Crush/Repeat 2021

The pandemic continues, yet there were many artists who yet again found solace and joy in the routine of making art for Crush/Repeat. For the second year in a row the show took place entirely online. Our live streamed virtual opening was on Saturday, April 17th, but you can see the whole show here!

Crush/Repeat is an annual art event for queer community and friends, and in 2021 featured the work of 56 artists of all ages and experience levels. Participants chose a small project to repeat every day during the month of March, with mediums including photography, painting, sewing, ceramics, dance, video, and more. Topics range from lighthearted to deeply personal, with some artists using the project to reflect on a particularly challenging year.

After a grueling year Crush/Repeat artists fully embraced our 2021 theme “Anything we do is beautiful,” and from what you will see in this gallery, it was absolutely true.

We are thrilled to share with you what has come to life this spring! 🌷

2021 Virtual Opening

🌷 Please enjoy the recording of the virtual opening that was livestreamed to YouTube on April 17th 2021 🌷

Crush/Repeat 2021 Artists

Alice Dinter Manos

is a queer Seattle-ite and amateur scrap artist who cannot leave the house without earrings. Alice is back to making earrings from a variety of found and bead store items including broken glass, old jeans, and ping-pong table packaging. Throughout this process, she enjoyed learning new methods like decorative knot tying and reviving old ones like papier mache. Everything everything started to take on earring potential and she is happy to have spared you from having to dangle egg shells and broken headlights from your ears.

Alice‘s work is for sale- please contact her at alice.manos@gmail.com for details.

Annie Fidler

is a white, queer, nonbinary youth mental health counselor living on Duwamish land (Seattle). Their collages focus on developing color palettes and moods. These collaged cards will be given to UW custodians through the UW Custodian Project, which advocates for greater recognition and protections for the custodians who have worked in person throughout the pandemic to keep space safe and the community healthy.

Audrey Ha

is a Vietnamese-American woman who enjoys walks with friends and every single flower she has ever seen. She believes that words shape our reality and can also help us process our internal world. Using her journal entries after leaving an abusive relationship, she paired them with stills taken on her Instax Mini 8. It was an exploration of the past, present and future; how our words can heal and guide us.

Audrey‘s work is for sale- please contact her at audrey.ha14@gmail.com for details.

Bee Schroeder

is a non-binary glass artist, community arts organizer, parent and nature-lover living on unceded Sinixt territory in the BC interior. Using flameworked borosilicate glass they create jewelry, pipes, and sculptural forms centered on motifs of flora and fauna. Throughout March they explored the theme of queer and trans resilience. They chose to highlight the role of hope, kinship, and joy within our resilient communities, and created ornamental and functional glass pieces featuring river otters and iris florals.

Bee’s work is for sale- find them via @prairiepipes on instagram for details.

Bernadette Wright

is a self-taught queer femme fiber artist. They like to experiment with different fiber modalities, and for 2021 Crush/Repeat, attempted to teach themselves weaving on a hand loom. They were really excited to play with different types of fibers, abstract designs, and colors. However, like much of the past pandemic year, this endeavor was much harder than they anticipated, and ultimately resulted in one scraggly, almost-kinda-finished piece and one piece still on the loom. They anticipate recycling these efforts and trying again at a later date when they have more... focus? time? ability to watch videos that aren't just montero?

Follow @femme_craft on instagram to see more of their work.

Blu brackish

is a quiet trans person living in the unceded ancestral territory of the coast salish peoples, they're 26 years old but if we analyzed their carbon we would find that they are timeless. Blu started an intense 12 week coding bootcamp at the start of March. Not having the time to contribute something elaborate they decided to find something that they would interact with every day...

This art project has been brought to you by the power of coffee.

Follow @Brackishblu on Instagram to see more of their work.

Callan Jansen

is a queer, nonbinary self-taught artist and paraeducator living in Seattle. While they usually focus more on drawing, Callan spent the month of March working with polymer clay, making small sculptures. The pieces they made explore themes of interconnectedness in relationships, and the ways in which the human body and the natural world reflect one-another. They greatly enjoyed the opportunity that crush/repeat provided to dedicate time towards learning how to work with a new medium, and hope to participate again next year!

Although they won't be selling the pieces they made this month, you can check out more of their work on instagram and etsy @socks4hands. Click here for more.

