Belltown Messenger

Most Seattleites probably still think of Pioneer Square as the center of the city's art world. The long row of high-end galleries on Occidental with their popular "First Thursday" opening garners most of the press. But Belltown, whether residents know it or not, is home to what's quickly becoming one of the most important art spaces in town.

On a Saturday afternoon, Roq la Rue is an easy place to miss. Its bright blue faade shrouded behind a few trees, the gallery seems to shrink into its building next to the Rendezvous on Second Avenue. On opening nights, however, it's a completely different story. The crowd of people who show up mostly young hipsters that would seem more at home on Capitol Hill turn the place into a scene as bright and exciting as anything happening next door.

Roq la Rue is devoted to one type of art. The space and its owner, Kirsten Anderson have become nationally known for displaying what's being called "pop surrealism." In fact, the title comes from a book on the movement that was edited by Anderson, and the publication party took her all the way to L.A., the nearest city with a gallery devoted to this art.

"Its original term was lowbrow,'" she explains as we sit in a corner of the gallery. Around me on the walls are pieces from the current exhibition of young Japanese artists exploring American hot rod culture. "It was sort of a tongue-in-cheek play on the high-art world, and as the work is actually being absorbed into the high-art world, it's sort of morphing into pop surrealism.'"

The roots of the movement go all the way back to the 1960s, to the biker and other subcultures who began experimenting with popular art forms, particularly comic art. As time went on, it began to include other non-traditional forms, like graffiti art, and then artists from a more traditional background began working with what had, until then, been considered little more than kitsch.

Anderson, the child of two artists, started out as a painter herself, but retreated from showing her work because of how personal her art often was, and her trepidation at putting it out to the public. But in the process she wound up curating small shows and found she loved it. "I couldn't sell my own work," she admits, "but I was very good at selling other people's work."

One of her first big shows was "ATM" at the Crocodile CafŽ in the mid-1990s. The show featured forty artists displaying one work each selling for $40. The idea being to not only score a bit of bill money for the artists but to also encourage potential art collectors. "Once you buy one piece of art, you quickly develop a taste for it," she says with a laugh, as though to make it clear that although she's a salesperson, there's more to what she cares about than money.

She discovered pop surrealism around the same time. "I wanted to do something cool, and work with the cartoonists I'd discovered," she explains. "A lot of the Fantagraphics cartoonists lived here, and I couldn't believe they weren't getting any attention. Here we had this wealth of talent in Seattle who no one was paying attention to."

After that she discovered Juxtapoz, an art magazine that serves as a sort of center for the variegated group of artists spread across the globe who make up the movement. "I couldn't believe there was this whole field of art I wasn't aware of that completely resonates with me because I'm a total pop culture geek."

The result was Roq la Rue. Opened in 1998 a block south on Second Avenue, it's been in its current location for four years. The gallery exclusively shows pop surrealist work, what "lowbrow" has evolved into. Although the work shares a lot of aesthetic and thematic characteristics, and the artists have certain common ground (like Juxtapoz), it's nevertheless a disparate movement that's hard to peg down. The term "pop surrealism" was adopted by Anderson for her book, Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art (Ignition Publishing/Last Gasp, $39.95) for the simple reason that "it was the only term all the artists could agree to." The "pop" part is fairly obvious like the 1960s Pop Artists, the Pop Surrealists incorporate mass media and pop culture imagery into their art. But "surrealism?" Asked to explain, Anderson responded, "It's what I like to call rapacious imagination.' It uses a lot of pop culture imagery, but it recombines it, puts these images into different contexts."

The February show was a case in point. "Burnout Network" is an exploration of American car and motorcycle culture from a Japanese perspective. Visually, it wouldn't be hyperbole to call it Hello Kitty meets the Hell's Angels.

"The use of the [pop culture] imagery and I catch a lot of flak for this, because a lot of people see it as very ironic and hipster, but it's not it's the use of pop culture symbols as a visual vocabulary," says Anderson. "We're all raised with these images, we all know what they mean, and there's a lot of humor in it. But I think for most people, it's just sort of become its own language."

That's the commonality that has made pop surrealism into the thriving movement it is today. When Anderson's book came out last fall, the publication party in L.A., at a gallery called La Luz de JŽsus, the other West Coast center of the movement. Anderson deserves credit for making Seattle a bastion of one of the most vibrant styles in contemporary art.

Also, Roq la Rue's success at the other end of downtown from the major galleries offers the hope that Belltown can follow in Pioneer Square's footsteps and develop a scene that's more than just hip night spots. Particularly if the city government has its way, Pioneer Square may become a less attractive place for galleries. The tunnel project threatens to dump out a thirteen lane highway out right near the galleries, the noise is already loud enough to elicit complaints from authors reading at Elliot Bay Books' underground lecture-hall.

Whatever the case, Roq la Rue seems to be in Belltown for the long-haul. Anyone interested in art who'd prefer not to take part in the yuppie-fest that is the First Thursday Artwalk should check out Anderson's gallery. The next show, "Opulent Decay" opens on Friday, March 11 and features the artists Joshua Petker, Alice Tippett and Shawn Ferris.