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Pas de Deux at Dreamsong
Brooks Turner on the group exhibition in Minneapolis.
NEW REVIEW
"Every artist works relentlessly to shed the irresistible references of their idols, some more than others, but those influences never truly go away. They are ghosts that forever haunt the artist and without constant exorcisms they become too seductive to ignore, usually grabbing hold every once-in-a-while for a Faustian pas de deux - a bargain that is a simple one; material pleasures over spiritual ones, resulting in a derivative, didactic conduit instead of an original, abstract belief system. But maybe originality is overrated or a flat out myth..." (Jay Heikes)
With references to Giotto, Michelangelo, Morandi, and Paul Thek, among others, the artists in Dreamsong’s summer group show explore what it means to appropriate another artist’s work, either directly or slyly, wholesale or in part, and how distinctions between homage, facsimile, commentary, subversion, and criticism bend and shift, allowing the past to be ceaselessly reread in the present.
Xavier Tavera’s Borderlands at Somerset Public Library
Mike R. Curran writes about the exhibition touring libraries within the St. Croix Valley.
NEW REVIEW
Part of Valley Reads 2024, this touring exhibition depicts landscapes of the US-Mexico border. Mexican-born Minneapolis artist Xavier Tavera documents the aesthetics of the borderland landscape. He reminds the viewer that, historically, artist-rendered landscapes were not meant to be contemplative. Rather, they were a statement of ownership. “Arid and rugged, the landscape is divided by a man‑made scar that snakes through the topography in fragmented sections from west to east along the continent.”
What If Less Were More: “Deathpower” at Law Warshaw Gallery
Christina Schmid discusses a group exhibition at the Macalester College gallery.
NEW REVIEW
Deathpower is the new exhibition at the Law Warschaw Gallery. Guest-curated by Erin Robideaux Gleeson, the exhibition invites visitors to explore the ways that death multiplies life. Twenty-seven artists from different geographic and cultural backgrounds share personal and entangled vitalities across human and more-than-human registers. Five overlapping areas focus on rituals of care, including placemaking for ongoing communion between the living and the dead, language in acts of mourning, transformation and regeneration, survival, and the role of haunting for justice-to-come.
Alexa Horochowski’s Under the Sea-Wind
Ryan Fontaine on the new show at Dreamsong.
NEW REVIEW
Named after the eponymous book by Rachel Carson, Under The Sea-wind is Alexa Horochowski’s debut solo exhibition at Dreamsong. An immersive and poignant dive into ecology, geologically deep time and collective memory, Under The Sea-wind features a monumental installation, sculptures and video. Through unexpected collisions of organic materials, corporeal remnants and manufactured products, this exhibition presents a hallucinatory tableau of objects that one might imagine preserved in a natural history museum of the future.
Designs For Different Futures
Mike Curran writes about the new group show at the Walker Art Center.
Curatorial team: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, the J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly the Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago. Consulting curators: Andrew Blauvelt, Director, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Curator-at-Large, Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Colin Fanning, Independent Scholar, Bard Graduate Center, New York; and Orkan Telhan, Associate Professor of Fine Arts (Emerging Design Practices), University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Philadelphia.
Paolo Ventura at Weinstein Hammons Gallery
Mike Curran on ‘Quarantine Diary’ at Weinsein Hammons.
Paolo Ventura studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in the early 1990s. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Forma International Center for Photography, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art of Roma (MACRO), Rome; The Hague Museum of Photography, The Hague; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome and during the Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles. In 2012, he was selected to create a series of works for the Italian national pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; he also received a commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. And recently Ventura was invited for a commission by the MART, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy. Four monographs of Paolo Ventura's work have been published: War Souvenir (Contrasto, 2006), Winter Stories (Aperture and Contrasto, 2009), The Automaton (Peliti Asociati, 2011) and Lo Zuavo Scomparso (Punctum Press, 2012). A retrospective show of Ventura’s work Carousel is scheduled to open at CAMERA Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in September 2020.
When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Art and Migration at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Part 1 & 2
Some thoughts on the Poetics of Home
by Brooks Turner.
By choice or by force. With great success or great struggle. People move or are uprooted, for many reasons. The world is currently witness to the highest levels of movement on record; the United Nations estimates that one out of every seven people is an international or internal migrant or refugee.
Borrowing its title from Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, “When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Art and Migration” highlights the diverse artistic responses to migration, ranging from personal stories to poetic meditations in a range of mediums. See how the global movement of people today through migration, immigration, and displacement has mobilized artists from over a dozen countries to reimagine ideas of home and place. The exhibition includes more than 40 works by 21 artists, among them Kader Attia, Tania Bruguera, Mona Hatoum, Yinka Shonibare CBE, and Aliza Nisenbaum.
Harriet Bart: Matter, Mind, Death, and Time
Brooks Turner on Abracadabra and Other Forms of Protection at the Weisman Art Museum.
A retrospective devoted to Harriet Bart; Curated by Laura Wertheim Joseph
Addressing urgent contemporary issues— the devastations of war, the complexities of memorialization, the emotional dimensions of space, the gendering of labor— this exhibition reflects on art’s ability to protect and transform, to expand our capacity for empathy, and to sensitize us to histories we might otherwise forget.
Featuring approximately 75 objects, the exhibition includes fiber works, paintings, sculptures, prints, artists books, multimedia installations, and a newly commissioned work that evokes the ancient Jewish tradition of geniza, the practice of safeguarding written texts that might otherwise be discarded.
Sophia Chai: Sight Lines at Rochester Art Center
Ryan Fontaine on the exhibition on view at the Rochester Art Center thru April 11, 2020.
In our image craving world based around the photography centric social media woven into our daily lives, Sophia Chai’s art pauses to consider photography’s inner workings of light and space. By doing so she questions the normalized perception produced by the camera and therefore all normalized and calcified modes of perception.
Chai’s process is performative and reliant on the parameters of the space in which she produces her art, her studio. Painting directly onto the walls and floors of the space, the corners turn into folds, large shapes expand and retract, all depending on where she positions her camera. Taking photos of the painted space, multiple photographs of the exact same painted walls turn into entirely new compositions of color and shape. The viewer might feel tricked by their own eyes, question what it is that they are really seeing, questioning the space and the sense of what they know or take for granted. The intention is to look closely at the issues of perception: how we see, know, and how we come to believe.
Justin Quinn at Highpoint Center for Printmaking
Brooks Turner on the McKnight Printmaking Fellowship Exhibition.
Justin Quinn received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Superior and his MFA in printmaking and MA in art history from the University of Iowa. Justin is Professor of Art at St. Cloud State University where he has taught for twelve years, following five years at the University of North Texas in Denton. He is represented by Conduit Gallery in Dallas and Satellite Berlin. Quinn’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art in Print, New American Paintings, The Minneapolis Star and Tribune, The Dallas Morning News and The San Francisco Chronicle, and he was included in the book Living and Sustaining a Creative Life edited by Sharon Louden. Recent exhibitions include the solo show King of Cardboard at the Conduit Gallery in Dallas and Word Dance: Selections from the Collection of Joann Gonzalez-Hickey at the Denver Art Museum.