Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Fox Whitney, Alitzah Oros, Melika Sebihi, and Kaya Noteboom pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Hayv Kahraman: Look Me in the Eyes
Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA
October 5, 2024 – February 2, 2025
Hayv Kahraman’s exhibition Look Me in the Eyes at the Frye Art Museum invites us to consider the act of looking,of watching, and of being watched. There are eyes everywhere…they fall like petals from a flower and grow from trees like leaves. They emerge where you’d expect from the faces of elongated figures and they also grow like stalks from foreheads and chins in ways you don’t expect them to. In my favorite painting, Love Me Love Me Not, two figures pluck eyes growing like petals from a plant while one feeds an eye into the mouth of another.
This exhibition made me think of the way too many eyes on something can grow a spectrum of feelings, ranging from fear to ecstasy. Visibility means being seen but it also means being misunderstood. This work asks us to meditate on the experience of looking and to consider the ways we look at each other. I loved wandering through the forest of Kahraman’s eyes.
Reflection: How does what we can see inform what we can’t see?
Boren Banner Series: Natalie Krick
Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA
October 16, 2024 – April 6, 2025
Natalie Krick’s collages make Marilyn Monroe magically mysterious. The artist reimagines Monroe’s last photo session using contact sheets from Bert Stern’s The Complete Last Sitting, a series of over 2,600 photos taken weeks before Monroe’s death.
Krick makes this overexposed icon an enigma, masking Monroe’s figure with cut outs, overlays, and techniques that make voyeurism impossible. Monroe is more of a textural experience, a web of fishnet and geometric reflective materials. She becomes someone new, removed from the original seductive intent of Stern’s photo session.
These collages obscure Monroe so well that in one of my favorites titled Merge Layers (2024) I thought I must be looking at a washed out black and white image of the ocean from above, realizing later it was actually a sea made of a multitude of Monroe’s eyes and the print of fishnet stockings. This work makes Monroe de-commodified, no small feat for a hyper famous and hyper sexualized celebrity. These collages feel protective, healing, abstract. A visual spell to reclaim some feminine power from a long history of visually exploiting femme people in photography.
Reflection: How would you create a collage to protect and conceal the image of a well known person you respect and admire?