SuttonBeresCuller

Mini Mart City Park

A permanent installation in Seattle, WA

Scheduled to be complete in 2009

“We will design, construct, plant and maintain a city park and conservatory in a convenience store or former gas stations in Seattle, Washington. The installation will include a meandering path, grass, trees, seasonal plantings, a small waterfall, and a park bench. Elements of the original building will be utilized and transformed—refrigerated display cases once responsible for the chilling of chocolate milk and soda pop will be converted to climate-controlled environments, simulating tropical, temperate and arid ecosystems. While embracing certain aspects of the original architecture for conceptual contrast, radical interventions with the building would include opening up large section of the roof to allow natural light to spill into the space and make the building “greener” on the whole, introducing eco-building elements such as solar panels, a green roof, and a re-usable grey water run-off filtration system. Another major architectural intervention would include a sunroom/greenhouse that would attach to the building’s exterior as a modular unit signaling to outside observers the interior transformation.

We will transform the space both visually and functionally. It is part of our desire to explore the notion of “convenience” as it relates to civic systems such as transportation, parks and recreation, school, libraries, and, above all, art and the cultural institution. All of these systems are within reach of the general public, and we see them serving vital roles in the formation and sustained health of community.

The project will work with concepts like urban forests and eco-building, re-incribing them as art into the domains of quotidian existence. Mini-Mart City Park is a vision of what happens when the urban landscape is given back to nature, and what community can inhabit it. The structure will keep its identity as a corner convenience store, but be converted into not only a truly “green” building, but a living work of art. This sculpture will provide a potential new model for a permanent public park.”

-SuttonBeresCuller

The artists have received a Creative Capital grant for this project.

MINIMART WEBSITE HERE

Drive-Thru Gallery, 2000

Installation, Seattle, WA

Finished walls were erected in a throughway to a parking lot. Grey carpet was laid on the ground and track lighting was mounted illuminating the space. All of these elements combined referenced a traditional gallery setting. The installation was publicized. Cars drove through the installation, activating the space, and thus becoming the art object.

Keys, 2002

Installation and performance Westlake Studios, Seattle

The artists were locked inside the gallery with thousands of keys spread on the floor outside of the space. Artists communicated with the public via spy camera/microphone while viewers attempted to gain access to the space.

New Installation, 2002

Consolidated Works, Seattle

A maze of spaces was created with triangular shaped columns and walls. As the viewer navigates through the installation he/she comes into contact with many elements including: a 10’ working pencil which the viewer may draw on the floor with; a telephone through which the viewer can listen to the artists’ answering machine messages; a conical stack of newspapers; six computers on which they may type and read messages; a curved hallway with speakers set in the walls—each pair of speakers plays a different language, a locked door with thousands of keys with which the viewer may try and gain access. The installation also included video elements.

Open House, 2002

Suyama Space, Seattle, WA

Open House was an installation constructed for Suyama Space. The structure took the form of a plywood cube extending up to the ceiling, divided into quadrants by four narrow vertical slits that led the viewer into the interior. Once inside, the form of an imagined house, or rather, the void left by the house becomes apparent. The interior is intended to imply the living space and social interaction of a basic single family home, referencing the manufactured house, urban sprawl, and the homogenization of culture as it metaphorically examined the physical and less tangible aspects of what makes a home.

Trailer Park, 2003

Mobile installation, Seattle, WA

Mobile city park constructed on a flat bed trailer. Tours Seattle during spring and summer months. Park features include: bench, fountain, live plants, tree and grass. Trailer Park typically tours more urban settings.

“On a Saturday night I wandered down to Broadway to see Trailer Park. This, as the name rather slyly does not suggest, is a bit of park built on a trailer: a stone path through a lush patch of grass, a neat little wood-and-wrought-iron bench, some trees, flowers, and a running waterfall, on that night taking up two parking space outside Septieme.

It was an absurd thing, but that wasn’t the whole of it. And certainly you could read it politically if you wanted—something about the dearth of available public space. But my husband and I simply sat on the bench and watched the foot traffic on Broadway watch us back, the dynamic of people-watching turned on its head by this simple inversion. We wondered what our behavior out to be: Could we litter? Should we have brought a 40? Could one smoke? Like the very best installation art, Trailer Park reorganized the world around it.”

-Emily Hall

Three-Day Weekend, 2005

Installation/performance, Consolidated Works, Seattle

A fourteen-foot travel trailer held aloft 10 feet from the gallery floor. The transparent floor of the trailer allows viewers a glimpse of mundane performances inside; different performers inhabited the installation each night. The Installation also featured audio and video elements.

“The installation consisted of a trailer built 10 feet off the ground with two moving wheels, taillights, a bumper, and a Plexiglas floor,, which allowed viewers to stand beneath it and see inside. With its stocked cupboards, breakfast nook, and tiny see-through table (so you could look up through the floor and, and beyond that, through the table), the detailed interior was its own gently tragicomic environment, like a Christian Holstad installation or an Alec Soth photograph.

It was the set for a non-drama that was hard to pull your attention away from. Each night featured different people “vacationing” inside. With rapt attention, the crowd watched the movements of a man and woman, a baby’s diaper being changed, a cat skittering along the floor, food and beverages being consumed, a small TV playing movies, adults playing cards, and a man trying to covertly urinate away from prying eyes.”

