Sloshing in from an unseasonably wintry spring night, revelers gathered amidst the rich fabrics and assorted tableaux of gaudy and embellished items that Chicago-based artist Dzine has brought together for Public Functionary‘s first-ever exhibition. The opening of this non-profit gallery and social space has been much anticipated, and the opening was heralded through the night with pulsating music, bomba drums, and a steady stream of attendees.

Dzine, Club Gallistico. From the website of Public Functionary.

Dzine’s show is aptly called Victory: seeing it, you feel as if you are walking through a personal awards-meets-dressing-room. Trophies abound! There are dozens of them along the far wall of the gallery that, upon close inspection, have clearly been reappropriated in the style of kustom kulture: they are decorative works swathed in a variety of bright velvets, fringe and brass knuckles. The artist, né Carlos Rolon, started as a teenaged graffiti artist and has gained popularity for bringing a celebratory Puerto Rican aesthetic into the art world via both installations and flamboyant nail art—a taste of his personal heritage at a large and small scale.

Detail from Dzine’s Victory. Photo by the author.

At the heart of the exhibition, a low-hanging chandelier, Untitled (Around the Way Girl I), drips with fake gold hoop earrings, mirrored surfaces and crystals. Like Andy Messerschmidt’s sheep chandelier in the Walker’s “oculus,” Dzine’s fixture functions as a sculpture but also draws the viewer into its warm and illuminated space. Dzine’s centerpiece is a beautiful distraction from the rest of the exhibition, an inviting place for people to congregate; small groups could be found throughout opening night staring into the work’s low lights like a fire in the hearth. The 2D works along the walls need to be experienced close-up, and every surface of Public Functionary is built up like a wall of a kitschy gingerbread house. Unlike their edible counterparts, these artworks are just eye candy, but still tantalizingly just-within-reach. The textures of the walls and paintings include: sequins, gilding, gold chains, and all sorts of other costume jewelry. I felt like a magpie ensnared by all the shiny things on view, drawn nearer and nearer to each sequined painting, wall and sculpture to investigate.

Detail from Dzine’s Victory. Photo by the author.

Situated in a relatively small exhibition space, Victory lives large. The installation celebrates the delights of surface and texture, but goes deeper too, confronting the viewer with signifiers of success. That said, literature for the show takes pains to invite all manner of viewers in, reassuring them that Dzine’s “work is not difficult to understand.” There are no individual wall labels, and there are many details to explore – it’s an invitation to stay a while and bask in the bright colors.  Victory by Dzine is on view through May 31^st at Public Functionary in Minneapolis.

For more: http://publicfunctionary.org/.

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Chloe Nelson is the program assistant for mnartists.org.

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 editor(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.)

The intriguing, dangling sculpture in the Hennepin Avenue lobby of the Walker is also a conversation piece. “Those are manger sheep,” one passerby told me. “Are those stickers?” asked another, pointing to the new window decals. Evocative and oddly familiar, Andy Messerschmidt’s  Friend Me/Follow Me: Graze Anatomy (2012), the new installation in the Walker’s “oculus,” looks like some eccentric holiday display: a shrine to psychedelia and the patterns of consumerism. The ingredients in this symmetrical and arresting mish-mash of sculpture, sound-piece and 2-D design are varied and decidedly low-brow: wrapping paper, 63 nativity sheep and several enormous shepherd’s crooks, gold paint and green Astroturf (among other surreal ready-made objects).

Andy Messerschmidt’s Friend Me/Follow Me: Graze Anatomy (2012) by night.

Messerschmidt told me that, in order to understand the origins of this work, it was essential to experience Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “disturbing Western” film, The Holy Mountain (1973). Apparently, there is a bearded transvestite in the film with cheetahs instead of breasts. Watch the trailer for said film, and he’s right – the connections do seem to all fall in place (note: the film trailer below contains some disturbing imagery).

