Burien Art 2025
Essa curated a section of gallery wall for Burien Arts at the Highline Heritage Museum. Essa tookover this programming in November of 2024, and began selecting artists in February of 2025.
Polygon Party:
A Celebration of Color and Shape
Rachel Bender
Rachel’s exhibtion takes place from September 27th, 2025 through January 2nd, 2026. Bold and colorful Rachels’ work was the perfect excape from the dreary, rainy, Seattle winter.
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Welcome to Polygon Party, a vibrant exploration of the playful possibilities of abstraction through bold lines, sharp angles, and saturated hues.
Drawing inspiration from modernist design, architectural forms, and sacred geometry, this body of work distills complexity into simplicity. The use of straight lines and geometric forms creates a sense of order, while the vivid palette injects energy and emotion. Rather than depicting the world as it is, these pieces offer a joyful reimagining — a party where polygons take center stage and color sets the mood.
Polygon Party invites viewers to engage with shape and color in their purest forms; to see structure not as limitation, but as a space for joy, movement, and playful imagination. It’s a celebration of clarity and contrast, and a reminder that even within the strictest lines, there’s room for play. -
Stable Habits
John Woodruff
John Woodruff’s exhibtion took place from July through September of 2025. A pleasure to work with John’s photographs are sequenced in the order they are taken to create one larger work mounted on wood or metal. Reminicent of film one can imagine the images dancing and flickering.
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As a continuation of the ideas in John's recent series, Stable Habits is a collection of smaller, more monochromatic pieces that read as shorter, concise visual ideas rather than the lengthy sentences of his larger works. John works primarily in the studio and is meticulous in his processes and planning. Created in-camera, the images of each grid are primarily presented in the order they were created, with the flow of each sequence being an important consideration.
John finds artistic clarity in the habit of repetition and adherence to the inherent rules governing each piece or series he creates. He utilizes the tools and techniques of traditional photography and presents the simple interplay of form, light, and time. These combine into intricate, approachable, and visually captivating compositions that transcend the conventional bounds of photography's traditional modes of presentation.
Originally from Seattle, John studied Photographic Arts and Art History in Salzburg, Austria, and received a BFA in Fine Art Photography from RIT. In 1991, he began a career in photography in New York. He eventually made his way west, continuing his career in Chicago and San Francisco. He now lives in Seattle with his wife and kids. -
Wool and fLowers
Trisha Gilmore
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This work is made from a rug tufting machine that is held in both hands and pushes out yarn into a stretched canvas. I draw an original sketch onto the canvas with a Sharpie and then start loading the gun with the color of wool yarn that I have chosen. I shoot the wool into the canvas row next to row, changing the color of yarn when the design requires it. I do not choose the colors I’m going to use ahead of time, but choose as I go. I make these decisions in palette and line similarly like my process of painting pictures. They feel organically alike to me, just different materials. I like to use floral and plant designs as they are abstracted easily and offer lots of color and texture ideas.
Trisha works with Wool and a Tufting gun that pushes the yarn into canvas, inspired by the composition of real-life flora and fauna.
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