Of all the art to be seen this fall in the Twin Cities, make sure that the 2006 Jerome/MCAD Fellows Show, now on at the MCAD Main Gallery, crosses your radar-screen. Having spent the past twelve months working under ‘formative’ status, the fellows are back with crisp-new bodies of work and have moved into the next stage of their careers. They are Megan Vossler, Janet Lobberecht, Angela Strassheim, Dan Tesene, and Megan Rye.
Megan Vossler’s Aftermath and Rubble, graphite drawings on massive sheets of paper, are meditations on war and image making. Focusing on the remains of conflict, what is left over and its lingering effects rather than indictments, Vossler manages to de-specify conflict from any geographic locality. In doing so, she recalls a multitude of recent military conflicts and refugee populations on the move. In spite of the gravity of these issues, her work is not didactic, a very successful feat considering how quickly images are weaponized and lobbed back and forth in the media-battlefield.
In her smaller framed works, Patrol and Refugees, Vossler draws attention to oppositional notions of movement and space through the absence of a fully rendered landscape. Soldiers patrol land in order to protect and enclose space. For them, territory is to be controlled. Refugees, on the other hand, are forced to move away from their homes and walk through a landscape of displacement with a more uncertain future, oftentimes never returning to their homes.
In refusing to be simply pinned up and hung idly from the wall, Janet Lobberechet’s mixed-media drawings insist on 3-dimensionality without being unruly. It’s Hard to Make the Good Things Last is a tangle of colorful irreconcilables that have been gently collected, rather than cohered. Swirling, spiraling, and gracefully torquing forms on paper, Plexiglass, and wall somehow commingle. There’s an oil-water magnetism that just barely holds it all together without mixing.
Sinuous lines crawl along and over, licking at the paper’s edges and quickly recoiling. Constantly in motion, and never sitting still, her hand tickles the surface and leaps from paper to the wall and back to paper. There’s an insatiable hunger for space and a thirst for more. It Lingers Then You Forget/Couldn’t Drag Me Away isn’t just a rendering though; it’s a drawing out. Her fantastic use of repeated lines and obsessively rewritten text is like the working through of an idea; in not wanting it to ever become too tidy, she leaves it perched at the precipice between sketch and shape. Lobberecht’s gestural bio-beaded-scripto-glyphs take off on a graceful tangent that will never be brought back to a center.
Tucked back into a corner of the gallery is Angela Strassheim’s installation, Grandma’s Closet. Taking inspiration from her photograph of the same closet, she has created an exact replica of just that. But in the installation these clothes, hung up and arranged so carefully, become tangible remnants of a life lived. Standing in front of Grandma’s Closet there’s a whiff of powdery perfume that brings back memories of my grandmother and her favorite Christmas sweater. Smells have an eerie ability to evoke recollections in ways that are stronger than photographs and Strassheim uses this unique olfactory dimension, along with the visual and aural, to provide an opportunity to remember as well as to see.
But is it a memorial? While it is definitely a container, the closet isn’t filled to the brim with minutiae the way an archive strives to hold or a memorial monumentalizes someone’s life. It has been reproduced as it may have appeared on any day, like a memory captures and holds onto a strangely familiar scene. As a kind of memorial, what’s most perilous to Grandma’s Closet is its impermanence; we know that it can, and will be, disassembled.
Rapid prototyping is a high-tech form of printing that creates 3-D shapes from digital renderings. A special printer builds shape in layer upon layer of delicate, sandy gypsum. The procedure is intricately labored but Dan Tesene is a patient and methodical artist. He’s willing to take his time with pushing the potential of the technology, seeing how far it will go in answering his questions on scale and vision.
In False City, he has assembled dozens of miniature buildings to create a rapid prototype cityscape. This is a ‘false city’ by not being modeled on any city in particular, but inaccurate as well because it’s a miniaturized representation. Both form and display seem bound with equal parts intense measurement and creative thinking. There is an attention to the delicate expression of ideas with the cold eye of logical observation.
Transit 1-5 are wall mounted map forms that carefully record Tesene’s daily movement over the span of two weeks. Rather than a street-level survey with storefronts and pedestrians each Transit is a tangle of lines looked down upon from above with an omniscience that conflates space and time. Supposedly, everything is there, right there. But we (and Tesene) know this isn’t true. His use of the cartographic ‘view from nowhere’, that fictional view of every city or road map that looks down from miles above the ground, speaks to the ineffability of establishing and recording his presence in the city.
Megan Rye’s oil paintings situate the viewer as witness but in such a way that we’re not totally excluded as participants. Riding in the backseat of a Hummer in Falluja to Abu Gharib, we’re offered the embedded viewpoint of a journalist or enlisted soldier that stares through the windshield into a deserted blankness. What you may not know is that this painting began as a photograph taken by Rye’s brother who was stationed in Iraq with the Marine Corps.
Working from snapshots and newspaper photos for the first time, Rye works through what it means to translate images into oil painting. She has deliberately left something of the original photo in her paintings but I keep asking myself, how are they different now that she has painted them? Maybe she’s amped up the intensity of each image, but surely there’s room for much more. When brought back as memoirs of the war or as newspaper photos attached to stories, these images spoke with a certain visual language. What happens when they become paintings? It will be interesting to see Rye continue to develop this interest in image reorientation while working through her brother’s massive archive of photos.
Again, make sure to see this strong show of new work at MCAD and treat yourself to some great work by artists who you will soon be seeing at local and national venues. The public opening is Friday, October 13 from 6-8pm and the show will on display until October 29.
