by Alec Clayton
Nobody does it like David Mollari Sederberg, an artist whose work is simultaneously otherworldly and grounded in reality. Sederberg is like a character actor you might have seen in dozens of movies but whose name you can never remember in that you have probably driven by or walked past or stopped to stare in wonder at his art — often created in collaboration with other artists — without knowing who he is. You have certainly seen his otherworldly Glowhenge (2020-2021), nine brilliantly painted monoliths standing upright on the mound by the shore of Capital Lake, each lit with black light at night and each painted by a different artist.
During fall Arts Walk this year, Sederberg’s work will be featured in a retrospective exhibition at the Olympia Ballroom of artworks created from 1981 to the present. His original and unusual compositions will be arranged chronologically into three main periods manifested in various media assembled by the artist: painting, sculpture, lighted installations, and video. The pieces share the dynamic of mobility, either in fact or image, and many pay homage to other artists in various media of the day. Environmental and social concerns make up much of the subject matter, which is global in some aspects and localized in others.
Sederberg says, “The gallery presentation is a microcosm of one version of the artist’s vision of a dedicated art museum for Olympia — the Olympia Art Museum, and envisions collaboration with others who value art’s place in society like the Thurston County Fine Art Museum and Olympia Arts and Heritage Alliance.”
Sederberg is the owner of Pacific Stage, provider of lighting and audio for Music in the Park and many festivals and stage events throughout the area. He is an award-winning painter and sculptor whose work has been featured and sold in national and international exhibitions from New York to Los Angeles. His work has been featured in the Bellevue Art Museum, Palm Springs Desert Museum, Beverly Hills “Affair in the Gardens,” the Amsterdam Whitney Gallery in New York City/Chelsea and the Florida State University Combined Talents International Exhibition.
For 10 years, he worked in his brother’s auto repair/paint shop. There he painted a series of automobile hoods to be hung on walls as art. Many of these will be shown in the retrospective exhibition. Also included will be polymeric steel painted sculptures. “I created my own medium for these sculptures: mild steel, polymeric resin, acrylic urethane,” Sederberg explained. “The finished pieces look like glass, and make people wonder and guess at the material. The material accepts the paint in an arrestingly luminous fashion.”
There are stories implicit and explicit in his art. For example, his car hood art piece Meet Me in Seattle at the Fair “was named after a song I had as a kid on a 45 RPM by Joy and The Boys. A happy song about the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair; it described having a world by the string. We had elected JFK, the economy was on an upswing, an average
white male boomer’s single income could easily sustain a middle-class family. … I wanted to paint what could be the worst of times. While the scientific consensus at the time was the Earth was going to heat up due to increased carbon in the air, I chose to paint what it might be like if we went back into an ice age.”
Or Sleeping Greener, a parody of Henri Rousseau’s famous painting Sleeping Gypsy. Instead of Rousseau’s sleeping lion, Sederberg painted a sleeping geoduck, the silly Evergreen State College mascot.
Sederberg also invited other artists to show with him in the exhibition, including: Natalie Coblenta, who collaborated with Sederberg on the Glowhenge and Inspire Oly installations; Andrew Ebright and Suza Manges, collaborating video artists for Four Letter Word; and several other artists who collaborated with Sederberg on Glowhenge, Inspire Oly and Precarious Stacks; and others of a broad range of background, inspiration, and demographics (including age).
This exhibition should not be missed.
WHAT
David Mollari Sederberg, a Retrospective
WHEN
5-10 p.m., Oct. 3 and noon to 6 p.m. Oct. 4
WHERE
Olympia Ballroom, 116 Legion Way, SE, Olympia
COST
Free
LEARN MORE
Dave Sederberg
dave@pacificstage.com
MollariArt.com