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Inspired by Soft Services installation at Volunteer Park, Capitol Hill writer joins artist for conversation about ‘intimacy and loss, cruising and alienation, communal possibility, and intimate transgression’

(Image: Jueqian Fang/Henry Art Gallery)

You are invited to visit Volunteer Park this weekend on what should be a sunny and crisp fall day to sit in on a conversation between an artist whose creations now dot the park’s lawns and pathways and a Capitol Hill author who has made the park a setting in their work.

CHS reported here on the Soft Services installations by artist Chloë Bass as the 14 stone benches will make Volunteer Park their home into next summer as part of a Henry Art Gallery project.

Saturday, author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore will talk with Bass about Soft Services in “a conversation about the body and colonialism, intimacy and loss, cruising and alienation, communal possibility, and intimate transgression.”

“Bass and Sycamore share a mutual interest in the pervasive potential of strange, everyday intimacies, and a mutual enraged concern about society’s failure to allow for such intimacies (or, worse, its commitment to police) as an important element of receiving proper interpersonal care,” the Henry writes about the free event.

The Henry says the conversation will focus “on the embodied experiences produced through interaction with Soft Services’ stone sculptures, and examine how acts of noticing open the door for new engagements with social and environmental landscapes.”

(Image: Jueqian Fang/Henry Art Gallery)

Sycamore will also read from The Freezer Door, a memoir she tells through vignettes of desire, intimacy and social interaction in bars and public spaces on Capitol Hill — including Volunteer Park.

Installed by the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery at points around the park, the Soft Services stones from Brooklyn artist Bass are engraved with inscriptions, “artist-written text that both stands alone and creates a larger meaning across the series of seating—and a silhouetted image applied in light-responsive pigment, which allows the image to shift slightly based on the time of day, weather conditions, and sight lines.” The large decorated and inscribed stones are meant to connect with the park’s history as a centerpoint for the annual AIDS Walk that morphed over the decades from a gathering of queer health activism to an annual tradition dedicated to supporting those living with HIV and AIDS.

“Working with Seattle Parks and Recreation and Volunteer Park Trust, Bass’s project is an exploration of systems of care in this country—the distinction between the natural and unnatural, the public and private—as well as memorials to what we’ve lost,” Jas Keimig of The Stranger writes about the project.

The talk takes place Saturday, October 1st from 3 to 4 PM in Volunteer Park near the duck ponds. You can learn more at henryart.org.

The stones of Soft Services, meanwhile, are meant to be placed in the park through August 2023.

 

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Wowjustwow
Wowjustwow
1 year ago

I’m not sure there’s a more Seattle event than this.