Chase Gallery

The mission of the Chase Gallery is to exhibit works that engage the public, bring people to a new outlook on contemporary issues, feature innovative artwork, and provide space for people of all backgrounds to share their perspective through art. The gallery showcases rotating exhibitions throughout the year, championing local Spokane artists and their work.

The Chase Gallery, located inside Spokane’s City Hall, is currently open for visitors whenever City Hall is open to the public and for First Friday receptions. Stop by and see the gallery Monday – Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (gallery access may be limited Tuesday mornings) and the First Friday of each month from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.

WHAT IF YOU STAYED: The Art of Tesla Kawakami

JULY’S FIRST FRIDAY OPENING RECEPTION: July 11 – 5:00 – 7:30 PM

AUGUST’S FIRST FRIDAY RECEPTION: August 1 – 5:00 – 7:30 PM

(Enter City Hall through the sliding doors on N. Post St.. Chase Gallery is on the lower level) This exhibition runs for 2 months.

City Hall, lower level
808 W. Spokane Falls Blvd.
Dates: July 4 – August 29, 2025.
Open and free to the Public. Hours 9am – 5pm, M-F

The Chase Gallery at City Hall is proud to exhibit the artwork of Seattle-based artist, Tesla Kawakami (they/them) from July 4 through August 29, 2025. Meet-the-artist receptions with live music will be held as part of Spokane’s First Friday events on July 11 and August 1 from 5pm to 7:30pm.

About Tesla Kawakami:

Tesla is a contemporary mixed media artist based in Seattle, Washington, whose oil paintings explore themes of nostalgia, destruction, identity, and transformation. Drawing from their life in the Pacific Northwest, their work is deeply influenced by the region’s whimsical landscape, the ongoing impacts of climate change, and their experiences as a queer person.

A 2023 graduate of Western Washington University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Tesla was unanimously selected as the Outstanding Graduate for the College of Arts. Their distinctive visual language incorporates diverse techniques and visual references, creating vibrant works that resonate with emotional and environmental significance.

Tesla’s partner and cat are frequent subjects in their paintings, reflecting the intimate personal dimensions of their artistic practice. Their work has been featured in a duo exhibition at fruitsuper in Seattle (2024) and in group shows including Surge at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner (2023).

Artist’s Statement:

In a world where departure often seems the only rational response, What If You Stay poses a radical question: what happens when we choose to remain and bear witness?

This exhibition represents four years of artistic inquiry, tracing an evolution from broad documentation of climate devastation to an intimate exploration of the entanglement between queer identity and our endangered natural world.

My work employs contrasting techniques—photo transfers that preserve memory, masking that conceals and reveals, reductive scratching that simulates erosion—all serving as metaphors for our complex relationship with environmental change. The signature neon acrylic underpaintings create a visual vibration beneath direct oil applications, producing landscapes that pulse with an unsettling vitality.

Throughout my lifetime, I have witnessed the normalization of ecological catastrophe. Floods, wildfires, and extreme weather events have intensified in both frequency and severity, yet our collective response has calcified into a numbing apathy. This exhibition confronts our emotional paralysis by transforming overwhelming climate data into scenes of unexpected aliveness.

The intersection of queerness and ecological consciousness forms the heart of this collection. Both experiences involve navigating spaces of marginality and discovering resilience in inhospitable conditions. Both demand we reimagine relationships with bodies—our own and the Earth’s.

What If You Stay is not merely documentation of loss, but a vibrant testament to persistence. These works invite viewers to consider what remains possible when we refuse the impulse to look away, when we commit to seeing clearly the beauty still unfolding in damaged places.

For more information about the exhibit and other Spokane Arts events, please visit www.SpokaneArts.org or contact Program Director, Jeremy Whittington.

SIMULA: the Art of Sarah Barnett

SEPTEMBER’S FIRST FRIDAY OPENING RECEPTION: SEPTEMBER  5 – 5:00 – 7:30 PM

OCTOBER’S FIRST FRIDAY RECEPTION: OCTOBER 3 – 5:00 – 7:30 PM

(Enter City Hall through the sliding doors on N. Post St.. Chase Gallery is on the lower level) This exhibition runs for 2 months.

City Hall, lower level
808 W. Spokane Falls Blvd.
Dates: July 4 – August 29, 2025.
Open and free to the Public. Hours 9am – 5pm, M-F

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sarah Elizabeth Barnett is a painter from North Texas, presently living and working in Washington State. Sarah earned her BFA from the University of North Texas (2018) and attended the 2018 Summer Undergraduate Residency Program (SURP) at the New York Academy of Art. She received her MFA (2022) from Washington State University. Sarah has exhibited nationally and is a 2023 recipient of the Artist Trust Fellowship Award. A devoted oil painter with a background in figure drawing, Sarah’s paintings are highly representational and heavily distorted, with themes revolving around mortality, self-preservation, the human body, and technology. Sarah is currently represented by Gallery110 in Seattle, WA. She works as a college-level art instructor and is also very involved working with her local community as a public arts advocate and project manager for an arts non-profit.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I am fascinated and terrified by the body. Coming from a family with many doctors and nurses, I vividly remember as a child being completely engrossed in medical textbooks that were around me. The strange mix of feelings I had looking at what should be the most familiar thing to me, but were instead completely bizarre, grotesque and often frightening images, continue to impact me as a person and artist.  In this fascination with the corporeal, my paintings have broadly developed from interests in anatomy, science, science fiction, film, and Baroque art. Overall, my work reflects on conflicting relationships between humans and technology. I think about technology’s role in life preservation, mortality, and our need to make sense of the world. Each of my paintings further explores connections between vision, simulation, the artificial and the uncanny. Presenting the figure in indirect ways, my goal is to create tension and elicit contradictory emotions, through combining lush colors and delicate rendering with distortion, and unsettling or intense imagery. My paintings strive for a sense of realism; however, my images are filled with ambiguity, often veering into the surreal and allowing multiple interpretations. I work from references including digital collages, photographs and found images, still life set ups, original sculptures, and collected objects that interest me, such as vintage medical equipment or scientific glass work. For most of my pieces, every element is first constructed with lighting, staging, props, or models, photographed, and then meticulously painted. My current work is building upon my graduate thesis work, Foreign Body (2022). The words “foreign” and “body” operate on multiple levels, referencing a medical term of an object not naturally belonging in the body and playing on the paradox of dissociation from one’s physical self. This series of paintings depict close ups of distorted flesh, drapery, plastics, machinery, and medical objects, which juxtaposed together, evoke simultaneous warmth and detachment, urgency and respite. A smaller series of my post graduate works have been exploring the influence of digital technology on human perception. Latent Permutations (2023) for example, portrays a screen filled with computer-generated portraits, further distorted by glasswork from a Frankenstein-assembled laboratory scene. Distant Vision (2023) references machine vision, our ability to extend human sight but also to the resulting image abstraction and fragmentation. My ongoing series of paintings are interested in speaking more to ethical implications of biotechnologies, using animals as additional subjects. Overall, these creative processes stem from an anxious but empathetic place, from conflicting feelings about the body, rapidly changing technology, and an uncertain future. I want viewers to feel this in the paintings; to be drawn in, pushed away, and pulled back in again. Through my labor-intensive craft, I can ground myself physically, but my primary goal as artist is to provide the viewer with detailed and close-up reflections on real issues we face, while hopefully resonating with them on a much deeper level.