I really like the term “fire artist” because it sounds like “fire bender” and I’m all about the Avatars. While there are no fire benders at the Chicago Avenue Fire Art Center, there are plenty of fire artists. Fire arts is an umbrella that houses many artistic skill sets including blacksmithing, glass work, jewelry making, sculptural wielding, enamel work and even electronics and neon work, just to name a few. Pretty much any form of artwork forged from heat, spark or flame can fall under the fire arts categoryOn March 19, I attended the Chicago Avenue Fire Art Center’s Open (Hot) House, an art exhibition featuring the work of CAFAC’s students from that previous semester. I live close by and thought this would be a really good chance to get acquainted with CAFAC by looking at some art, talking to some people, watching a blacksmithing demo and acquiring a bit of history about the building.On my way up to the second level, I ran into local artist and friend Yuya Negishi, who was watching a jewelry making demo. Continue Reading
Martine Syms’ was the third presenter at Insights, a lecture series co-presented by the Walker Art Center (WAC) and AIGA-MN Ms. Syms is described in promotional material as a “conceptual entrepreneur.”The goal of this series is to help cash-strapped designers decide whether “being there” to see, listen, and meet offers any inspired benefits vs. buying one of the designers’ books or researching their Web sites or attending the lectures on-line. All Insights lectures are streamed online at the WAC Channel and via various AIGA chapters-the Sioux Falls Chapter showed it on the big screen with popcorn. The WAC suggests having an Insights Viewing Party (kit available) and encourages participation by sending in your comments and questions for the speakers via Twitter (#Insights2014).) In The Gradient, a WAC blog, I was introduced to the content of Ms. Syms’ lecture: “In preparation for her Insights design lecture . . . Continue Reading
One of the benefits of starting off all this critical writing I do these days in the crucible of the Minnesota Fringe Festival is that I got (and continue to get) introduced to all manner of artists with which I might otherwise have never crossed paths. And they in turn introduce me to still other randomness. As a consequence, I can get invited sometimes to some pretty odd stuff. It might not always be my thing, but if I have no idea what’s coming next, I certainly don’t get bored.The latest helping of strangeness to come my way is courtesy of a showcase curated by the local performance duo Fire Drill (individually known as Emily Gastineau and Billy Mullaney). When they were out touring some physical performance pieces of their own last year, they kept bumping into kindred spirits who wanted to find a way of sharing their work both with each other and a wider array of audiences. So Emily and Billy invited some new friends they met in New York to bring their stuff out to Minnesota, and gathered an equally eclectic bunch of local artists to share the stage and help draw a crowd.The notion of stage here is more symbolic than literal. The one night showcase, Bring In The Indigo, took place at a relatively new little gallery space called The White Page. Intimate but not cramped, the first half of the showcase allowed for folks to sit in folding chairs on three sides of the action. Then on the intermission break the chairs were removed and the art wandered through the people—or the people wandered through the art, sometimes it was hard to tell. The chairs in the first half were full and there were people standing on all three sides as well besides, so it was a cozy and well-attended launch of a new idea. (Since it’s located just off the light rail line a couple of blocks from Hiawatha in a friendly residential neighborhood right next to a restaurant, I’d be very surprised if The White Page isn’t a quite busy little venue in the near future.)So how’d this Minneapolis/New York collaboration work out? Pretty well, actually.Bring In The Indigo led off with one of the strongest acts of the night, a Minneapolis dance duo called Hiponymous. Hiponymous is the dancers Renee Copeland and Evy Muench. [One of the added bonuses of this particular group of artists is that they’ve applied a lot of thought to specifically worded mission statements. These are especially handy if you’re trying to figure out how to put their art in some kind of context, or figure out for yourself if they’ve hit the target they’re aiming at, or perhaps missed the mark.] “Hiponymous strives to make art that promotes social justice, community, and queer/feminist representations.” So how does that manifest itself? Copeland and Muench for their offering “a rolling thought my sister flung a century ago” were both decked out in half tucked plaid shirts, jeans and sneakers, each of different hues so they were similar but not identical. Both had their hair pulled back into a single long ponytail, one with a streak of blue in her hair. They managed to use every inch of the playing space, as well as the crowded entryways, without ever causing the audience to worry they might get kicked in the head. The piece was a thrilling example of two people absolutely in synch with one another. Whether the moves were identical, one following or working in opposition to the other, the dance was precise and full of real joy. No music, just the sound of their feet and their breath, loud or soft, as they worked through their moves. An interlude in the middle with the two dancers hanging out, often twined together in some way on the floor, whispering things to each other that only they could truly hear, was beguiling in its intimacy and innocent quality. A class act from start to finish. I look forward to seeing more from them.No surprise that another prolific local artist also charmed me. Samantha Johns was joined by Justin Spooner and Daniel Luka Rovinsky to present “Fer Fuck Sake.” Despite the explicit title, Johns presented another of her signature explorations of the human heart. “She comes from theatre and marching band and love. Continue Reading
