Seattle Catalog is both an art project and a for-profit company. As a for-profit company, Sea-Cat takes the form of a tri-yearly sales catalog with carefully selected artwork by different artists. As an art project, it is a collaboration by Gretchen Bennett, Wynne Greenwood and Matthew Offenbacher.
Sea-Cat is a teaching / learning art gallery and catalog sales business. In our experience, the selling of work can feel removed from and even opposite the experience of community and meaningful connection. We are interested in opening up the access to and experience of art purchasing and selling. We’re trying to experience community within a sales environment.
Sea-Cat engages individual practices, involving creators from various communities and backgrounds. Our goals include: building an audience for and selling experimental artwork; creating interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and transitive programming; nurturing individual practices into new and fruitful areas; examining and re-evaluating the idea of “value”.
We want everyone to build upon their individual practices, while also realizing new language and creating new connections. By everyone we mean: artists, performers, ourselves, our advisory board, audiences, you. This cooperative framework is intended to put practices into discursive motion. We hope Sea-Cat will reflect some of the social, geographical and artistic conditions and contradictions of shifting positions, roles, and open-ended outcomes.