What Do You LACK?

Remember when downtown Seattle was a shopping district? The place where we’d all head for school clothes, dishes, couches, bedding, and definitely for holiday gifts? It’s been a couple decades, but longtime Seattleites certainly recall the city’s Bon Marché and Frederick & Nelson era, when the borderlands between Belltown and Downtown were dedicated to retail. This winter season, Base Camp 2 has brought that beat back—with an artful twist.

In decades past, the building at the corner of Third and Stewart was occupied by Bergman Luggage, its storefront piled with Tumi expandables and Samsonites spinners. Last month, artist duo Mary Anne Carter and Lilia Deering have re-realized the original purpose of the 6,000-square-foot space via STÖR, an immersive restyling and un-branding of a certain multinational furniture company, the name of which shall not be mentioned for legal reasons. The exhibit’s fully stocked with an array of chairs, beds, dishes, and other housewares created by 36 Pacific Northwest artists, from Portland to Vancouver, BC. On view through January 10, STÖR offers consumers of homegoods and art alike a chance to reconsider consumption and have fun doing it.

Opening night on October 25th was served with canned beverages and a side of Swedish meatballs in the marketplace portion of the space (for one night only—sorry!). Visitors wound their way through a series of showroom-styled mini installations, including a cigarette-themed children’s bedroom, a Nickelodeonesque slime vignette, and a soft living room rendered in Carter’s signature “faux inflatables” (Poly-Fil–stuffed pillows comprising screen-printed or hand-painted canvas). In the last case, the fluffy domestic display includes a stuffed fireplace, stuffed potted plant, and stuffed dog. Carter’s repertoire of fabrication skills is on full display here, resulting in a smorgasbord of trompe-l'œil moments throughout the space. Arriving to art by way of dance and theater, Deering brings her stage design skills to STÖR in the form of large-scale sets for visitors to explore.

It was clear from the start that Base Camp 2 was the right home for their concept. “It's got the history of being a retail store,” Deering explains, “So really it felt perfect in this spot, where we're bridging retail and art gallery. It already has that energy. We're basically using this familiar container, right? It writes itself.”

Deering initially approached Carter with the idea one year ago, when Base Camp 2 first opened to the public with Ghosts of Belltown, an exhibit that made creative use of a messy reconstruction phase by inviting artists to create installations out of the abandoned luggage displays and debris that’d been gutted from upstairs. Inspired by the sheer amount of space, Deering and Carter both knew they wanted to create one large installation with many smaller installations nested within it. In a cool coincidence, they both independently came up with the name “STÖR.”

“We’d been talking about how there's this boom of experience museums right now,” Carter says, “where there's something like a Museum of Illusions, and people will pay fifty dollars to see a Van Gogh slideshow, but they don't understand why they have to pay to go to an art museum. As installation artists, we were kind of bemoaning that.”

It also occurred to them that ”‘the Swedish retailer” was one of the first public immersive experiences to exist. “We’re just toying with, as a public art piece, the idea of downtown Seattle getting an IKEA,” Carter laughs.

(Oops, she said it!)

Meatballs, of course, are a recurring theme here. Blurring the line between the real and the art of it all, STÖR’s actual meatballs offered to visitors on opening night were complemented by a host of meatball pillows peppered throughout the exhibit, screen-printed with the image of the iconic frozen Swedish meatball bag. Elsewhere there are ceramic meatballs as well as a very grand, orange, kinda-meatball-looking light fixture dangling overhead in the “cafeteria” area of the exhibit. The inclusion of the meaty chandelier was another coincidence, Carter notes: “It was part of the previous exhibit. It’s technically not part of the show, but it does look like a glowing meatball!”

A skin-themed showroom concepted by Deering offers an array of artifacts, like a wooden clock in the form of a Band-Aid, a fleshy and vaguely mouth-shaped mirror, and little curly hairs protruding from the wall (they’re hooks, hand-formed with clay). Elsewhere, Deering’s love for ’90s nostalgia comes to life in a showroom vignette loaded with sentimental kitschy tech decor, like an iMac in blueberry blue, a ceramic volume of IKEA for Dummies, and a plush chair shaped like a Magic 8 Ball. For its backdrop, she constructed a freeze-frame of the green Windows 3.0 Solitaire screen with cards cascading down the wall.

There are less in-your-face moments, like one scene tucked away in a dimly lit storage room, where visitors view a pile of overturned chairs illuminated from underneath. On closer look, the sculpture, Autoerotic POÄNG by Amanda James Parker, consists of two chairs embellished with human hair, their legs intertwined. Taking a Toy Story approach to imagining the secret lives of inanimate objects, Parker hints at the naughty things the furniture might get up to at night, when all the shoppers have gone away.

Some chairs at STÖR are more functional than others. One, a minimalist dining room chair, is painted by Deering to look like a King County Metro bus transfer. A series of stools and tables made out of salvaged NO PARKING signs rounds out a showroom dedicated to things traffic- and transit-related. It’s apt for a space with a sweeping view of Stewart Street, an arterial that funnels traffic through the heart of downtown, along with an estimated 300 or so buses a day.

Everything at STÖR is for sale, with many items available to take right out the door and some larger display pieces ready for take-home when the show closes. The sheer number of items is a little mind-boggling: glass coasters printed with delicate moths and lobsters, glass night lights that resemble fried eggs, FLÄPPJACK ceramic pancake coasters, DISKETT floppy disk coasters. An array of colorful handmade quilts by Lacey Swain and Lane Bestold are featured in STÖR’s spicy bedding section (one of Bestold’s quilted pieces displays the words “TRANS-SEXUAL DEVIANT”). Two-foot-long beeswax taper candles created by Calico Botanicals curl and tangle in wand-like shapes, blossoming into flowers at the ends. They come in a matching oversized vase that’s also carved from beeswax.

There’s an aspect of utility to all the objects (although you might not want to actually light the vase on fire), making the show as a whole approachable, if sometimes surreal. And with its old showroom allure, the Bergman Luggage-turned-gallery-turned-STÖR is just as attractive from the street; it’s easy to imagine tourists wandering in and accidentally becoming art patrons.

Deering and Carter want to make sure visitors know that this parody of “the Swedish retailer” is not meant in any way but loving. The theme is just a prompt, Carter says, “not a takedown. We actually found, without guiding artists in any direction, that it does seem like most of us feel very favorably about the company!”

“Also,” she quips, “we needed shelving to display all this beautiful art, and we spent way more money in there than I ever have before! So hopefully, they’ll thank us.

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STÖR is open every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through Jan. 10 at Base Camp Studios 2 and is open for Belltown, Downtown, and Pioneer Square Artwalk. For more information (or to browse and buy online), visit storseattle.com or @stor_experience.