The mission of METHOD is to foster and exhibit sculpture and installation that regards process, material, and concept, while engaging the gallery space.
We endeavor to:
We endeavor to:
- promote a changing program of visually stimulating, well-researched, and thoughtful exhibitions.
- provide a venue for interdisciplinary thinking that supports exploration and creative problem solving
- provide a contemporary exhibition space for artists who are working outside the traditional commercial standard
- offer a platform for discussion on aesthetics, technical considerations, experimentation, and the creative process that are supported by artists’ talks.
- present exhibitions that question, inform, and inspire through engagement with the Pioneer Square community.
Photo courtesy of James Arzente
Mary Coss creates sculptures and installations that travel from the instantly recognizable — an infant, a woman’s torso, a nest in a branch — to the vaguely familiar and almost purely gestural. The details of family lineage might be abstracted and re-formed into a large-scale biomorphic installation. Mother nature may be portrayed through pods of woven wire. Even with those works that are more overtly representational, Coss chooses forms that invoke issues and stories beyond the visual. With all of her works, there are layers of social import, personal or local history, and existential suggestiveness.
Coss’s diversity of form is echoed in, and often inspired by, a diversity in materials. Plaster, glass, paper, found objects, wood, text, and sound co-exist or stand alone, offering evocative associations in form and content. The themes of Coss’s art often stem from nature and the roots of cultural and familial histories. She is a story gatherer and teller, but, in the end, through her metamorphic materials and processes, the viewer intuits and constructs meaning. Just as her sculptural forms are often permeated by openings — spaces in between her interwoven and extended gestures — Coss offers expansive and interconnected impressions rather than closed narratives.
Coss received her Master of Fine Arts from Syracuse University and has accumulated an extensive exhibition record, focusing on alternative venues and community and public art projects. Coss has received residencies and grants from institutions such as the Candyland Arts Center in Stockholm, the National Endowment for the Arts, the San Juan Island Museum and Sculpture Park, and Seattle’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs. Her public work is in numerous collections including King County and Seattle Housing Authorities, McNeil Island Corrections Center, Carlsbad Public Library and Port Angeles Fine Arts Center. Coss’s curatorial experience includes exhibitions at the Columbia City Guest Gallery, Another Roadside Gallery, and co-curated projects for the New City Gallery. Coss has also curated and installed work outside of traditional venues including architectural firms and University Women’s Centers.
Photo courtesy of James Arzente
Paul D. McKee fabricates sculpture and installations that are both romantic and predatory. The brocaded wallpapers and fabrics, stuffed deer heads, and atmospheres of elegant dereliction lure us in. And then we are ensnared in discomforting juxtapositions between signifiers: familiar and unfamiliar, home and danger, male and female. Antlers, trophies of hunting, an activity associated with masculine faults and virtues, are often fetishized and feminized in McKee’s works. McKee’s self-portraits often take the place of deer faces, bringing up questions of sacrifice, narcissism, and the display of self in the home.
McKee’s deliberate use of artifice and contradiction sheds light on idealized visions of home life and gender, representations of the American dream that have been exclusionary for gay couples and families. In place of an ideal, McKee proposes jumbled, sensual, dilapidated constructs that are both alluring and discomforting. The large-scale installations are theatrical, but they are also life-size and full of familiar objects, the trappings of home. Like microcosms of his installation tableaux, McKee’s stand-alone sculptures conjure up experiences of the uncanny. The trophy heads or antlers offered on elegant pillows excite visual pleasure and psychic disquiet. The conflict between the familiar and the unfamiliar opens up questions about gender, idealized representation, and the places we call home.
McKee earned a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Wichita State University, a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornish College of the Arts and has amassed an extensive exhibition record. McKee has received recognition, grants, awards, and residencies from institutions such as Visual Overture Magazine, the James Washington Foundation, The UW Henry Art Gallery, and 4Culture. His work can be found in numerous private collections in Europe and the United States. McKee’s curatorial experience includes curating for the Angle and Corridor Galleries at the Tashiro Kaplan Building since 2010 as well as with multiple local and regional exhibitions.
McKee’s deliberate use of artifice and contradiction sheds light on idealized visions of home life and gender, representations of the American dream that have been exclusionary for gay couples and families. In place of an ideal, McKee proposes jumbled, sensual, dilapidated constructs that are both alluring and discomforting. The large-scale installations are theatrical, but they are also life-size and full of familiar objects, the trappings of home. Like microcosms of his installation tableaux, McKee’s stand-alone sculptures conjure up experiences of the uncanny. The trophy heads or antlers offered on elegant pillows excite visual pleasure and psychic disquiet. The conflict between the familiar and the unfamiliar opens up questions about gender, idealized representation, and the places we call home.
