Bellevue Art Museum Exhibit

Facing Homelessness is honored to partner with Johnston Architects on The View From Here, an art installation, at the Bellevue Art Museum, part of the BAM Biennial exhibit. The piece which explores homelessness locally and asks us all to come closer and see ourselves in the experiences of others.

The BAM Biennial is a juried exhibition which focuses on the work of established and emerging Northwest artists, craftspeople, and designers, with an emphasis on new work. Learn more here and visit beginning November 5th. BAM is open Wednesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm.

The Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce published the following article on the exhibit.

Every two years, the Bellevue Arts Museum (BAM) holds its biennial. This year's theme is Architecture and Urban Design. The exhibit features a unique mix of works from artists and architectural firms in a plethora of media that includes wood, fiber, photography and audio and visual installations. There is also the more traditional models and sculptures that you might expect to see at an architectural showcase.

The exhibit challenges us to think about the impact that architecture has on our everyday life, on our communities and on our bodies, and to see the built environment as sculpture. Several exhibits also pose architecture and the built environment as a lens through which to witness culture and society and to ask important questions about this.

There are 25 exhibits in total chosen from 130 submissions all from the Pacific Northwest (including Alaska). Submitters were encouraged to look at the theme of architecture and urban design broadly. In consequence, the pieces address an array of topical questions including homelessness, gentrification, accessibility, and climate change.

“A lot of these works look at traditional architecture and then put a twist on it,” Lane Eagles, associate curator at Bellevue Arts Museum, explained during a recent press tour of the exhibit.

Architectural firms whose exhibits were chosen for the biennial include Johnston Architects (JA), LMN Architects and Paul Michael Davis Architects. Johnston Architects' submission, “The View from Here,” is made in collaboration with Facing Homelessness. The piece is designed to “shine a light on our neighbors who now live unsheltered in Bellevue and Seattle.”

The installation consists of a "tent tower" of four tents stacked atop one another, an audio-visual component and an info-graphic.
“When we were brainstorming about the piece we wanted to make sure that we created an installation that was relevant and specific to the region, and unfortunately the reality of homelessness in the built environment can't be ignored,” Jack Chaffin, principal at Johnston Architects, explained.

“The tent tower is a play on the luxury towers and condominiums that we have seen rise up at the same time as homelessness in Seattle and Bellevue,” Chaffin continued.

JA wanted to juxtapose these two realities that are hard to reconcile. Each tent features a silhouette of a domestic scene that you might more typically see in a holiday window storefront display, such as someone reading a book or getting their hair done.

“The idea behind the silhouettes was to try and put the viewer in the museum ‘inside of the tent,' to show that the un-housed are people just like them. The thin fabric of the tents also represents just how fine the line between being housed and un-housed can be,” Chaffin added.

In addition to the tents, there is an audio-visual component that consists of looped recordings of homeless individuals and those who are helping to solve the problem of homelessness. These audio clips are taken from a series of videos produced by Facing Homelessness. The info-graphic frames the tent tower and features an image of the Seattle and Bellevue skylines with facts about the crisis provided by Facing Homelessness.

“Ultimately we want the piece to stir action and to create an empathy bridge between those viewing the exhibit and the homeless community that it represents,” Chaffin concluded.

In addition to the main biennial exhibit, LMN Architects and Sound Transit have teamed to up to create a smaller exhibit that showcases art and architecture that will feature in upcoming East Link and downtown Redmond light rail stations.

Both exhibits are open now and run until April 24, 2022. Cost of entry to see the main exhibit is $15 per adult and free for BAM members. The smaller Sound Transit and LMN Architects exhibit is free and can be viewed on the ground floor of the museum.
For more information visit https://www.bellevuearts.org/.../current/bam-biennial-2021