process. This looks different for every artist. Some artists are focused on attaining technical skill, some in finding themselves, some on expressing a concept and some, in the most forward way, attempt to capture something unholdable, an essence, a feeling, the experience of being human.

 - China Star Curator

Anton Seder is a multidisciplinary artist living in Olympia, WA. Through individual practice as well as collective projects, his work explores interdependence, consciousness, and the act of play. By celebrating being and aliveness, he seeks to connect the audience to the forms life and the living process can take, the web of collective being that we as individual agents inform and dance within. He is a member of the artist collective Yard Sale For World Peace, promoting and distributing work by Olympia area artists. He lives with artist Donna Michelle Seder and their daughter Golden.

"This body of work is about interaction, mapping the way individual agents (both human and more-than-human) generate a network of relations. Lattices of humans and plants overlapping with each other gives the viewer a new image, both atomized and holistic. While these fields dance and morph together, other images enter into an expression of the conditions of a commons, moving into a new hybridity of relations.

Using house paint, aerosol paint and acrylic, the work for this show is meant to celebrate the openness of the living process. There are some general rules I’ve introduced to the game, objects placed to give the dance parameters, but the situational solutions form the interbeing of an alive reality. In my process, cooperation with the image leads into new forms. Working with the field of possibilities is an important part of extending the visual language into new circumstances and connections.

Improvisations, maintaining balances in complex systems. By playing with something, you learn how to listen and how to respect it. The joy of witnessing the consciousness that can emerge out of listening to the more-than-human world and the way we are entangled. By engaging with these ideas and images through play, we are given glimpses of the experience of the infinite and finite, freedom and time."

- Anton Seder (painting, music)

Sophie Gross grew up in Maryland and has been making art since she was 3 (child prodigy) . A doctor diagnosed her with main character syndrome recently. They live in Olympia, WA

"I am obsessed with the untamed urge. A large part of my art is allowing myself to act on these compulsions. I walk outside and look at a broken piece of colored plastic- it must have been run over by a car or stepped on by a heavy boot- and this voice inside of me says pick it up! Put it inside your tiny tin that you keep in your pack just for this! Turn it into an eyelid for a puppet- a new friend! Garbage. The sacred trash. I breath into it new life.

My version of precision has little to do with time, and much more to do with placement. I listen to where the things want to go, and put them just there. I have an impulse and I follow it. I don’t think too hard about cutting or glueing, everything is trash. If it doesn’t turn out right, I can put it back where it came from- with reverence- to the endless mystic dump.

Another fascination I have is with the sensory experience: how do things feel? There are certain textures that give me comfort- I delight in them. They feel good, in my hands they feel right. A temporary antidote to my existential dread.

Everything I make is a spell. It is alive. It is ceremony. I practice the magic. I share this with you, a peek inside my little toy box. Open it and squint from the light- let the rainbow beams fill you up. Your feet rise a few inches off the ground and you are floating. Close the lid and ground yourself. Feel your body on the earth. Let yourself be in my world while you are here, and then step out the door and return to yours."

- Sophie Gross (sculpture, performance)