I don’t know about you, but I’m still a little art-hungover from Seattle Art Fair week.  My notes app looks like a graveyard of half-jotted thoughts and memories I absolutely must remember, like the observation that Chloe King—while not an actual resident of Seattle, currently—is very m uch the king of Seattle right now. Their color-soaked, Gen Z fever dream-scapes at the ARTXIV booth at Seattle Art Fair was one of the highlights of the weekend. Meanwhile, at Assembly Art Fair, most visitors I polled agreed that Hall Spassov Gallery took the cake with their labyrinthine, neon-lit sanctums constructed for Amber Cowan’s maximalist glass sculptures. An unforgettable performance by Belgian/Hong Kong artist Caratoes at the Europa afterparty on Thursday night is forever seared into the memory of all who attended, along with the undulating crustacean-alien suits stitched together from god-knows-what manner of holiday inflatables. Unrelated to the art fair, that weekend also marked the debut of The Night Shift: After-Hours Arts Music Series at Pike Place Market, a free activation open to the public, organized by Pike Place Market Preservation Development Authority and our favorite subterranean dive, The Rabbit Box. I arrived Friday night to a market transformed. Constant Lovers took to a stage erected directly under the Pike Place sign, and a huge and happy crowd was serenaded by sax as the sun sank. Monthly Night Shift concerts are planned through October. I want them to never end. Now here’s some openings we definitely recommend.  August 5, 12 For the past four summers, Base Camp Studios has hosted a Summer Outdoor Movie Series—a free, BYO-chair (or blanket) film festival activating Belltown’s Portal Park every Wednesday in August. This year, they’re expanding to a full neighborhood festival complete with an art market and food trucks from 5–8 p.m., followed by an outdoor movie screening until 10 p.m. This August, the film series follows the theme “Humans vs. Robots”—harkening to the technofascist zeitgeist at large, but also echoing the exhibit by the same name that’s currently on view at Base Camp Studio gallery next door to the park. Everything is free and open to the public. Films include The Terminator (August 5), The Iron Giant (August 12), Blade Runner (August 19), and The Matrix (August 26). August 6Ariana Heinzman’s Red Tree in Bright Memory at J. Rinehart Gallery is the stuff of childlike wonder and interior worlds let loose. Heinzman is influenced by children’s book illustrations from the ’60s and the unrepentant palette of Niki de Saint Phalle; her ceramic sculptures and paintings are equally unabashed, messy, and bright, featuring stylized birds and frogs, fancy bugs, mysterious flora, and heart-faced fauna. It’s all really weird and endearing. An 11-foot-tall papier-mâché tree anchors the exhibit and experience, “a portal to this provocative realm.” Loop Holes at Dirkse/Prim opens with a showcase of work by Portland-based artist Tanner Lind, whose abstract paintings are bursting with a splashy, gushy, explosion of color and marks made by manipulating things like bleach, dyes, paints, ink, and flocking on canvas. Some of these marks float like fuzzy, amoebic blots against graphic grids (there’s a slight-but-satisfying ’90s throwback to early computer art). Other compositions are landscapes of tangled, soft, black, bottomless voids. Each design is a breathlessly balanced web of doodles suspended in a universe of its own self-contained, lavish object logic.  For years, Troy Gua has been steadily cranking on a signature style of glossy, resin-y, pop-candy iconography that plays visual puns using elegant overlays (like my fave, La Dada Gaga, where Salvador Dalí and our Lady of Monsters are superimposed in liquidy layers). Troy Gua: Expression at Seattle Art Museum’s SAM Gallery puts his signature “hybrid” series on view, along with other collaged images and deconstructions of the human form. August 7In April, I wrote about Marcellus Bonow-Manier’s residency at the Georgetown Steam Plant, which has stretched out over the past year as the artist haunted and documented the darkened corners of our city’s iconic industrial cathedral. Now his work is being exhibited onsite in Perimeter Road at 13th Greely, titled after the abandoned intersection where the Steam Plant stands. The show features Bonow-Manier’s ethereal point-and-shoot images as well as sculpture by colleague and collaborator Mack Greene. The opening reception—with a live DJ set billowing through the building—is free, but RSVP to save your spot. August 7, 8Okay, I’m not exactly sure what all this experiential experience entails, but if immersive theater is your thing, you should probably head over to this very different event put on by Base Camp Studios 2 (at their downtown location). ALL IN: A Speakeasy Casino With a Supernatural Twist promises a choose-your-own-adventure experience set in a “secret speakeasy casino run by mysterious supernatural forces.” Participants are given tokens at the door to gamble, imbibe, and spend throughout the night. (Not real gambling and non-alcoholic beverages only!) August 8You had me at “anti-AI.” Organic Intelligence: An Anti-AI Art Show, curated by Elle Glasse and Sophia Holland, is all about anti-slop (and anti-technofascism) and it runs for just one week (August 3–8) at Slip Gallery. I haven’t seen it in person yet, but I’m recommending it based on strength of concept, some images that came across my feed, and the stacked artist lineup. The closing party on August 8 (5:30–10pm) features live music by Bubblegum Cr1sis and The Spectrumz, plus an anti-AI art market. The English word “text” comes from the Latin textus, which literally translates to “a woven thing” (the root texere means “to weave”). Threaded by Language at The Vestibule puts the literal text in textile in an exhibition of works by diasporic artists Gabriela Nirino, CLaire Renaut and Shin Yu Pai. This show promises poetic and elegant variations on text-based work, as the three artists explore loss of culture and language through weaving, including embroidered vintage postcards and handspun thread made from old copies of the Seattle Times.  Marti Jonjak’s Fantasy Hot Dog Series showing at the Factory. August 13I love an idée fixe—and the kind of people who fixate. The Factory presents a show about exactly that. It Bears Repeating is about repetition, obsession, and “the strange things that happen when you commit to an idea longer than you probably should.” Work will be clustered in groups and grids; visitors who buy art are invited to take it off the wall and take it with them, causing the grids to slowly dissolve and leave behind traces and new arrangements of whatever is left. Featuring Brandon Vosika, Brit Zerbo, Genie Ospital, Ink by Bailee, Marti Jonjak, Sophia Trịnh, Tara Thomas, and Timothy Rysdyke. Commit your obsession to ink with tattoos by Jules (@innerpunk). We’re also flinging our doors wide open at The Stranger offices for this month’s Capitol Hill Art Walk, where we’ll be showcasing photographs by Madison Kirkman, whose death worker photo essay is featured in our August Death Issue.   August 14Roq La Rue delivers yet another stunner: a solo show by Carles Gomila, a painter based in Menorca, Spain, whose work is dripping with 19th-century symbolist energy, the divine feminine, and—perhaps most importantly—her witchy familiar, the cat. Titled Holy Purry Order, Gomila’s exhibit delves into a quasi-mystical realm of cat-female iconography, from sphinx to spinster cat lady. The show officially opens August 15, with a reception on the evening of the 14th. Also opening Friday: Gallery ERGO debuts dual solo shows by Berlin-based painter and muralist SNYDER and Seattle’s own wunderkind, Casey Weldon.  The post A Speakeasy, an Anti-AI Art Show, and My Gen Z Fever-Dream Art Fair Hangover appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less