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You may not know it, but strange and wonderful things are afoot in south Seattle. One such thing is Spitehouse, the intriguing new exhibition at the Lawrimore Project curated by Yoko Ott & Jessica Powers. The Lawrimore Project being a contemporary art gallery located just across the street from the Adventure School offices, all cozied up next to the US immigrations building. If you work in the area and need a breath of fresh air, you should mosey over on your lunch break and look inside. Oh, and don’t be intimidated by the big wall blocking the entrance. It’s supposed to be there; just walk around.
Now, to pique your interest, here are a few words from Yoko and Jessica on Spitehouse.
Adventure School:
The phenomena of action taken out of spite is a fascinating and totally prevalent phenomenon, but it isn’t something one would necessarily think of spotlighting. What gave you the idea for the theme of this exhibition?
Jessica:
Yoko Ott introduced me to spite houses when we sat down to plan an exhibition together for Lawrimore Project. Spite houses are typically 19th century buildings that were constructed or modified because the builder felt wronged by someone who did not want it there. The stories of the disputes that lead to said houses are fascinating.
The most compelling spite house story is that of the Richardson Spite House. Story here:
http://www.lawrimoreproject.com/lp/Exhibitions/Entries/2009/7/30_SPITE_HOUSE.html
Yoko:
I became intrigued by spite houses initially because of a desire to create and/or live in one. Reading the stories behind these obstructionist architectural feats fascinated me and I began dwelling on the complexity of it all. As thoughts unfolded in my head, I recalled the time I saw Aaron Young’s Miami Gold Fence in Bortolami Gallery’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach. I thought Young’s piece was brilliant. That became the catalyst for thinking how a theme inspired by spite houses could be framed up conceptually for a group exhibition. As Jessica and I became more familiar with the stories of the builders of spite houses and fences, as well as the discourse happening among behavioral scientists who study spiteful behavior in humans, the “invisible territories of spite” within the art world began revealing themselves to us, as did the exhibition.
Adventure School:
Any personal experience with this kind of thing?
Jessica:
“Spite House” is a personal experience of this kind of thing.
Group exhibitions are, by their very nature, land grabs and property disputes. When two art objects hang side by side there is an unspoken territory of spite between them. Spite also exists between the artist, the artwork and the audience, especially when an action of obstruction is implied—whether physical or conceptual—and often with self-defeating results.
Adventure School:
Do you think people who experience the space end up feeling spited or spiteful?
Yoko:
Bert Rodriguez’s piece “A Wall I Built With My Father” was intentionally placed in the gallery’s entrance to help set the tone of the exhibition. Viewers are forced to confront, then circumvent the wall which immediately helps incite thoughts about boundaries and obstructions.
Some visitors thus far have felt a bit shorted, or perhaps even spited after their first lap around the space because they “missed” some of the works. Two of the largest pieces in the exhibition have gone almost routinely unnoticed because people have forgotten what the architecture looked like previously. Matt Browning painted the formerly hot pink corner of the exterior and the gallery’s office window black for the show, and SuttonBeresCuller drastically altered the white cube exhibition area. Others have expressed feeling a “heaviness” when viewing the show, sensing boundaries everywhere.
This said, the end goal was not to simply incite spite in viewers. If that were the case it would have been a different show altogether, and possibly resulted in jail time for us. We did mean to provoke the audience–but to the extent of them becoming spiteful, not really.
Adventure School:
Any other interesting things we should know about Spitehouse?
Jessica:
My favorite recurring motif in the exhibition is the ‘buff’. Covering something that previously existed with a flat color field is at once a ‘fuck you’ and an invitation for greater possibility — a grassy backyard becomes a stark monochrome landscape, a concrete wall becomes a front door to an impossible dwelling, and a black corner silences attention requests and dramatically decreases gallery visibility.
Yoko:
The suspiciously serendipitous fire. [The fire was officially classified an "accidental transient fire." Apparently, a homeless person broke into the sculpture and accidentally set fire to it. One theory is a cigarette ember ignited things.] When Scott and I were running to the gallery to meet the firemen, in addition to the panic and nausea I felt, I kept asking myself, “What artist took this too fucking far?!” We know it was an accidental fire, and not set by an artist, but that experience and the timing of it demanded a lot of me. I was rapidly processing many feelings and one of them was my own commitment to the very exhibition and concept itself. If we were really going to make such a strong statement, where would I draw the line as a curator, and where would I surrender to the fact that I’ve been spited by an artist? The damage from the fire was so beautiful. It connected to a number of the other artworks in the exhibition, and I started seeing the “land-grab” between works in an interesting way. The way the burnt bushes framed through a charred window frame spoke to Dadson’s work; the slumped glass from another melted window within the hollowed shell-of-a-sculputre referencing Hansen’s coffin; the overall blackness becoming the companion bookend to Browning’s painted corner. It all commanded my attention. The fire was the element that dramatically underscored the exhibition concept and left me really considering the ideas we put forth. Similarly, when we discovered that Matt painted the gallery, I had a tinge of irritation at first, which has to be assigned to the protectiveness I felt for Scott’s gallery. I quickly became excited at what he had done however. The curator is not exempt from the spitee v. spiter construct, and to personally have experienced first hand the ethos of spite generated by the exhibition is rewarding.
  The corner of The Lawrimore Project, before and after  
*photo of the hot pink corner courtesy of Barbie Hull, the rest courtesy of the Lawrimore Project website
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