Carissa Knipe

lives in Seattle, is into sing-a-longs, pointing out dogs and making lists, and usually doesn't know how to answer "how are you?" but still asks it of others. The pitch is basically "When I try hard but don't meet my hopes/expectations, I can be hard on myself -- what if instead I was nice to myself?" Carissa often draws pretty pictures or fun stick figures, and is excited and nervous to share a piece that feels a bit more vulnerable.

Carissa‘s work is for sale- find them via instagram @carissaknipe or at carissaknipe.com for details.

Carolyn Shasha

is a scientist and artist living in Capitol Hill. She spent the month working on a series of portraits called "Unfinished". Each portrait is of a person who died from COVID-19, sourced from the New York Times COVID obituary series. Each work consists of a pencil portrait plus an abstract watercolor piece, combined digitally.

Follow @carolyn_shasha_art on Instagram or check out her website to see more of her work.

Carrie Brazil

is a Seattle native who started painting in February 2021 as an experiment and has found a ton of joy in discovering expression through art. Carrie’s materials were mostly acrylic, pastels on paper and sometimes bourbon on the side. March was a test of patience, perseverance and perspective. Carrie feels she has so many technical skills to learn and looks forward to taking classes.

Her work is for sale- find her via Instagram @Carrieb_creative for details.

Catmeal

likes long walks, petting their kitten, and dismantling the patriarchy. The body of work was a constant battle with limiting beliefs and past rumination. They learned to trust the process and let go of fear.

Catmeal’s work is for sale- find them via instagram @bumpi__ for details.

Christine Longé

loves both her curly asymmetrical hairstyle and her penchant for uproarious laughter at the simplest delights. When she discovered The Betsy-Tacy Treasury in a Little Free Library, Christine’s project immediately changed course. She’s constantly untangling the nets of how oppressions separate us, so that she can reconnect with herself and the rest of the world. The subversive captions type-written alongside Lois Lenski’s illustrations form a growing collection of things Christine has (un)learned, epiphanies she’s realized, experiences she’s shared, what she wished to hear as a young person, and her hopes for our collective future.

Christine’s work is for sale- visit her website for details.

Cleopatra Cutler

is a queer, mixed Taiwanese American painter and illustrator from Seattle / unceded Duwamish land, who happily paints anything that enables her to paint for a living but especially loves making art about her cultures' connections with the land. TRANSFORMATIVE, a series of 31 self-portraits, began as a way to document Cleopatra's daily life as she journeyed through 31 lessons about transformative justice and mutual aid. Mixed faces are rare in art—Cleopatra had never knowingly seen a mixed-Asian artist or subject in a museum—so, drawing from Carrie Mae Weems' 1990 Kitchen Table Series, Cleopatra intended to share her many faces by creating small "portals," one glimpse per day. Unbeknownst to her, these portraits would journal her navigation through a rising wave of racial violence toward her Asian community, and transformative justice and mutual aid would become a welcome mental framework for healing and supporting herself and others through this time.

Cleopatra’s work is for sale- find her via Instagram @cleopatratheartist or on her website for details.

Danielle Morgan-Scharhon

is a queer filmmaker from Bellingham currently living in Brooklyn with her spouse and their tiny dog Kino. Danielle experimented with watercolors to create a greeting card each day which she mailed to friends and family. She found the daily practice of drawing and painting was very soothing. Especially after a year that felt so unwieldy, using watercolors was a much needed exercise in letting go of expectations and relinquishing control. Mailing something handmade, unique and tangible was the nearest thing to sending a hug to her loved ones.

Visit Danielle’s website to see more of their work.

Darius X and Sarah Brown

are neighbors who have been friends for 20 years. They were recently interested to learn that while some birds learn their calls by socializing with each other and are known as oscine birds (aka songbirds), the mostly tropical suboscine birds “come out of the shell” knowing their calls because it’s been genetically encoded. During this long and lonely year of turmoil and quarantine restrictions we’ve all had to reconnect with our original “birdsongs.” Sarah recruited a different person every day to mimic a suboscine birdcall, with the strict rule that the first take was final. She sent only the bird name and the human birdcall to Darius to draw what he thought the bird might look like, trying to tease him with the most outlandish names. Darius wanted to keep his end of the project sustainable and spontaneous, so he challenged himself with simple guidelines (even though he regularly broke them): don’t overthink it, 10 mins per bird, one brush for the outline, maybe one or two more for the colors.

