Punch Gallery - Seattle, Washington


	March 12 , 2009 Young collaborators cut through the fog with impressive works by Adriana Grant The Seattle P-I "Sol Hashemi and Jason Hirata's two-man show, "Please Stand By; Stand By Me," at Punch Gallery is a quietly smart exhibit. The two-part title is apt. "Please stand by" is an old-fashioned phrase used to apologize for technical difficulties, while "Stand by Me" is a 1986 film about friendship among teen boys. " Read full story in The Seattle P-I :: Info about the exhibition February 19, 2009 Works at three galleries display the threads of an art movement by Regina Hackett The Seattle P-I "A small coterie of Seattle artists is sewing its way into an art movement. Take Ries Niemi. He started out in the late 1970s as part of Larry Reid's Rosco Louie Gallery, moved to Los Angeles to make a mark in public art with his wife, Sheila Klein, and, when they moved back, went for the rural experience in Bow, near La Conner, to raise two kids whom Niemi feels obliged to embarrass." Read full story in The Seattle P-I :: Info about the exhibition November 18 , 2008 The Real America by Jen Graves The Stranger "People tell Beckman, understandably, that his art reminds them of the 1960s trompe l'oeil sculptor Ed Kienholz. His acknowledged influences also include Wynne Greenwood's video "band" Tracy + the Plastics, Phil Collins's karaoke installation, and Pipilotti Rist's vampy 1990 music video You Called Me Jacky. The tone of Beckman's work is warm, open, and friendly, more Greenwood than Rist. It relaxes things, keeps them from getting too meta." Read full story in The Stranger :: Info about the exhibition September 12 , 2008 Rascally artist's "Weasels!" invade Punch Gallery by Rachel Shimp The Seattle Times "The furry, wily creatures Ñ especially variants like the Ravanamangus, or "Flying Death Weasel" Ñ are probably not what you expect to see in your average Pioneer Square gallery. But some unusual representations of the mustelid family greet visitors this month in local artist Eugene Parnell's "Weasels! Cryptozoological Reconstructions," at Punch." Read full story in The Seattle Times :: Info about the exhibition March 9 , 2008 The Stranger Suggests: "Safe and Sound" by Jen Graves The Stranger "Howard Barlow's last sculptures were made of bright orange earplugs and cubes of metal, painted in cheerful colors and riddled with bullet holes. For his new works (including Seven Pains Mended and Big Guns Make Good Neighbors) the Thorp-based artist uses institutional powder-coat colors, gun-barrel patina finishes, recycled bullet-lead solder, broken window panes, wool yarn, and abused steel—all of it knitted, hacked, shot, and shattered." Read full story in The Stranger :: Info about the exhibition January 11 , 2008 Listening to the voices in his head by Sheila Farr Seattle Times "Got issues with cellphones? They probably pale in comparison to the self-diagnosed "paranoid rant" that opens Ries Niemi's show titled My Phone Tells Me to Do Bad Things." Read full story in the Seattle Times :: Info about the exhibition January, 2008 Ries Niemi: “My Phone Tells Me To Do Bad Things” by Matthew Kangas art ltd. magazine "For an artist who has shown rarely since his 1979 solo debut and concentrated instead on public art and design projects around the nation, Ries Niemi has managed to make a considerable impact in each of his subsequent solo shows. This one, “My Phone Tells Me to Do Bad Things,” at Punch, is no exception. " Read full story from art ltd. :: Info about the exhibition December 29 , 2007 “A bell is a cup until it is struck.” Art that’s made it past a discriminating judge by Rachel Shimp Seattle Weekly "In compiling my end-of-the-year Top 10 lists, one thing I realized is that in Seattle, contemporary art is seldom boring." Read full story in the Seattle Weekly :: Info about the exhibition November 15 , 2007 'Vertical Hold' is an engaging effort to expand video boundaries by Nate Lippens Seattle P-I "Vertical Hold, the magnetic collection of experimental video and sound curated by Justin Colt Beckman and Andrew Kaufman at Punch Gallery, features a handful of works that push the boundaries of the medium in engaging ways." Read full story in the Seattle P-I :: Info about the exhibition October 3, 2007 Statement of Vindication Rebellious collage at a rocking gallery by Rachel Shimp Seattle Weekly "Joanna Thomas, who makes cheeky and thought-provoking collage, opens A Hundred Horses in a Landscape & Other Collages tonight. In a show last year, she pasted bright red lips on Benjamin Franklin’s face; now, she’s gone and inserted buttoned-up equestrians into Chinese literati paintings, frolicking over the hills and through the calligraphy." Read full story in the Seattle Weekly :: Info about the exhibition September 20, 2007 'Homestead' is Justin Colt Beckman's rural shrine/sly joke by Nate Lippens Seattle P-I "It's rural minimalism but still closer to Ma and Pa Kettle than the cabin of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Beckman's shack is home. It's also a sly joke about the tedium of the everyday that manages to captivate in the way our own home lives usually