Seeing my sister's art

So I have this sister named Julie who makes lots of stuff, including collages. She submitted some of her collages to the Northwest Collage Society for inclusion in a juried art show, and she got accepted! Woot!

Naturally, my friend Candice and her boy and I had to wend our way to the Washington State Convention Center today and check it out.

The gallery is on Level 2 of the WSCC. If you walk a loop around this floor, you can see all the artwork in the show.

While Candice went downstairs to give her boy a bathroom break, I struck up a conversation with a security guard. He told me he'd been enjoying walking around the building and looking at the various collages, and pointed out which ones were his favorites -- the ones that kept drawing his eye every time he walked past.

We aimed to make a full circuit of the show...

...but we had to begin at Ground Zero, the artwork that we (well, at least I) had come to see.

"Black Haired Girl: Jennifer," a collage made by one of my sisters, featuring another one of my sisters! GAZE IN WONDER UPON THIS GLORIOUS PINNACLE OF NEPOTISM.

heh.

There are several collages in the Black Haired Girls series. Aside from featuring people Julie knows who have (or are portrayed with) black hair, they all have backgrounds that symbolically represent an aspect of the subject's personality. In Jenny's case, the background is composed of postcards she sent to Julie. Jenny loves postcards, and one year she decided to send out a postcard every day to people she knew. As you might imagine, it gets difficult to know what to write after the first week or so of doing this, so many of Jenny's postcards have little stories about minor, everyday things -- very similar to status updates on social media.

It turned out very well, I think. Also, it happens to be one of the largest collages in the show, so it's visually striking even from a distance.

(By the way, Jules -- just as we were getting ready to leave, another guy who works at the WSCC came by your collage and said, "I don't know what the deal is with this one and all the postcards," so I asked, "Would you like to know more about it?" and we got to talk for a minute or two about your art. 'Twas fun!)

Are you in or near Seattle? Want to go see some super-snazzy collages? This show is running through the end of March 2016, and it's free and everything, so let me humbly suggest that you hie on over to the Rotating Art Gallery and take in some culchah! (You know you wanna.)