Ongoing

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AHTSIK’NUK (Good with the Hands) A collection of “rare and unusual” carvings from the Nuu-cha-nulth Nations of BC and Washington. Steinbrueck Native Gallery, 2030 Western Ave., 441-3821, steinbruecknativegallery.com. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sun. Through December.

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Zack Be

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Lean-out, Lean-to is an installation inspired by a chance encounter with a truck canopy in Spokane. Bent takes that structural form and adopts it into a “monolithic chamber of secrets.” Jack Straw New Media Gallery, 4261 Roosevelt Way N.E., 634-0919, jackstraw.org. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri. Ends Feb. 6.

BAM Biennial: Knock on Wood Again, there’s a very materials-focused emphasis to this biannual group show. Clay and fiber art were featured in 2012 and 2010, respectively; now it’s the chisel-and-mallet set’s turn to display their creations. Some of the three dozen artists featured you know or have seen before at BAM (or local galleries), like Rick Araluce, Whiting Tennis, and W. Scott Trimble. The juried selection offers every variety of woodworking from the Northwest, ranging from indigenous Native American carvings to smartly modern furniture that might fit into your SLU condo. In addition to a juried award, which bestows a future solo show and a $5,000 prize (the winner to be announced this week), there’s a popular balloting system whereby visitors can select their own favorite pieces. Unlike the Frye’s current crowdsourced #SocialMedium show, here you cast your voting on regular old scraps of paper—appropriate, of course, since they were originally made of the same material the artists are using. BRIAN MILLER Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., 425-519-0770, bellevuearts.org. $5-$10. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Ends March 29.

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City Dweller

s A dozen contemporary Indian artists are represented in this show organized by SAM and originating entirely from the private local collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy (a Microsoft millionaire) and wife Malini Balakrishnan. Scenes and icons from Mumbai to New Delhi are represented via photography and sculpture, from an all-native perspective. As tourists know, India is ridiculously photogenic, from its colorful idols and deities to the slums and beggars. It all depends on what you want to see. Photographer Dhruv Malhotra, for instance, takes large color images of people sleeping in public places—some because they’re poor, others because they simply feel like taking a nap. Nandini Valli Muthiah opts for more stage-managed scenes, posing a costumed actor as the blue-skinned Hindu god Krishna in contemporary settings; in one shot I love, he sits in a hotel suite, like a tired business traveler awaiting a conference call on Skype. Sculptor Debanjan Roby even dares to appropriate the revered figure of Gandhi, rendering him in bright red fiberglass and listening to a white iPod. Apple never made such an ad, of course, but this impudent figure tweaks both India’s postcolonial history and the relentless consumerism that now links us all, from Seattle to Srinagar. B.R.M. Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $12–$19. Weds.-Sun.

Ends Feb. 15.

John Economaki

Quality Is Contagious contains a small selection of the woodwork of Portland’s Economaki. Examples from the ’70s and ’80s are quite impressive—pure joinery (meaning no nails or screws), dovetails and elegant corners, interesting selections of grain, and completely one-off, handmade creations. Then comes the cruel turn: Economaki the woodworker somehow became allergic to wood dust, effectively ending his career behind the saw. In response—and this is the show’s main focus—Economaki started a new business called Bridge City Tool Works, which sells high-end planes, mallets, hand drills, jigs, chisels, and the like. So if you (or your dad) enjoy expensive tool porn, this is like a tour through a trade-show booth. B.R.M. Bellevue Arts Museum. Ends Feb 1.

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Family: It’s Complicated A group show exploring the difficulties and joys of coming together as a family. Gay City Health Project, 517 E. Pike St., 860-6969, gaycity.org. 3-8 p.m. Mon.-Sat. Ends Dec. 7.

From the Toy Box Forty artists present work based on their favorite childhood toys. Ltd. Art Gallery, 501 E. Pine St., 457-2970, ltdartgallery.com. 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends Dec. 7.

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Yumiko Glover This artist left Japan as young college graduate and never went back. After working in business and as a simultaneous translator, she settled in Hawaii, trained as a painter, married an American, and began her second career. Moe: Elements of the Floating World is her first solo show, one that will nicely overlap with SAAM’s Japanese Neo-Pop show by the artist known as Mr. (opening Nov. 22). Glover, by virtue of her sex, wouldn’t receive such acceptance in the Japanese academy; like other educated, independent women, she’s found more freedom outside her homeland. Her bright acrylic paintings look back uneasily on a native culture saturated with anime imagery, sex, video games, schoolgirl fetishes, naive folklore, and the whole kawaii industry. (Moe is a slang shorthand for idealized youth and femininity, where the creepy meets the innocent—usually from a male perspective.) There are gestures toward the languorous old “Floating World” of the Edo period, but they’re mostly overlaid with tokens of the present: cellphone bangles, Sega video-game creatures, jet liners, and nighttime cityscapes. The orb-eyed cuties and too-short plaid skirts are all familiar from manga, only they feel wrenched out of context. Glover’s frames are crowded, not settled, with some areas of the canvas even degrading into pixels—as if the source code has been corrupted. B.R.M. Bryan Ohno Gallery, 521 S. Main St., 459-6857, bryanohno.com. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends December TBD.

