Front of Winter Survival Pod. Photo courtesy of the author.

I always look forward to the beginning of winter. However, after the joy of the first snowfall has left and the holiday season is through it suddenly settles in that winter could drag on for several more agonizing months. I get hit with that dreadful feeling, the one that questions how I will make it through the long, dark, cold nights. While exploring Sean Connaughty’s “Winter Survival Pod,” I was reminded of this struggle of physical and psychological survival.

Displayed on the front lawn of ARThouse, the Winter Survival Pod stands in contrast to modern shelter. Branches, leaves, and twine make up its egg-like form. I wondered if any other creatures had taken up residence inside. I slipped into the darkness of the sculpture, leaving the bitter wind behind me. The rows of houses and cars driving by faded from my senses. Encapsulated by the pod I felt safe. I was comfortable being alone with my thoughts. I stretched out my legs on the bed of crushed leaves and imagined I’d be quite content hibernating in the pod for the rest of winter.

I curiously peered out of little openings where leaves once were, a sign that the sculpture and winter itself was slowly breaking down. As I gazed between the crisscrossing of twigs I saw that the last of the day’s golden light was fading fast. It won’t be long now until the sun will set on this bleak season and the pod will be returned to the very earth it came from. It stands as a reminder that no matter the will to survive, the time for everything must come to an end.

Inside the Pod Looking Out, The Form of a Person Appears. Photo courtesy of the author.

In the Pod. Photo courtesy of the author.

Inside the Pod Looking Out. Photo courtesy of the author.

Entrance of Pod From Above. Photo courtesy of the author.

About the Author: Jacinda Davis is a photographer and graphic designer that also enjoys writing, running outside during the golden hour, and scheming ways to go on more road trips. Until her new website is launched you can visit her personal photo blog at http://allfall.tumblr.com/

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Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it.  Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to katie(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Recently, I took my kindergartener to see the Children’s Theatre Company’s colorful, musical theater production of Harold and the Purple Crayon. Their adaptation of Crockett Johnson’s classic children’s series from the 1950s is so charming, so sweetly upbeat and whimsical — it made my teeth hurt. My son, a fan of both the books and the Scholastic video version of the stories, was instantly and utterly rapt.

But it’s more than just a good show. What really struck me was that our experience of the story, from page to stage, was almost seamless. From the moment the lights went down and Harold grabbed his crayon, we believed.

When you get right down to it, there’s little actual plot to keep track of – Harold’s imaginary adventures are more dream than story. In this staging, there’s lots of hammy singing and dancing, and the kids seemed to love that. But truth be told, though they were well executed, the show’s tunes didn’t seem to me all that memorable (although my son was very impressed with the appearance of a disco ball during one number).

Photos by Dan Norman, courtesy of the Children's Theatre Company.

It’s the look of the production that made the magic: the pitch perfect set and costume details, the visual surprise and ingenuity of the puppetry, lighting and use of animation. It’s the design of the show that’s left me marveling.

Harold’s got his blue-blue footie pajamas and oversized magic crayon, of course; his two supporting cast members are likewise dressed in comfortable-looking rompers. The  accompanying props and set designs for each scene are minimalist and gorgeous: there’s a puffer fish puppet as delicate as origami; an elegant, stylized Asiatic dragon; a ginormous, menacing crab pincer; furry space aliens; inexplicably and delightfully Francophone critters hungry for pie. Harold’s sailboat and rocket ship, in particular, are wonderfully faithful to the original drawings. And all of it is set against a backdrop of evocative computer animation and lighting effects, which shift – from mountaintop to undersea to outer space –following where Harold’s crayon  and rich imagination take us.

The show is filled to the brim with both low- and high-tech hacks used to conjure these beautiful dreamscapes, with a minimum of fixtures and lots of multipurpose, movable pieces: the effect is by turns trippy and fanciful, equally well suited to invoking the vast expanses of space or Harold’s cozy bedroom. The world created on stage is all-enveloping and enchanting.

Harold and the Purple Crayon closes February 26 — if you haven’t yet seen it, grab a kid and go.

About the author: Susannah Schouweiler is editor of mnartists.org.

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Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it.  Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to katie(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Lion and kitty. Photo courtesy of the author.

Today I took a trip to my local Savers, a thrift store here in Minnesota, to study the art for sale. I happen to mostly believe in the motto, “art makes nothing happen,” adapted from Auden. As soon as art has a purpose, at least in my mind, it loses some of its artfulness. Not that art doesn’t make all kinds of things happen — good things, bad things, revolutions, laughter, tears. But I wanted to try and understand what the art stacked in the bins at the thrift store was doing (and, literally, it’s stacked in bins).

The Savers art bin. Photo courtesy of the author

Overwhelmingly and not surprisingly, what I saw were mostly pleasant images of animals and flowers and lakes, of nature domesticated, of a world in harmony and harmless: baby raccoons with big eyes, flowers in full bloom without insects. Even the painting of a lion seemed safe, perhaps because it was sitting right next to a photo of a kitten. In this art, animals are cute; they don’t eat you or bite you or carry infection. People put these images in their homes and feel calmer about the world around them; it is a good, safe place out there and in here.

Of course, I did find one strange, haunting original oil painting — true outsider art — that was not reassuring. It was a rural landscape with a windowless farmhouse, leafless tree, winter, decay. The awkward painting style only emphasized the work’s ennui. This was a spooky painting, stacked in between the reassuring dogs, lilacs and words of praise to God. And then I remembered, felt that all of the other “Hallmark” art was cloying, creepy in its own way; it all set my teeth on edge — does it really calm anyone?

