September 4 - October 18, 2025
Unclassified Materials
Opening Reception: September 4th, 5-8PM
Second Reception: October 2nd, 5-8PM
Gallery Hours: By Appointment on Saturdays, 12-3PM
Specialist presents Unclassified Materials, new work by Stefan Gonzales.
Unclassified Materials invites viewers to reflect on the origins of the materials that shape our daily lives. Every floor we walk across, every chair we sit on, and every cup we drink from began as something drawn from the earth—harvested, mined, or extracted for human use.
The exhibition borrows its title from a mining term: “unclassified materials,” which describes unfiltered stone or dirt that may or may not contain gold. In this context, it points to the raw matter that underlies every fabricated object. The works on view have been similarly sifted—pulled from the world, pared down, and presented as temporary art objects. Their minimalist forms invite us to look past surface appearances and consider their deeper, earthly origins.
Rather than telling the complete stories of these objects, the exhibition asks you to imagine them: the labor, histories, and encounters embedded within each material. These stories continue to unfold, carrying on long after our own interactions with them.
Stefan Gonzales is an artist and arts educator from Colorado, now based in Seattle. They are Prio/Manso/Tiwa and a trans/nonbinary individual. Stefan chronicles the lives of ordinary objects through photography, sculpture, and installation. Over the last several years, Gonzales’s practice has focused on decolonizing and feminizing the aesthetics of 1960s–70s land art, which is strongly associated with the “heroic” masculinity and rugged individualism of artists like Robert Smithson. Smithson’s most famous artwork, Spiral Jetty (1970), is a 1,500-foot-long formation in the Great Salt Lake made from over 6,000 tons of displaced dirt and black basalt rocks. The work, alongside other touchstones of land art like Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), has what Gonzales calls a remarkable “mythological imprint” that obscures the history and preexisting significance of the site. “They were talking about big, open, free geologic locations,” Gonzales says, “but what about the land that Spiral Jetty sits on? Who occupied the land first? That land had not really been ‘empty’ in the past.”
Gonzales received a BFA from the Cornish College of the Arts in 2016, followed by their MFA from the University of Washington in 2020, where they were awarded the de Cillia Teaching with Excellence Award. They have participated in residencies at Signal Fire Arts in Portland (OR) and the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle (WA). Recent exhibitions include The Frye Art Museum’s Boren Banner Series (WA, 2022), Melanie Flood Projects (OR, 2020) in Portland, and Mount Analogue Gallery (WA, 2019). Gonzales is preparing for a solo exhibition at 4Culture in Seattle, Washington this fall.