-Nate Lippens

There Goes the Neighborhood, 2005

There Goes the Neighborhood is a continuation of an ongoing series of mobile environments. The piece itself is a display model/cross section of a family living room with performers occupying the space, interacting with people passing by. The installation includes couches, TV dinners, a fireplace, and other accoutrements of Middle America. This project is voyeurism, reality TV, and performance art all rolled into one. There Goes the Neighborhood is a mobile living space that has toured King County in a series of performances that are a mix between installation and theater. This seemingly quaint little home-on-wheels also has the potential to get domestic on your own front lawn.

The Island, 2005

Early in the morning on Monday, September 19, a Seattle Police Harbor Patrol boat came across a desert island floating in Lake Washington. On the island were foam rocks, a fake palm tree, a plastic crab and starfish, real coconuts, and three men in ripped-up business suits. One of the harbor patrol officers started asking questions: How long are you going to be shipwrecked? What are you doing? Are you trying to raise money? Do you need anything? John Sutton, Ben Beres, and Zac Culler had spent the night on the island and had enough food, water, and beer to last three or four more days. The harbor patrol officers asked a few more questions, wished them well, and sped off.

Two hours later, harbor patrol came back. A commuter on the SR-520 Bridge had seen the desert island, thought it was a capsized ship, and called 911. Sixteen fire engines were waiting at the University of Washington to assist the rescue. Sutton, Beres, and Culler assured the harbor patrol that no one needed rescue.

-Christopher Frizzelle

If These Walls… / Three Dragon Restaurant, 2006

On Thursday, June 22, at 7pm, SuttonBeresCuller entered a 32 x 32 x 12 foot box in the main space of Lawrimore Project. For three weeks the artists worked in the box hermetically sealed from any human interaction beyond their own. Spectators were able to hear the artists building their exhibition, but did not see what it was they were working on.

On Saturday, July 15 at 7pm, the walls came down, revealing Three Dragon Restaurant – a full-scale chinese eatery like the ones found in Lawrimore Project’s new neighborhood, the International District of Seattle. Taking “site-specific” art to a logical (though ridiculous) extreme, SuttonBeresCuller’s gesture, not only to place the gallery in its proper context, but also brought their practices and interventions to date into razor sharp focus.

Home Sick, 2006

Take The Cake, Stranger Genius Awards, 2003-6

Henry Art Gallery

A pristine, white house, seemingly sinking halfway into the gallery floor. Interior lights slowly dimmed on and off in sync with a heavy breathing sound emitted from within the house.

Julie’s Teahouse, 2007

Commissioned Project

Landscape designer and art collector Julie O’Farrell approached the trio with a request for her own bespoke backyard artwork: a teahouse. That is how a piece of the SuttonBeresCuller world, where perspectives shift with dreamlike ease and the ordinary becomes transcendent, came to be tucked away in a keystone-shaped pocket of a serene Sandpoint garden.

Framed by creamy rhododendron blossoms, the toy-sized teahouse seems poised to take flight. Maybe it’s the V-shaped garden rooftop, spilling over with greenery, like half-shaped moss-covered wings. Or perhaps it’s the cantilevered-steel front step, which endows the structure with a weightless feeling, as if it’s hovering slightly above the ground.

While an aura of imminent ascent is a new twist on a historically rustic and earthbound structure, there’s old-fashioned craftsmanship behind the lighthearted theatricality. Shoji-inspired shutters glide open to reveal interior walls fashioned entirely from tongue-in-groove cedar planks, each hand-stained and then pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle.

What is here is stillness—a quite sliced by birdsong that is suddenly, vividly, loud. Although O’Farrell plans to work in the teahouse, seeking inspiration for her landscape designs in this singular clam, perhaps its main purpose will be as a place to escape and dream. To enter this slightly eccentric, but mostly exquisite, creation, is to step outside of ordinary life. In this, it is vintage SuttonBeresCuller.

-Sara daSilva

Ship in a Bottle, 2007

Tacoma Art Museum

Northwest Biennial

The artists try to expand the idea of what art can be and renew a sense of wonder about visual information. Their strategy related directly to the infamous Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp, a store-brought, porcelain urinal that Duchamp declared sculpture. SuttonBeresCuller also invoke the tradition of the mundane object displayed as formal art. For Ship in a Bottle, the artists and the museum collaborated to lift and place a 1956 Blanchard Senior Knockabout sailboat into the center stone courtyard on top of Richard Rhodes Untitled sculptural installation. Referencing the hobby of building replica sailing vessels in bottles, the “SuttonBeresCuller” rests in a glass courtyard, suspended nearly 60 feet above the parking lot. The improbability of their sculpture in this location genuinely surprises in an age in which digital technologies make virtually everything effortless and instantaneous.

-Tacoma Art Museum

pPod, 2007

pPod is a self-contained, mobile, miniature stage. The Pod is propelled by human power, much like a pedi cab or rickshaw, which makes it very eco-friendly, and is suitable for travel in urban areas and well-paved thoroughfares. Large enough to seat one person comfortably, it comes standard with all of the accoutrements a person could ask for. pPod is highly customizable and versatile. With futuristic design and functionality kept in mind, the pPod features a tough fiberglass chassis, a spacious trunk ideal for housing audio/video equipment, a CD/DVD player, three LCD screens, CB radio/PA system, interior/exterior speakers, interior lights, three observation cameras, all riding on top of four high quality pneumatic casters. The possibilities are endless with options for wi-fi and video conferencing. It’s also compact enough to easily travel long distances via automobile. Lightweight yet durable, the Performance Pod can travel the dense urban landscape and the sprawling suburbs all in the same day.