Ann Hamilton: Guests

Inhabiting a half-hidden cave-like space, Guests is a congregation of large-scale puppet-like figures who greet and witness the street, the water and the setting sun. Inspired by the subtle rising, falling and rocking motions of a buoy at sea, these landlocked figures lumber, drift and bob in response to the site's fluctuations and tides of air and weight. Both audience and actors, animated as much by imagination as by air, theirs is not an unfolding narrative but an anticipation of tales yet to be told from the eternal turnings of the dark and the light, the visible and the invisible, the inside and the outside whose abstractions figure our stories. — Ann Hamilton Forty-two large-scale puppets — Hamilton has come to call them gentle giants — fill a wedge-shaped, cave-like void next to the Pike Place Market garage, suspended from the underside of the Overlook Walk pedestrian bridge. A series of unique heads, individually carved by the artist and her team, top bodies of bright, flowing "Spinnaker" cloth. During the day, the work is visible from the street through a perforated black screen wall and viewing ports along the sidewalk. At night, seen through the gridded scrim of perforated metal, the illuminated figures take on the appearance of stained glass, and a nocturnal puppet theater emerges.