Follow @dariusxstudio on Instagram to see more, and purchase prints at his Society6.

Eila

is a facilitator, organizer, and artist working to heal systemic and interpersonal violence at the root. Eila spent the month making linocut portraits of trans women/femmes she loves and admires across space and time. She wants to remind everyone that trans femmes are hot, hilarious, and wise.

Follow @_._eila_._ on Instagram to see more of her work.

Emily Stern

is an artist, writer, mama, and teacher living with her cats, daughter, and badass roommate in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For this year's crush/repeat, Emily was inspired by prayer and reflection to make pieces that allow for a daily ritual of presence. Emily sought a connection to the earth and to ancestors through her playful incorporation of found, salvaged, and reimagined objects. These pieces tell a story of a being, embedded in the messiness of daily life, seeking a pattern, a connection, and aspiration to what came before.

Emily’s work is for sale at on her Etsy.

Emmett Stanfield

is a white, queer, trans, Jew living on Duwamish land/Seattle who spend their weekdays as a nanny and therapist, and their weekends having as much fun as possible, all the while taking lots of photos. This year, Emmett decided to take their love of photography to make a photo-a-day project. They love to capture the beautiful, sweet, silly, frustrating, and sad moments of each day, but have never made a project of their daily photography—until now!

Follow @em_stanfield on Instagram to see more of their work.

Erica Everage

is an artist based in Santa Monica, CA who works in a variety of mediums including painting, drawing and sculpture and will be pursuing an MFA in Fine Art at Otis College of Art & Design this fall. Erica set out to spend March "Zooming around the world in 31 days" by drawing an international group of models/performers/artists via Zoom. The idea was to combat the isolation of pandemic life by meeting & painting new people all around the world. In the end, she ended up painting 14 people ranging in location from the Canary Islands to Brazil. She used gouache, watercolor, pastel, and acrylic to paint on paper, used cardboard, and boxes, often attempting to reuse the packaging from goods delivered to her home during these final days of isolated life.

Erica’s work is for sale- find her @ericaeverageart on Instagram for details.

Erin Lynn Forrest

is an artist, herbalist, and harm reductionist living on unceded Pomo land/in Sonoma County, California. This March, she made spells with leaves from Umbellularia californica, The Bay Laurel. Endemic to the western coast, The Bay is a volatile fuel for fire and also has the ability to withstand and regrow from it. These leaves are markers of home, and for Erin, are emblematic of safety and uncertainty, grief, hope, and resilience.

Erin’s work is for sale- visit her website for details.

Erin Gilbert

is an artist, writer, and translator who lives and works in Seattle. Throughout the month, she created quick sketches of friends and loved ones as part of an ongoing project exploring intimacy, ephemerality, and memory.

Follow @eringilbert on Instagram to see more of Erin’s work.

Haley Freedlund

is a musician, curator and tour manager based in South Seattle. For Crush/Repeat she chose to write a new 31-word poem each day of the month gently centered on her own queer experience in real-time and reflection.

Haley’s work is for sale- find her on instagram @haleyfreedlund or visit her website for details.

Hannah Chapin

is a queer teacher and scientist who loves walking around the Pacific Northwest. Hannah has a frequent art practice of urban sketching, so for this crush/repeat project she went the other direction, into the intentionally abstract. She made her own dip pens from sticks, used mixed media rather than just brush and watercolors, and avoided the representational as much as possible. The openness of the goal was both freeing and frustrating, but the final products make her smile, so maybe this new leaf is turned over for good.

Hannah’s work is for sale- contact her at hcchapin@gmail.com for details.

Janet & Wylie (age 8 1/2)

are a parent-kid artist team who like to combine their creative superpowers into weird, fun projects. For this project, Wylie made mini-figures and small builds out of LEGO bricks, and Janet painted watercolor backgrounds for them, giving them new, unexpected worlds. The project is a work-in-progress!

Follow @planet.janet.art to see more work.