From the trailer alone, you get a clear impression of the unique visual culture Jodorowsky establishes in his film;  the imagery recalls many things: Yves Klein’s Anthropométries, a nightmarish cult involving Surrealists, sacrificial animals,  war-torn society at its worst, and religious pastiche. Cindy Sherman’s grotesque humanoid forms and the aestheticized religion in Lady Gaga’s “Judas” music video. High-brow and popular art, both echo the filmmaker’s eccentric visual language.  Messerschmidt’s installation streamlines Jodorowsky’s lexicon down to clean design elements. The (sacrificial) lambs are still in evidence, but they are combined into an elegant, illuminated chandelier; the repetitive and overwhelming patterns inspired by Eastern religion he has flattened into wallpaper. The grotesque, curious, and bizarre of Jodorowsky’s cinematic vision, translated this way, becomes playful.

Messerschmidt’s work creates the experience of an isolated, enveloping moment for passersby that is decidedly separate from the rest of the museum. It’s also interesting to view the work from the restaurant, Gather, upstairs: the swirling projected images flash across the asymmetrical ceiling and are readily visible from the bar. As night falls on Hennepin Avenue, people going by make the occasional observation; I hear someone wonder aloud about the impact of the lit sculpture at different times of day.  The installation looks warm and bright as I give it one last look from the snowy sidewalk outside.

___________________________

Chloe Nelson is the program assistant for mnartists.org.

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 editor(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.)

Hidden away in the little-known Walker boudoir, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s Fantasy Play is lovingly separated from the rest of Midnight Party. And rightfully so, for this work gives passersby a slightly uncomfortable glance into Von Bruenchenhein’s elaborate private world. Marie, the artist’s wife and subject of the photograph that we will explore today, is standing up. She sports stockings and little heels, a long dress with a painterly check design that evokes the South Pacific (and pulled a little low to be appropriate for any but those beaches), flowers in her hair in the style of Frida Kahlo. Her exposed breasts point out at the viewer, oddly squished by her ill-fitting garments. She’s wearing a peach cardigan and her hands are somewhere behind her back; untitled (Marie) features the lady looking out at the viewer, nearly smiling (photograph pictured below, at the far right of the shot).

Installation view of Midnight Party. Courtesy Walker Art Center, photo by Gene Pittman.

Marie seems to be comfortable in her spot on the wall: surrounded by other portraits of herself, she is matted and placed within a simple, wooden frame. This room is devoted to Marie as much as it is to her husband’s photographs of her. The Walker’s intimate parlor welcomes the viewer with blue green walls, shell-pink kissing chairs and slightly spotted brown, wall-to-wall carpet.

Working with flowers during the day as a florist and baker, photographer Von Bruenchenhein staged floral scenes by night centered around his wife Marie. Through this series of photographs, the artist unwittingly gives us insight into his marriage: the playful relationship of a couple living  in relative obscurity in mid-century Wisconsin. Now considered an “outsider artist,” Von Bruenchenheim documented his wife, his junior by ten years; his lens lingers on her slim physique, curled hair, and gentle gaze over and over again. Rather than archive his wife’s daily life, Von Bruenchenhein pins Marie like a little butterfly in these sensual boudoir scenes, replete with textiles, wallpapers and pattern. Like Max Reinhardt’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), Von Bruenchenhein’s photographs are intoxicating, ethereal but also collaged, cut-and-pasted — clearly a façade. His figures lack the exoticism of Matisse’s odalisques or the fierce empowerment of modern-day Mickalene Thomas’s ladies.

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Untitled, circa 1950, gelatin silver print, 9-15/16 x 7-3/4. Collection: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Gift of Richard Flood, 2006

Untitled (Marie) is no girl next door, and she’s also no trophy wife or consciously exotic other. This is the girl in the bedroom: she is complicit, unlike a hired model, and her sensuality seems to lack motive. She lives in a dream world, cacophonous with  flowers and delightful homemade props. She is not subversive;  she is comfortable. She exposes her breasts as unapologetically as she wears her little heels and cardigan. Plucked from obscurity and chosen by the institution, these photographs are bizarre in this context but not altogether dissonant with the crowned, queer dancing scene reflected across the gallery . The little-known Walker boudoir stages a tiny, flattened arrangement of Maries, like a Wisconsin-born bougainvillea, among the flowers.

___________________________

Chloe Nelson is the program assistant for mnartists.org.

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 editor(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.)