Cutting-edge showcases with media galore

The New Year is starting off with a bang at some of Seattle's smaller, more alternative gallery spaces. The trend is not all "out with the old, in with the new," but involves conscious, cutting-edge uses of traditional spaces, forms and media.

The newest arrival to the Seattle art scene, the McLeod Residence, has moved into a 100-year-old building in Belltown. The founders of this new art gallery (and lounge, opening in spring), Lele McLeod (born Leanne Ng) and Buster McLeod (born Erik Benson), have transformed this old space into funky-elegant showrooms for both old and new art.

After walking up the old wood stairs into a foyer with turquoise chandeliers and black-and-white Victorian wallpaper, you immediately know that this is not your typical white-cube gallery space. In one room, you can bask in the glow of the McLeod Residence's light boxes, which feature photographs and digital art by different artists, including strong works by Galen Ward, Matt Daniels and Chuck Lopez. The imagery, format and even the curatorial process — the images were submitted digitally from artists in the Northwest and further afield — are decidedly contemporary.

Moving into the burgundy "parlor" is like moving back in time. Late 19th- and early 20th-century paintings and furniture — the kinds of things that might have once graced a room just like this one — have been selected by Seattle art dealer Jay Franklin. The exhibition of paintings and furniture is somewhat mixed in terms of quality but includes some gems by Adolphe Eberle and Robert Wood, among others.

Also at McLeod is "Eleven Conversations," a fascinating interactive installation by artist and musician Paul Rucker. A large-scale image of Rucker, playing the cello, is projected on the wall and his rich music fills the space. You can manipulate the rhythms, tones and speed of Rucker's playing by waving your hand over a sensor in the middle of the room. In keeping with one of the goals of the McLeod Residence, this installation spurs you to interact with art, rather than passively receive it.

Down in Pioneer Square, the aptly named PUNCH Gallery is showing vigorous art by its three new members — Nathan DiPietro, Patricia Hagen and Natalie Schmidt Dotzauer — and although there isn't a deliberate curatorial theme drawing their works together, the artists' divergent styles and forms dance and spar with each other very nicely.

DiPietro uses an age-old medium, egg tempera, and a traditional format, gilded icon framing, but instead of showcasing the Virgin Mary, for example, he crafts charming, folksy landscapes. They're idyllic little visions, rendered vibrant through DiPietro's deft handling of the tempera. But there are small, sharp intrusions by contemporary life and politics, like a tiny man with a tiny leaf-blower who disrupts the quiet scene with a subtle allusion to the noisy issues of labor and class.

Exhibition reviews


"Parlor," "Eleven Conversations" and "Light Box

Installation," various artists, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, through Feb. 26, McLeod Residence, 2209 Second Ave., Seattle

(206-441-3314 or www.mcleodresidence.com).

"7 Chairs," installation by Mary Welch, 5-9:30 p.m. Mondays-

Saturdays (or by appointment), through Jan. 19, Good Shepherd

Center, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., Seattle (206-547-8127).

"Round Three: New Member Work," by Nathan DiPietro,

Patricia Hagen and Natalie Schmidt Dotzauer, noon-5 p.m. Fridays-Sundays, through Jan. 28, PUNCH Gallery, 119 Prefontaine Place S., Seattle (206-621-1945 or www.punchgallery.org).

Like DiPietro, Schmidt Dotzauer plays with expectations. At first, it seems like Schmidt Dotzauer has transported real, found chunks of wall into the gallery space, stripping away the layers of wallpaper and plaster to reveal the inner supports. She does use found materials, but her works are constructed, not ripped from a preexisting structure. By layering her own silk-screened "wallpaper" onto found wood and other materials, she plays with ideas of construction and destruction, fiction and memory.

In contrast to Schmidt Dotzauer's raw and bulky works, Hagen's organic, abstract paintings are weirdly elegant. They seem to bind the show together, which is appropriate to her subject matter: Hagen paints polymorphic pods and globs of cells that reproduce and cling to each other across her rich surfaces.

Up in Wallingford, at the Good Shepherd Center, Mary Welch, one of the center's artist-tenants, has created an enchanting new installation in the beautiful old chapel that now serves as a gallery space. Seven elaborate, fantasy-filled chairs are surrounded by a "labyrinth" created on the floor out of cornmeal — evoking associations with mandalas and mystical sand painting.

As you start your journey through the maze, a timed lighting and sound system is triggered, further guiding you from fantastic chair to fantastic chair with colored spotlights and pulsing new-agey music. According to Welch, the experience is meant to encourage "consideration of the chakra system, thought to be a source of energy for psychic or spiritual power." It's also just delightful to the senses and a refreshing reflection on the ideas of worship and guidance that are integral to this old space.