Hank Reavis Makes Familiar Seattle Scenes Feel New in Georgetown Exhibition

On a bright August afternoon, sun shone into Seattle artist Hank Reavis' studio space in Pioneer Square.

When I visited, he was in the process of finishing a painting of a flower booth in Pike Place Market. The piece resembles a low-res downloaded photo, composed purely of painted pixels. Beneath it was a waist-high pile of discarded yellow FrogTape, which Reavis uses to single out each pixel square, carefully building color and texture with his airbrush. The result is a scene that looks familiar to any Seattleite — the chaotic beauty of the Market — but vague enough to be slightly unrecognizable.

"What's interesting to me is forming a connection through something that is deeply personal to me, but also kind of part of our universal experience as people living in Seattle or in the modern world," said Reavis.

This airbrushed painting and several others will be part of Reavis' solo show I Can See It From Here, which runs at Mini Mart City Park in Georgetown from Sept. 5 to 27. Drawing from personal photographs and screenshots from Google Street View, the exhibition explores memory and place. And just down the street at Georgetown Steam Plant, Reavis and co-curator Bergen Hendrickson put together Campers (Sept. 5–20), a sprawling group show featuring the work of over a dozen artists who have been associated with Seattle's underground DIY art scene.

While the images in I Can See It From Here are drawn from photos of moments or places that Reavis finds personally significant, there's no strict narrative to the show. "Sun Deli Mart" depicts a Street View image of the Sun Deli Mart sign on Airport Way, a now-closed corner store in SoDo that Reavis used to pass on the way to an old friend's house. And "Hoquiam Window" looks like it could be at any house in Seattle's residential neighborhoods, perhaps belonging to a friend, an ex, or a family member.

"I wanted to find intentionally vague imagery to allow people to form connections of their own to the pretty universally identifiable scenes," said Reavis. "It looks familiar, but not. That's what I'm looking for, this sort of edge of familiar clarity."

For some of his pieces, Reavis pulls reference images from Google Street View, which Google launched in 2007 to capture a "360-degree map of the world." Updated periodically, the feature lets users place themselves on the streets of cities and countries around the world, even allowing them to go back in time to older versions of the street-level photographs.

It's become an organizing point for GeoGuessrs, who compete to figure out the location of a randomly selected Google Street View image. And Instagram accounts like Old Seattle Blocks crawl previous versions of Street View for photos of Seattle to capture old corners and geographies of a city undergoing constant change. Reavis' paintings feel like an extension of those practices. They're mediated by the experience of growing up online, but rather than being about being online, the works use the visual language of the internet — a sheen of pixels — to depict the slipperiness of memory.

"We're used to seeing images in this format because you know everybody uses computers and technology and is seeing an image online," said Reavis. "It's not so much about the computer as a processing tool, and more functions as a filter to represent how remembering things is not this crystal clear process."

I feel that when I look at Reavis' very small painting of a bird, soaring against an orange sky, its body and wings made of squares. It reminded me of moments where I've tried to capture a cloud, a sunset, or a particularly bright moon with my phone, only to look at the blurry photo later. While the image might not directly reflect the beauty of that moment, the feeling is still accessible. I can see it and still access what it felt like to stand under the sky, at the beach, or sit in the forest and the thought of whipping out my phone to capture the scene before me. Reavis' airbrushed paintings function in a similar way: By mimicking broadly accessible or familiar images of Seattle, they're non-specific enough to function as placeholders for the viewers' own memories.

Outside of Reavis' own pieces, I Can See It From Here will also feature a screening of work by Robert Zverina (a.k.a. robZtv), a Seattle-based videographer who spent the last 20 years capturing micromovies — no longer than 30 seconds — of glimpses of the Pacific Northwest. Random street corners, parties, roadways, gas stations, protests, and the like are all fodder for his cheap digital camera. At his Sept. 11 pop-up at Mini Mart within Reavis' show, Zverina will present robZtv: The Struggle Against Forgetting, a specially composed selection of never-before-seen clips Seattle circa 2006.

"I think [Reavis and Zverina's] practices are so aligned. So having that as an independent program just for Hank's solo will be a different way to contextualize these perspectives on lens and memory," said Alissa Dymally Williams, Mini Mart's gallery and program manager.

For Campers at Georgetown Steam Plant, Reavis and co-curator Hendrickson have invited artists like Chito, Noelle Whitaker, and Andrew Durgin-Barnes to bring painting, sculpture, and installation to the venue. Though many of them have moved away from Seattle and may not be associated with today's local art scene, they were among the first artists Reavis remembered showing work alongside at places like Pipsqueak Gallery in the Central District. Despite the distance, Reavis said there's a "strong link" between his work and theirs, and Reavis wanted Campers to be an opportunity to give them their collective shine. Together with I Can See It From Here, both exhibitions serve as mirrors of Seattle — what you see in them is based on wherever you are at that moment.

"This is a show about Seattle for people from Seattle and people not from Seattle, people who appreciate Seattle," said Reavis. "Even with all its bad parts, I still love Seattle so much."