no touching ground • nko • dan hawkins: ‘tomb’
April 7 – 29, 2011
Opening: First Thursday, April 7, 2011 from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Gallery4Culture welcomes legendary Seattle-based street and installation artists no touching ground (ntg) and nko as they team with photographer Dan Hawkins to unleash their dynamic energy within the confines of our white-walled gallery. The exhibition, ‘tomb’, is the name sake of an anonymous, crumbling industrial site taken-over for an elaborate intervention by these artists in the recent past. Hawkins’ audio and photographic documentation, methodically gleaned during this earlier project, provides the framework for this exhibition. Large-scale panels, running the full length of the gallery, display a lively and expressive dialogue between ntg and nko. In addition, ‘tomb’ incorporates 3-Dimensional elements and a series of eerie lightboxes that revisit the original tomb.
no touching ground (ntg) is a street and installation artist. His life sized graphics of animals transported from the wilds of Alaska to the urban maze of Seattle and other national and international cities are haunting reminders of our distance from nature. ntg’s installation work continues his non-traditional graffiti practice by creating monumental structures of found materials with hand colored printed graphics.
nko is a street/installation artist and curator. His artistic practice involves meditations on collective memory and urbanism, often manifest as memorials for dying buildings, or artistic interventions in unconventional spaces with events like the Bridge Motel, the Belmont, the Corner: 23rd & Union, and the FSF 2400 Battery project.
Dan Hawkins has spent the better part of 20 years exploring and photographing marginal spaces locally, nationally, and internationally. His practice as an urban explorer has led him to create haunting images of urban decay. His work comments on the life and death of cities, reflecting on the stories that these decaying buildings hold silently within them. Dan has published a book, “This Empty City”, of his photographs from Detroit.
Dan Hawkins, ‘tomb’ interior, archival inkjet print © 2010