Jess George

lives in Kentucky and spends 11 months out of the year looking forward to Crush/Repeat. Since this year has been spent using a lot of digital communication, Jess decided to learn how to make stickers and gifs that she could use on text messages to friends and other loved ones. With the help of a Skillshare class she created the stickers using Adobe Illustrator, After Effects and Photoshop. They are uploaded to her Giphy profile and can be used in text messages (and I assume instagram, etc.) through that platform.

Check them out on her Giphy page.

Kaden Kai

is a mixed race non-binary installation artist who daydreams wildly on Duwamish land called North Seattle. Their project was firstly to gently expand what constitutes "art", so this year's theme was very helpful. Using installations of naturally found materials, they explored the ways that certain parts of them try to be protective against scary things, both internal and external.

For more, follow @lunathirst on Instagram or contact them at kadenkaibodywork@gmail.com.
Feedback welcome, or requests to build them a nest too.

Kat Behrend

is a queer, white, Latinx, Jew who lives in Seattle, teaches kids to read, and loves to make stuff. She spent the month drawing household objects in under 10 minutes on origami paper her partner wasn't using, and utilizing a set of markers her friend from Portland sent her. Drawing a thing in under 10 minutes was really about seeing and being in the moment and then being done. The simple, daily objects she chose reflected the simplicity of the task.

Kat’s work is for sale- find her via @mousebehr on Instagram for details.

Kelley Kavanaugh

is a visual artist who loves donuts, taking a nap, and has now spent over a year in the constant company of their dog, Buxton. Kavanaugh's project, entitled "Thirty-One 2 Minute Sketches of Buxton" includes 31 digital portraits of the artist's dog, Buxton, generally drawn in 2 to 5 minutes. By completing each daily sketch at different times of day Kavanaugh attempted to capture the varied moods and attitudes of their subject.

Kiyomi Go Hollo

is a trans queer person who sews a lot to find enjoyment in life. They spent this month sewing an outfit out of fabric and patterns they already owned. They wanted to challenge themselves in using up their stash as well as creating a new garment every week.

Follow @TheDapperCrow on Instagram for more.

Krystal Correa

is a queer fat femme of color + facilitator of brave transformative spaces, whose greatest joy in life is laying in the sun next to a body of water with her people. Krystal is NOT A DANCER, but also believes that everyone is a dancer. For her project she elevated her daily movement practice into exploring "flow", recording a video of 3 minutes or more almost! every day and then splicing them together with no rhyme or reason using the Splice app. Krystal offers tremendous gratitude to the artists who created the songs she vibed to everyday, which allowed her room to find both fluidity and grounding in a time of immense pressure and change.

Follow @krystalisbeing on Instagram for more.

Kylina M Rench

is a pacific northwest born artist with a deep appreciation and love of nature; working as a habitat and trail restoration worker, they have many opportunities to observe and interact with their environment. Kylina's project this month is focusing on the observation and study of clouds through the medium of water colors. Working long days outside provides many opportunities for cloud contemplation, from the hues of sunrise to the racers across blue skies and the setting of the day saying its goodbyes. The end result of these cloud contemplations is a compilation of twelve watercolor paintings in two sets of six.

Kylina’s work is for sale- find them via their website, Instagram @kylinarench14, and Facebook, or contact them directly at kylina.rench@arts.cornish.edu.

L.M. Zoller

is a Seattle-based bisexual, nonbinary writer and baker who explores the intersection of gender and food through zines, food blogging, and cake design. As a nonbinary person, Zoller takes out their frustration with cisgender people's obsession with genital reveal parties and cakes in the form of satirical cakes celebrating the biggest "gender reveal fails" or "gender reveal disasters"; prior work includes Fight At Applebees and 47,000 Acre Wildfire. During the pandemic, they were not able to work on their intermittent cake series in cake, so for Crush/Repeat, they've created artistic representations of 1. gender reveal fail cakes (works 2-7), 2. alternative gender reveal cakes (8-22), and 3. other as collages, mainly with colors and textures from magazines. All the cake designs could theoretically be baked and decorated, and Zoller plans to make a few after their friends are vaccinated.

Check out their work on Instagram @illmakeitmyself, Twitter @illmakeitmyself or on their website.
The individual pieces are not for sale but I will be creating a zine of the designs eventually.