Juried Exhibition Local art trio SuttonBeresCuller waded through 1,902 submissions to pick out the top of the crop for this show. Punch Gallery, 119 Prefontaine Pl. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), 621-1945, punchgallery.org. Noon-5 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. Ends Dec. 20.

Dakota Gearheart The artist turns her love for creating immersive environments and mixed media into a meditation on the “psychology of a cage” in When We Get There. Gallery4Culture, 101 Prefontaine Pl. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), galleries.4culture.org. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri. Ends Dec. 6.

Ann Hamilton The famed artist has created new commissioned art for the Henry that she invites viewers to interact with through touch—elements of the show can be ripped off the wall and kept for later. Henry Art Gallery (UW campus), 543-2280, henryart.org. $6-$10. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Weds., Sat. & Sun. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Thurs. & Sat. Ends April 26.

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Idleness At last, a celebration of sloth! Man Ray and Duchamp are among the inspirations for this group show, also featuring work by Gretchen Bennett, Matt Browning, Tacita Dean, Claire Fontaine, Ripple Fang, Anne Fenton, Tom Marioni, Bertrand Russell, Edwin Shoemaker, Nicholas Bower Simpson, Mladen Stilinovic, and Andy Warhol (no slacker he). Jacob Lawrence Gallery (UW Campus), art.washington.edu. 10 a.m.-5 p.m Tues.-Fri. Noon-4 p.m. Sat. Ends Jan. 17.

Misfits & Mutants Krissy Downing, Claudio Duran, Eli Wolff, Rhodora Jacob, and Kate Tesch show their paintings of freaky creatures in alien worlds. True Love Art Gallery, 1525 Summit Ave., 227-3572, trueloveart.com. 1-8 p.m. Tues.-Sun. Ends Dec. 7.

Nick Mount There are about three dozen glass creations in the traveling show The Fabric of Work. The Australian Mount has been practicing his art for more than 40 years and even trained at Pilchuck, but this is a more recent selection. Certainly he has his craft well-honed. The control of color and shape is formidable in his bulbs, orbs, vases, and pendants. Some have delicate flowering stamens; others are intricate bottles with ornate stoppers. It’s all strictly decorative work, completely uninteresting to me, but suited to posh waiting rooms at dentists’ offices or on the mantels of gas fireplaces in new Bellevue highrises. B.R.M. Bellevue Arts Museum, Ends Feb 1.

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Never Finished This new sculptural installation by local artists Etta Lilienthal and Ben Zamora presents a tangle of old-school fluorescent bulbs—not those fancy, efficient, newfangled LEDs—suspended from the ceiling like a mobile. (It doesn’t move, however.) Never Finished is always plugged in, always on, though many of the tubes (of about three dozen) appear to have been painted black. The cluster is hung like an airborne game of pick-up sticks, the tubes pointing this way and that, gradually rising in the atrium like a glowing, fractal cloud. There’s seemingly no order or direction to the piece, which has an almost haphazard construction—until you look at all those precisely aligned black power cords. The curse of good lighting design is the cabling and wiring, what to do with all those blocky plugs and transformers. Part of what I like about Never Finished is its somewhat naked, unfinished dressing of the power bricks, which lie in a snake pit on the floor. But the cords above have been painstakingly aligned. They fall on a precise vertical axis, like rain or drapery, contrasting with the unruly tubes. They make you appreciate how light, apart from lasers, is omnidirectional—radiating outward and unconstrained, unaffected by gravity. (Apart from black holes, of course.) The light’s intensity falls off with distance, too, as you walk around the installation to view it from different angles. There’s no correct perspective on the piece, no final sense of proper lighting design (think of James Turrell’s fastidious, numinous Skyspace at the Henry). The only possible order or finality will come when all the bulbs burn out; then darkness will impose its aesthetic. B.R.M. Suyama Space, 256-0809, 2324 Second Ave., suyamaspace.org. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri. Ends Dec. 19.