Winter in Minnesota does not favor plein air sketching – ink freezes in pens, watercolors turn to ice and fingers develop frostbite. Fortunately, there are many good places to sketch indoors in the Twin Cities (watch this KARE 11 report about the Metro Sketchers sketching at the Como Conservatory). Towards the end of the season, I get bored of sketching indoors and venture outdoors into the cold. I put on my fingerless gloves and dilute the ink in my fountain pens with alcohol and step outside to sketch the predominant feature of late winter in Minnesota: snow piles. Snow piles are a ubiquitous, though fleeting part of the urban, winter, Twin Cities landscape and every year, a few of us urban sketchers take up the challenge to celebrate and immortalize snow piles on paper before they melt away. Continue Reading
The Walker Art Center (WAC) and AIGA-MN are co-presenting Insights, four lectures featuring leading graphic designers from around the world who have graciously agreed to share the thinking, methods, and processes behind their professional design work. The presenters have some intense labels to live up to: Lance Wyman/NY is called a humble master (of design) and a legend, Sara De Bondt/London, the epitome of a cultural designer, Martine Syms/LA, a “conceptual entrepreneur” (sic), and Henrik Nygren/Stockholm, a premier graphic designer. Because there is a fee associated with this series, I’m taking a stab at understanding if attending this lecture series is a good value. Better than, say, buying one of the designers’ books or spending time at home researching their Web sites. Why? Continue Reading
When you think of your cultural and ethnic identity, is there a piece of cloth—a sown or painted tapestry, a beaded headband, a knitted cable sweater, a special quilt made by the matriarch in your family—that helps you honor and celebrate who you are? Cloth and/or textiles are often overlooked as key cultural touchstones in modern day society, but they are the focus of Maggie Thompson’s solo exhibition at All My Relations Gallery. She uses textiles to ask important questions about family, identity and culture. As a Native American woman (Fond du Lac Ojibwe), Thompson uses this show to “dig deeper into the notions of her identity focusing on issues of cultural appropriation and Native authenticity through the rigid ideas of blood quantum and stereotyping.”
Plan to attend “Bring in the Indigo” at The White Page, a collectively-run art gallery, on Sunday, March 16 at 8 p.m.Expect an evening of contemporary performance, spanning dance, theater, visual art performance, relational practices, music and hybrids of all of the above. The event is curated by Fire Drill (Emily Gastineau and Billy Mullaney).There will be performances by Fire Drill (Minneapolis), Panoply Performance Lab (NY), Future Death Toll (NY/PDX), Hiponymous (Minneapolis), Samantha Johns (MPLS), Valerie Kuehne (NY), Glow Mechanics (Minneapolis), Beasthead (Minneapolis), and Dustin Maxwell (Minneapolis).The sitting section (dance, theater, visual art performance) starts at 8 p.m. At 9:30 p.m., the standing section (music, performance installation, relational performance) begins.Tickets: $10 to enter at 8 p.m., $5 to enter at 9:30 p.m.The White Page is located next to Chris and Rob’s restaurant at 3109 E. 42nd St. in Minneapolis.EVEN IF IT KILLS YOUThere’s still time to catch the exhibition “Even If It Kills You” by artist-in-residence Bryan Thomas Daly, which is up until March 8.He says this about his work: “When I was a teenager and I wanted to leave society, I tried to use rock n’ roll as an escape hatch. So I tried to build a library of Alexandria from record stores, house shows and liner notes. I believed for a while that I was unearthing a secret lexicon: the true stories of race, class, sex and taste. Continue Reading
Until the modern age, visual artists such as Rembrandt or Van Gogh had a relatively straightforward task when it came to painting or drawing landscapes; all they needed to do was paint what they saw just outside their front door or down the street. Today, the visual artist has to contend with a landscape cluttered with cars and commercial crap. It’s safe to say the landscape painting that you will see hanging over sofas in a suburban Minnesota home is more likely to be painted in the French countryside than the Interstate 494 strip in Bloomington. James Howard Kunstler describes the American landscape as a “landscape filled with cartoon buildings in clownmobiles, absorbed in clownish activities”. Continue Reading
When I think of famous Jewish painters in history, many names come to mind: Marc Chagall, Yaakov Agam, Camille Pissarro et al. But there’s only one who gained real fame with portraits: Amadeo Modigliani.
Within the first few steps into the Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take exhibit at the Walker Art Center, you’ll find yourself treading through an emotional nature scape—a place where a world of plants, animals and all of earths forces reach out to you in the hope that you will reach back.Hodges’ work is a natural landscape of symbolism; stretching branches of trees and the radiation of light wrap metaphorical arms around you and pull you into its story. Hodges utilizes mixed media and found objects to formulate these landscapes and stories of loss, love and self-discovery—stories that are wildly universal and raw in their humanity. There is an element of dissection—Hodges is one of those artists who deconstructs his tools and reconstructs them so methodically that it creates a new map for viewing this creative landscape.With this in mind, Hodges clearly isn’t a painter. There is an inherent rejection of painting within his work, but he engages his subjects in a painterly and illustrative manner. A gentle and ethereal hand gives the work a delicate femininity that feels warm and mindful; it’s compassionate, intimate and tells you that it’s safe to be open and to let what lies dormant inside out.Aligned with this positivity are also many points of darkness that, instead of battling against the light, dance with it as another unifying force that is equally as reaching and communicative. Continue Reading
