IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE Kristen T. Ramirez presents her first solo exhibition at Crawl Space Gallery. Irrational Exuberance is a celebration of high and low art, fueled by political traditions in printmaking, modern packaging design, contemporary installation art, and crude street graphics all over the planet. This exhibit includes drawing, collage, screen-printing, letterpress, and a large multi-media installation. Irrational Exuberance is work about place. More specifically, it is nostalgia-laden work that Ramirez has created about the disorienting, urban, American experience in her own attempt to understand what “America” is. Ramirez aims to bring beauty and dignity to a place where messages create a noisy collision of textures, colors, stylistic and cultural contrasts. She knows there is no way to perceive at once our contemporary chaos of gigantic, lurid signs, big box dollar stores, red-and-white striped chicken buckets, seas of asphalt parking lots, and horizons punctuated by utility poles. Instead, Ramirez embraces the exuberance of icons, signage, and visual clutter, imbuing it with dignity and no small amount of good, old-fashioned TLC.

Kristen Ramirez is an artist and arts educator from San Francisco, California who now calls Seattle home. She completed her MFA in printmaking from the University of Washington in 2004 and works in all types of print processes, but especially loves letterpress, silkscreen and relief printing.