If you’ve ever been to a metal show, you’ll know that they’re funny. Simultaneously really cheesy and really hardcore, metal dudes are quite frequently just nice guys that revel in the irony of it all. You can’t constantly be wearing shirts with upside-down crosses and heavy ass phrases and mean it all of the time. (Note: We are definitely not including those from the second wave of the Nordic black metal scene in these generalizations.)

If you don’t believe my statements about metal dudes, though, perhaps these hella heavy metal quilts by Ben Venom will convince you. In his statement of work, he says:

“I’m interested in juxtaposing traditional handmade crafts with one of the more extreme musical genres, Heavy Metal. My work can be described as a collision of Iron Maiden Metal ballads with the outrageous stage antics of Ozzy Osbourne. Serious, yet attempting to take on a B movie Horror film style where even the beasts of Metal need a warm blanket to sleep with. The question remains… Can I play with madness?”

Let’s keep in mind these quilts aren’t a one-time creation with little thought put into them. Venom not only needs to craft the blankets, but he needs to attain the materials, which probably involves hours of sifting through thrift store piles to find heaps of Slayer, Def Leppard, and AC/DC discards. Then, after fighting the arduous mental battle to justify that art is greater than the sadness of the few individuals offended that he is tearing apart t-shirt classics, Venom repurposes the shirts into cozy creations. Sure, the blankets are centered around calaveras, wolves, and other stereotypically metal shit, but come on, they’re blankets. You definitely get the idea that Venom’s probably not that serious most of the time… which is just really metal of him.

Don’t Wake Me Lucifer! / 83″ x 95″ / 2010

Am I Demon? / 41” x 51” / 2010

Listen to Heavy Metal While You Sleep! / 73” x 99” / 2010

White Magic / 21” x 21” / 2010

Raised by Wolves / 19” x 19” / 2011

Jack Fischer Gallery does it again for their next art opening — which is TONIGHT — by bringing in Richard Bassett and Chris Crites to present new paintings. Entitled Cold Comfort, the show seems centered around a general idea of violence and crime, with guns playing a central role.

Chris Crites brings his intricately-detailed illustrations of convicts and deviants. This time, though, he also contributes “stick-up” notes he pulled from an L.A. crime photo book. And because Crites does no over-painting or under-painting, you can bet the precision seen in the “stick-up” notes is damn near perfection.

READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS CRITES, IN WHICH HE TALKS ABOUT HIS PROCESS.

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Meanwhile, Bassett’s works are painstakingly-sewn needlepoint pillows which, from afar, look like snapshots or scenes from hidden cameras. Their framing, in particular, gives them the appearance of being works of medium-format photography, each of their sewn blocks resembling pixels.

Go to Roq La Rue (2312 2nd Ave, Seattle, WA) on January 14th. It will be incredible.

The opening, which will feature the mixed media photography and sculpture of the ever-talented Mandy Greer, the show sees Roq La Rue transformed into a multi-chamber installation. Textiles are sewn, knotted, and manipulated to create divine worlds. Greer has been getting the bulk of her attention around the Pacific Northwest so far — in many ways — but it’s time the world knows about her talents.

These images below are of Greer’s work, of course, but they are not the pieces in the gallery. You’ll have to actually go to see the real deal. (I am screaming in my head as I write this.)

Here’s the artist statement, lifted from Roq La Rue’s website, if you haven’t salivated enough yet:

“Honey and Lightening” is a show of installation chambers, sculptures of talismanic birds and a series of staged photographs all revolving around examining the mercurial nature of human desire. The substances honey and lightening both have literary, mythical and archetypal references to the occurrence and evolution of desire and it’s fading. I see one as the slow ooze of pleasure and the other as the dangerous, uncontrollable and inexplicably instant occurrence of magnetism between two bodies.

Two installation chambers create full body experiences of these ephemeral phenomena and crystallize them in tangible form as a way to signify the human longing for a perfect stasis of experience – which is impossible as emotion begins to degrade, evolve, fold in upon itself after the initial strike.

The Honey Moon chamber is a 10 foot tall mirrored jewelry box spanning 12 feet, enclosing a giant engorged golden chandelier formation encrusted with tens of thousands of gold-colored trinkets – the cheapest of the trashiest materials but representing the purest element from the bowels of the earth that has induced lust to the point of violence since pre-history. This giant mass of gold, as well as the body of the viewer, is reflected infinitely in 35 mirrored panels that create a simultaneously claustrophobic and expansive encounter that memorializes a temporary event. The mythology of honey, a bodily fluid produced from flowers, has long been associated with the ooze of erotic perfection. An ambrosial month of drinking honey-wine has followed the wedding ceremony since the Pharaohs. But locked up in the folklore of this transitional period is that the delirium ends and the state of bliss is forever sought after.

The Cherry Tree Root chamber is, in a way, a reverence to my own experience with Colpo di fulmine — “love at first sight” in Italian, which literally translate to “lightning strike”, and a craving to re-experience a place and time that no longer exists. Recently digging a 16 foot deep foundation hole, my husband and I removed 72 tons of dirt from our property to build a studio, exposing deep and gnarled roots that seems like frozen solidified lightening, long forgotten, dug up by us to lay the foundation for the rooms we hope we’ll die in. The root chamber is like entering this underground world hidden from view of long- ago electric ephemeral desires that have now turned into strong and sturdy roots- not as flashy as lightening but quietly enduring and growing. The roots are battered beautiful twisting accumulations of crocheted scraps of fabric I’ve saved for years, old ropes and remnants of past installations, hand-spun hair, rabbit fur and old clothes, all coated in the dirt from below my family’s foundation.”

Prolific dancer/performance artist/sculptor Nick Cave (not to be confused with the musician Nick Cave– creative bunch, those Nick Caves) is one of my absolute favorite artists, and these images make it easy to see why. Nick uses everything but the kitchen sink in his modern folk costumes, and even when his performers are covered in layers of loud patterns and cumbersome fringe, their forms still still manage to cultivate a sense of lightness and dynamic movement. If you are fortunate enough to be based in the Pacific Northwest, the Seattle Art Museum owns a number of Nick’s soundsuits, and they are well worth seeing in person.

Macramé, One of the techniques Portland-based jewelry designer Amira Mednick uses, is believed to have originated from 13th-century Arab weavers. According to Wikipedia, the Spanish word for macramé is derived from the Arabic word migramah (مقرمة), believed to mean believed to mean “striped towel,” “ornamental fringe,” or “embroidered veil.”

Enough on the history lessons, though. I’ve never been a huge one for jewelry because it often feels a bit too high-maintenance or non-sustainable or luxurious for my tastes. Mednick’s works, though, which sometimes use sustainable materials, are high fashion without being stuffy. One of my favorite new posessions includes these bloody amazing woven rings.

Ah, but it gets better. Stumble on to see a combination of canvas and macrame works by Mednick:

You can find a lot of her works on sale soon at Crafty Wonderland.

I just recently came across Synaptic Stimuli, a blog with the all-too-appropriate tagline of Transmissions of Consciousness and States of Being. In addition to that, they just generally have very amazing, life-affirming content that makes you appreciate all of the complexities and possibilities of nature and human capability. They also have some of the best blog titles around, and I was pretty much blown away by everything I saw on the site. Here are some of my recent favorites, from their recent posts.

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Imaginings of future selves in exoplanetary dreamscapes.
(Works by Kahn & Selesnick)

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In a world made of strings we are designers of expression.

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We are here to soften the edges of life for each other.
(Works by Palden Weinrenb)