Laila Suidan

is an arborist and educator fueled by awe of the natural world and love of some humans. Laila sketched some of her favorite trees for 15-30 minutes each evening, and started to remember how to draw after many years away. Her favorite discoveries were the joy of committing to strokes with a brush pen, and how to transform her drawings with shading and depth by wet-finger-smearing the permanent ink before it dried.

Follow @noticingnature on Instagram for more.

Lauren Dawson

has been in Seattle for a handful of years, and is an avid consumer and creator of art, and so they greatly enjoyed participating in this project! Lauren's project is a series of daily, traditional ink illustrations depicting figures being surrounded and comforted by large blooms. They found it relaxing to imagine basking in the comfort of these large blooms in such uncertain times, and they hope anyone who sees their work can also indulge in the idea of it.

Follow them on Instagram @laurenedawson for more.

Leah Wohl-Pollack

is a mixed media artist whose work explores primordial fears and the questions that lie at the root of anxiety. She spent the month working with a process that combines printmaking and collage. Though she had intended to use Crush/Repeat to explore her experiences as an invisibly disabled person during the pandemic, the process quickly led her to abandon her plans for a more visceral exploration of the themes of personal growth, humor, rage, and uncertainty.

Leah’s work is for sale: for details find them on Instagram @leahwp.art or visit their website.

Lucas Anderson

is an interdisciplinary visual artist from Seattle exploring fragility, vulnerability and safety in the context of technology, masculinity and the environment. His project, feeling.into, explored the space between what we hide from ourselves and what we show to others. Using collage and self portraiture, the resulting images are intended to be intimate and vulnerable while at the same time empty and veiled. This work seeks to be in larger conversation about concealment as a political act: questioning who can benefit from, and find safety in, the reduction of individuality, and its connection to trauma and violence.

To purchase work visit Lucas’ website.

Luna

is a 12 year old artist who likes to paint, draw and bake. This is a series of little landscapes- some were inspired by pictures Luna took and others inspired by Luna’s imagination.

Mackenzie Lew

is a 4th gen 24 year old Asian American wannabe heartbreaker and Zoom partier, who likes to draw, shrinky dink, and scheme! Originally started as a comic meant to appreciate mornings, with spring's arrival she has instead been thinking about gardens and the magic of worms. As her dad tries to rescue as many worms off the road as he can, she played with the idea of anthropomorphizing them but decided that would just be inappropriate to their nature! Instead she imagines all that the worms can accomplish on their very own (which is both terrestrial and extraterrestrial adventure).

Mackenzie’s work is for sale- follow @a.corn.acorn on Instagram for details.

Maddie Romansic

is a lifelong Seattle resident who spends her time making big messy art projects, working for a library, teaching math to kids, hanging out with friends and family (mostly via zoom these days), petting cats, consuming delicious foods— mostly, while in a constant state of overwhelm and varying levels of anxiety. Her project for Crush/Repeat this year involved the yellow "street bumps" that she collected in February after they had been knocked loose during the snowstorms. She decorated them with various mundane media such as: the insides of security envelopes, old doodles and todo lists, cat hair, orthodontic rubber bands, glitter, and more.

Maddie’s work is for sale- follow @madlyromantic on Instagram for details.

Makenna O'Keeffe

is a queer, femme, jewish artist and designer living and working in Unceded Duwamish Territory (otherwise known as Seattle). One of the things that helped her stay afloat this past year has reveling in tiny sweet moments of what she calls "Mundane Magic". To stay present in and give love to these moments she spent the month of March capturing them in a series of soft monochromatic drawings that when viewed together make a lightly hued rainbow. This process, for Makenna, was a sweet healing practice in coming back into her body, her relationship to her own creative practice and her attention to the sweet soft connective moments that can exist even in the hardest of times.

Makenna’s work is for sale: to see more or make a purchase find her via Instagram @makenna.okeeffe, or visit her website.

Molly Kaftan Tollefson

is a Jewish American improviser, collage-r, and novice tarot reader living in Seattle, WA. Molly is crafting her own tarot deck with family photos, found collage materials, a lot of glue, and a white gel pen. The four suits will be tears (cups), hands (pentacles), breathes(swords), and heart beats (wands/rods). She is far from completing the seventy-eight card deck, but is honored to unveil the first six cards.

Prints are available for any card at $10 a piece. Please email her at MollyTollefson@gmail.com to place an order. Follow @mollywithay on Instagram to see more work.