A sweet-faced, leather-skinned, crazy-eyed woman in an inside-out black sweatshirt and dusty-assed black jeans asked all the wallflowers except me and the guy standing next to me to dance. Everyone politely declined but she kept on asking anyway, smiling obliviously like Jack Pumpkinhead.
Neither of the proprietors, Ryan Shuquem and Elena Kenney, knew who these people were. They were just people from the neighborhood hanging out. And that was exactly what they’d hoped for when they opened Reversible Eye.
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Their first show at Reversible Eye features some of Shuquem’s own work–a bunch of scratchy, spiteful doodles he made last spring while working on the phone as a telemarketer–and sculptures by Benjamin Hirschkoff, who lives in Seattle and is in the graduate ceramic arts program at the University of Washington. He and Shuquem met in 1996 when Shuquem’s band, Boy Scouts of Annihilation, played a show in the Bay Area. “He was naked on the ground having seizures,” says Hirschkoff, “and I thought, I gotta go meet that guy.”
“There’s lots of opportunity here,” says Shuquem, “but I’m having a confusing time figuring out how to fit into this community. I don’t want to just live here. It’s just going to be a dry well otherwise.”