Farmhouse. Photo courtesy of the author.

My favorite piece, which I nearly bought for $2.99, was yarn art of a port scene at sunset, a small five-by-seven-inch piece, black sailboats on a red and orange and yellow yarn sea. A girl walked by and did what I did, rubbed the yarn (and you can never rub the art in any gallery, so Savers has that, at least, over the Walker). And then she asked her mother, didn’t she think it was pretty? There was no irony in her voice. The piece was strangely soothing and horrible at the same time. I guess I was ready to dismiss the mass-produced art of domesticated nature as willfully ignorant decoration, a kind of perversion of art, monomaniacal in its wishful manifestation, creepy. But I liked and was attracted to this handmade piece that was in the same genre, had the same theme. It was more human, maybe, this dedication of time and effort to an idealized yarn world, and there was just a little something more in it, which is all you can ask of art, really.

In the end, I didn’t buy it, though.

Yarn "painting". Photo courtesy of the author.

 About the author: Jay Orff is a writer, musician and filmmaker living in Minneapolis. His fiction has appeared in Reed, Spout, Chain and Harper’s Magazine. Read more on www.jayorff.com.

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Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it.  Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to katie(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Viewfinder: Laidlaw and guests performing at Amsterdam Bar & Hall.

There’s nothing I dread more than February, the middle of winter, other than perhaps Wednesdays, the middle of the week… until now.

Early last week good old Facebook informed me that Brian Laidlaw and friends from Yes!Let’s Collective have an outstanding gig (a residency called “February Colonization”) at Amsterdam Bar & Hall in downtown St. Paul every Wednesday of February. Thank goodness someone else realized how badly we need something to look forward to on the lamest day of the week during the grayest month of the year.

The music feels like folk/folk-rock, but don’t let the easy listening (the kind that makes you want to sing along) fool you.  Brian is an obviously talented writer whose poetic, geographic, and rather intellectual lyrics carry the listener along a true narrative arc.  These musicians love to play, and the joy they so clearly take from their art is contagious.

Amsterdam Bar & Hall is spacious enough to not feel crowded, designed with acoustics in mind allowing for conversation (not shouting!) while musicians are on stage, and offers a selection of Dutch-inspired beverages and snacks sure to warm the body while the music warms the soul. Its high ceilings and industrial dark interior seem a little cold at first, but the atmosphere is colored with warmth and intimacy once the music starts.

I am now looking forward to every Wednesday this month and am no longer counting down the days until February is over.  Brian has also handpicked other local musicians to play with each night – musicians that had inspired him when he first came onto the Twin Cities music scene. The final Wednesday, that magical extra leap year day Feb. 29^th, is promised to be a big celebration with all sorts of musical collaborations from the entire Yes!Let’s Collective and special guest Lucy Michelle.

Notice anything different around here lately? Along with the ballyhooed website revamp rolled out by the Walker Art Center in recent months, mnartists.org is also working to spruce things up here on our blog this year. In partnership with the Walker’s Education and Community Programs department, we’re launching a few new regularly-appearing features, to give you more breadth of information about and by Minnesota’s arts scene, and to include a broader diversity of artists’ voices in the mix of things we publish.

Here’s what’s new on the mnartists.org and Education and Community Program blogs for 2012:

It Is What It Is!
You’ve likely already noticed our weekly web-comic, posted midday every Wednesday and perfect for light lunchtime reading. The strips offer an irreverent, funny glimpse behind the scenes at the museum, and is written and drawn by illustrator-cum-gallery monitor Todd Balthazor — it’s Dilbert meets Dada. We hope it’ll become a regular part of your hump day routine.

Viewfinder – Art is where you find it
Look for these short-shorts to be posted once or twice a week; you may have noticed Jehra’s post in this category yesterday, on the Lowertown St. Paul venue Rage to Order. Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists. We’re counting on you to share with us what you’re seeing in your neck of the woods — it could be something in a museum, gallery, or on stage, of course, but responses to more quotidian sights and sounds are welcome, too.  Interesting signage, seasonal bird song, graffiti, architecture, fashion — tell us what’s in your viewfinder.  Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the everyday art around you to katie@mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. Submissions should be no longer than 300 words (photos and multimedia – video, audio – are welcome!). We ask that you not write about your own work or anything with which you’re directly connected; but if you’ll offer a sentence or two about yourself (no more than 150 words, please), with links to your own websites and current projects by way of a bio, we’ll include that after your “Viewfinder” response.

Making It – How art gets done
Under this umbrella, we’ll include things that lift the curtain on art-making around the state with a broad mash-up of semi-regular cross-disciplinary posts that go inside the process of making and showing work. You’ll find these visually-oriented little pieces on both the Education and Community Programs’ blog and here, on the mnartists.org blog, along with staff dispatches from Arty Pants to Open Field, rehearsal notes and studio visits, maybe even a few DIY tutorials by and with Minnesota artists.

The Family Business – Dispatches from the intersection of art and real life
For this monthly column, which we’ll publish both as an essay on the mnartists.org homepage and in the Education and Community Programs blog, we’ll invite a local artist or arts worker to write something about their experience of the day-by-day juggle of art-making with the responsibilities of real life – kids & family, day-jobs and other everyday obligations – and to do so in their own voices. From grocery shopping to daycare, caring for older relatives to community activism, we aim to offer snapshots of what a life in the arts really looks like, as seen through the eyes of the creative people living it every day.

Now, we want to hear from you! We welcome your questions and story ideas. Submit a “Viewfinder” response of your own any time by emailing katie – at – mnartists.org, and join the conversation.