Notice of Proposed Land Use Action

Curator. Consolidated Works, Seattle. May - July 2001

Artists: Dan Corson (Seattle), Patrick Holderfield (Seattle), Shannon Kennedy (New York), Bret Marion (Seattle), Jennifer McNeely (Seattle), Brad Miller (Seattle), Jesse Paul Miller (Seattle), David Nechak (Seattle), Matthew Picton (Ashland, OR), Susan Robb (Seattle)

In August 1998, Consolidated Works moved into a 30,000 sq. ft. warehouse at 410 Terry Ave. N., thrilled to find a space vast, raw, and flexible enough to house cinema, theater, and a gallery with soaring 35-foot ceilings. What began as a six-month lease becomes a long-running experiment in transformation. As the organization prepares to vacate and the wrecking ball looms, Notice of Proposed Land Use Action marks the final exhibition in this structure. Ten artists respond to the building’s layered history—its industrial past, our time inhabiting it, and its imminent disappearance—creating new works that explore loss, transition, and the potent in-between space we occupy.

Some artists engage the building literally. Shannon Kennedy’s endoscopic video dives into hidden inner architecture, turning insulation and rust into a mysterious landscape. Susan Robb magnifies overlooked corners and cracks, introducing playful interventions with materials like Play-Doh that transform the mundane into vibrant mini-worlds. Patrick Holderfield treats the space as a container for human activity, allowing organic forms to ooze from its seams in an elegant expression of memory and decay. Jennifer McNeely commemorates the building’s 72-year lifespan with stitched, plastic-wrapped bundles of drywall—fragile pink artifacts arranged like a careful archive. Matthew Picton renders a ghostly architectural imprint from plastic and glue, creating a buckled, translucent memory of the building’s second story, suspended between presence and absence.

Other artists focus on the emotional resonance of our tenure here. Jesse Paul Miller’s fragmentary drawings memorialize the space with immediacy and joy, while David Nechak’s convex mirrors remind us that the structure, history, and each other are always watching. Dan Corson transforms the fantasy of destruction into a participatory sound piece, and Bret Marion revises the land use sign poetically, evoking westward expansion and the forging of new futures. Brad Miller’s conceptual work, Dulcinea, distills it all into three buckets of gallery paint—each mixed with a single tear—intended for use in the new space. Together, these artists honor the building not just as a physical container, but as a vessel of creativity, community, and the bittersweet residue of dreaming big.