McKee earned a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Wichita State University, a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornish College of the Arts and has amassed an extensive exhibition record. McKee has received recognition, grants, awards, and residencies from institutions such as Visual Overture Magazine, the James Washington Foundation, The UW Henry Art Gallery, and 4Culture. His work can be found in numerous private collections in Europe and the United States. McKee’s curatorial experience includes curating for the Angle and Corridor Galleries at the Tashiro Kaplan Building since 2010 as well as with multiple local and regional exhibitions.
Photo courtesy of James Arzente
Paula Stokes practices glassmaking and printmaking. The full forms, opaque colors, and smooth surfaces of her blown glass objects have an intense bodily allure. They are quite themselves — self-contained objects that are satisfied to sit on their own or in conversational groupings. But their dense, full curves and intentionally irregular forms pull on us physically, compelling us to imagine how the smooth curves of weighty glass would feel in the curve of our hands. And with titles like “Breathe” and “Lungful,” they occasionally reference the artist’s body, too. We can sense the process of the artist as she creates solid form out of molten glass. The objects become containers of the acts of their own creation. But in the end, Stokes’s sculptures are not stand-ins for people. The forms are biomorphic rather than strictly anthropomorphic. The ambiguous forms might remind us of pods or teardrops but, more importantly, they are their own unique beings.
Stokes’s two-dimensional work — monotype prints and flat glass panels — are inhabited by some of the same lively characters. Organic, rounded shapes of saturated color skim across the surfaces, moving among vertical, linear elements. But there’s a seriousness to Stokes’s play. Much like the Surrealists used dreams and games to open up cognitive and social possibilities, Stokes sets in motion a concentrated interplay of shape, surface, depth, color and line. Her works become their own worlds — with their own characters and dynamics — even while they remind us of our own worlds and bodies.
Stokes earned a Bachelor’s Degree in design specializing in glass from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and has pursued post-baccalaureate studies at the International Glass Center in Brierley Hill, England and printmaking at the University of Washington, Seattle. Stokes has exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally and has received grants and awards from institutions such as the Finnish Ministry of Education and the University of Washington’s Milnora Roberts Award for Academic Excellence. Her work can be found in numerous collections including the National Museum of Ireland. As the Scholarship and Exhibition Programs Manager of Pratt Fine Arts center, Stokes curated and managed over eighty exhibitions at Pratt’s satellite gallery in Pioneer Square and other off campus venues such as City Hall and the Design Center.
Stokes’s two-dimensional work — monotype prints and flat glass panels — are inhabited by some of the same lively characters. Organic, rounded shapes of saturated color skim across the surfaces, moving among vertical, linear elements. But there’s a seriousness to Stokes’s play. Much like the Surrealists used dreams and games to open up cognitive and social possibilities, Stokes sets in motion a concentrated interplay of shape, surface, depth, color and line. Her works become their own worlds — with their own characters and dynamics — even while they remind us of our own worlds and bodies.
Stokes earned a Bachelor’s Degree in design specializing in glass from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and has pursued post-baccalaureate studies at the International Glass Center in Brierley Hill, England and printmaking at the University of Washington, Seattle. Stokes has exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally and has received grants and awards from institutions such as the Finnish Ministry of Education and the University of Washington’s Milnora Roberts Award for Academic Excellence. Her work can be found in numerous collections including the National Museum of Ireland. As the Scholarship and Exhibition Programs Manager of Pratt Fine Arts center, Stokes curated and managed over eighty exhibitions at Pratt’s satellite gallery in Pioneer Square and other off campus venues such as City Hall and the Design Center.
For more information about the founding artists of METHOD:
Mary Coss http://www.marycoss.com
Paul D McKee http://www.pauldmckee.com
Paula Stokes http://www.paulastokes.com
Our exceptional artist volunteers are:
Aimee Bullock
Makena Gadient www.Makenagadient.com
Justine Harris
Jamie Christene Petersen www.jamiechristenepetersen.com
Emily Tyler
METHOD artist introductions by Gayle Clemans Ph.D., writer, critic, and art historian
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METHOD is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike. Shunpike is the 501(c)(3) non-profit agency that provides independent arts groups in Washington State with the services, resources, and opportunities they need to forge their own paths in sustainable success.
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