don't." Read full story in the Seattle P-I :: Info about the exhibition August 15, 2007 Random acts of resistance overcome the big irony at Punch by Nate Lippens Seattle P-I "This two-person show works because it plays the domestic and the political off of one another. Using video, performance, works on paper and installation, the two artists put the concept of resistance into play..." Read full story in the Seattle P-I :: Info about the exhibition April 11, 2007 Pick Up Stick – Video Tussle at Punch by Jen Graves The Stranger "It is a rare and lovely thing when a work of art elicits urgent laughter in unison with intense disturbance while touching upon topics from sex to pedagogy to religion to puppetry to engineering..." Read full story in The Stranger :: Info about the exhibition February 9 , 2007 Northwest creatures come to life in Gibbens' 'Birds and Bees' by Nate Lippens Special to The Seattle P-I "His solo show 'Birds and Bees' follows Howard Barlow's excellent show 'Riddled' and demonstrates why Punch Gallery is a force to be reckoned with on the alternative scene. Tapping his background in scientific illustration, Gibbens renders life-size portraits of insects and birds native to the Northwest with detailed flair." Read full story in the Seattle P-I :: Info about the exhibition January 12, 2007 Cutting-edge showcases with media galore by Gayle Clemans Special to The Seattle Times "Down in Pioneer Square, the aptly named PUNCH Gallery is showing vigorous art by its three new members — Nathan DiPietro, Patricia Hagen and Natalie Schmidt Dotzauer — and although there isn't a deliberate curatorial theme drawing their works together, the artists' divergent styles and forms dance and spar with each other very nicely." Read full story in the Seattle Times :: Info about the exhibition December 29, 2006 Know What I Like? by Jen Graves The Stranger "But what you still have a chance to see through Sunday is Howard Barlow at PUNCH Gallery. His safety-colored powder-coat-finish steel boxes are pocked with bullet holes; some, like Opposing Views, deliriously pull together the hot logic of a gun with the cold precision of geometric abstraction." Read full story in The Stranger SLOG :: Info about the exhibition December 22, 2006 Barlow's 'Riddled' toys with small-town stereotypes and American frontier myth by Nate Lippens Special to The Seattle P-I "A victory lap of a different kind is happening quietly at the hotter-by-the-minute PUNCH Gallery. Howard Barlow's 'Riddled' is one of the most provocative and fully realized shows of the year. It's also an indication of how smart and rigorous this small, new gallery is." Read full story in the Seattle P-I :: Info about the exhibition November 21, 2006 Jen Graves talks to Mary Simpson and Fionn Meade by Jen Graves The Stranger's In/Visible: A Weekly Conversation with People in Art "'Billy in the Lowground' is the first live-action film by artist Mary Simpson and writer-curator-musician Fionn Meade, and it's built around the haunting, centuries-old murder ballad 'Pretty Polly,' performed in the film by the Foghorn String Band. In a conversation that ranges from Alaska to Joan Didion and the Greek word nostos, Meade, and Simpson circumnavigate the dark heart of what they've made, which is on display at PUNCH Gallery." Listen to the interview :: Info about the exhibition November 17, 2006 If you need a reason to visit the galleries, here are four compelling ones by Regina Hackett The Seattle P-I "The precision of her dense marks and the authority of her ominous, open space isn't all she has to offer. Her isolated figures have a kind of shine. They gleam in their own trickster light, as if waiting till the music starts to make their move." Read full story in the Seattle P-I :: Info about the exhibition September 15, 2006 Punch Gallery features the artwork of Michael Sherwin by Regina Hackett The Seattle P-I "By starting strong and getting better, PUNCH Gallery (devoted to Central and Eastern Washington artists) has forced Seattle to revise its notion of who's out there ... Currently featured is the casually meticulous Michael Sherwin. " Read full story in the Seattle P-I :: Info about the exhibition August 9, 2007 Joanna Thomas by Sue Peters The Seattle Weekly "In 'Lion Devouring Rabbit & Other Collages,' the Ellensburg artist amusingly embellishes 19th-century French engravings with contemporary, colorful images deftly cut from modern magazines to create small but subversive montages. What her efforts are doing to the value of these antique prints, Thomas isn't sure. 'In effect, I'm destroying them,' she admits. 'But on the other hand, it's an unwitting collaboration.'" Read full story in the Seattle Weekly :: Info about the exhibition May 1, 2006 And the Galleries Marched in Two by Two by Carrie E.A. Scott Visual Codec "...PUNCH, the newest artist-run gallery to open on Prefontaine Place, debuting with a show cleverly titled 'Round One'. Displaying work by four of their eight members — yes the next show, 'Round Two', will boast the art of the other four — PUNCH has made a strong first appearance. Both the space and the art are refined." Read full story in Visual Codec