William Yang, from Australia, gave a sneak peek of his work Monday to about two dozen people at the Minneapolis American Indian Center. Yang, who shared the evening with a half-dozen Native American poets, singers and other performers, presents his full autobiographical slide show, Shadows, 8 pm Wednesday and Thursday in the Walker’s McGuire Theater.
There are still two weekends of the Art Shanty Projects left and I swear it’s not that cold. Now in its fifth year, ASP brings together a community of artists to build and inhabit themed fishing shanties on Medicine Lake in Plymouth.
This year two co-conspirators and I created Medicine Lake Fisheries, a two-story shanty with an open air deck and a fishing tent on the second story. We’ve been fishing from the second story and admiring the view (see Justin Heideman’s shot above) for the past month. Andy Sturdevant, of the MOWSAR Shanty, has a thorough rundown of 2008’s shanties, but here are some of my favorite firsts from this year:
1. Catching a fish from a frozen lake.
Medicine Lake Fisheries is strictly a catch and release operation.
2. A Taiko-drumming groundhog wedding.
Last Saturday, February 2, Duane Tougas and Kat Corrigan were wed on the top of Medicine Lake Fisheries. Their wedding party consisted of 3 groundhogs and one mouse.
Also check out the Snap Shot Shanty’s photo blog- where they post the images they capture in their on-ice portrait studio.
You may not know it, but the Walker has a YouTube Channel where we post some video clips and keep our eye out for things Walker related. Here are a few things that caught our eye. At our last After Hours opening party for Frida Kahlo, one visitor made this movie:
We’ve also gotten a few submissions to the video competition for Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes:
We also have four(!) groups on flickr: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Walker After Hours, and WACTAC.
Here’s a small sampling of some of the more recent additions to flickr:
Until a couple months ago, my knowledge of social/political cartooning was limited to Garry Trudeau, Ted Rall, Tom Tomorrow and the like. Then I got turned on to Joe Sacco and, as of this weekend, am an official convert to the medium. Will Dinski and Tom Kaczynski were among the handful of Twin Cities cartoonists with tables at the 6th annual Minnesota Center for Book Arts book arts festival. I bought so much of their work Saturday — not to mention my impluse buy of an MCBA membership — that I barely had enough cash to carry to the card room Sunday.
Dinksi is the kind of artist I revere in any medium — dark, witty, irreverent, unafraid, creatively ambitious and wired to what we think but don’t often express (probably a good thing, considering some of his subjects carry guns - notice the hologram in the image at left). Kaczynski, a regular contributor to the comics quarterly MOME, produces such a variety of work that it would be impossible to know it all comes from the same artist. He used the weekend festival to showcase his more abstract, disjointed narratives and series.
Both artists self-produce work in a range of formats — cards, booklets (Dinski makes his own hardcover books), limited- edition prints, pop-out displays and posters. They also planned to be in the audience for Sacco’s talk Tuesday at the Walker. As a primer, check out our Allison Herrera’s interview with Sacco.
“Oh yeah, I’m going,” Kaczynski said, as if the mere question of his attendance was absurd. “Most of us (cartoonists) probably are.”
IMAGE FROM WILLDINSKI.COM
Readers of this blog are no doubt aware that the Republican National Convention is taking place in St. Paul next September. Given this unique opportunity, The Walker and many other arts and education institutions in the Twin Cities are teaming up to create an entity called The UnConvention. Over the next year and a half, The Walker, along with these institutions, will be presenting lectures, workshops, classes and exhibitions based on the theme of participatory democracy.
We’ve put out an official media release, and have a website just for The UnConvention. Here are some details from the media release:
The UnConvention is about participation and democracy, the public sphere, media, and creativity--not a critique of the Republican Party and its policies. Our motto is “unscripting the political process”. The UnConvention exists as a counterpoint to the highly scripted and predetermined nature of the contemporary presidential nomination process and convention.
The mission of The UnConvention is twofold:
We working on some exciting projects that residents of the Twin Cities will be able to participate in. Conventions in the past have been a good excuse for people to leave town for a week. We’re hoping to give people a reason to stick around and participate in a constructive way. As the convention approaches, we also will be fleshing out the website with more features including a full events calendar, a forum and some project specific features.
We also put together an announcement video, created from the announcement or pre-announcement videos of many of the presidential candidates:
A just fascinating story I came across this morning:
On January 1st, 2007, a funny thing happened in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The city of approximately eleven million people, South America’s largest, awoke to find a ban on public advertising. Every billboard, every neon sign, every bus kiosk ad and even the Goodyear blimp were suddenly illegal.
The ban on what the mayor calls “visual pollution” was the culmination of a long battle between the city’s politicians and the advertising industry, which had blanketed Brazil’s economic capital with all manner of billboards, both legal and illegal. Within months, the city has gone from a Blade Runner-like vision of the future to a reclaimed past.
Businessweek also has an article on the ups and downs of the ad ban:
Already the law has led to some strange discoveries. Because the site-ing of billboards was unregulated, many poor people readily accepted cash to have a poster site in their gardens or even in front of their homes. With their removal, a new city is emerging: “Last week, on my way to work, I ‘discovered’ a house,” says Piqueira. “It had been covered by a big billboard for years so I never even knew what it looked like.” The removal of the posters has “revealed an architecture that we must learn to be proud of, instead of hiding,” says de Marco.
But there are downsides--Piqueira worries that much of the “vernacular” lettering and signage from small businesses--”an important part of the city’s history and culture”--will be lost. The organisers of the São Paulo carnival have also expressed concerns about the long-term future of their event now that sponsors will not be allowed to advertise along the route. The city authorities for their part have made it clear that certain public information and cultural works will be exempted from the rules.
The São Paulo No Logo photoset by Tony de Marco gives a good idea of the effect this can have on the way a city looks. You start to understand just how many times per day we are bombarded with visual messages.
Rosemary Williams is a popular woman as of late. Ever since I first heard of Rosemary and her now famous projects, The Wall of Mall and its companion podcast series Rosemary Goes to the Mall, in November 2006 on Radio mnartists, she has quickly become the subject of an ever-escalating number of news stories from the likes of the New York Times Magazine to National Public Radio.
For those who haven't yet heard of the project, it's probably best to hear Rosemary describe it in her own words...
From rosemarywilliams.com:
"The Wall of Mall is a wall approximately 8' high and 20' wide, covered on both sides with shopping bags from each of the retail stores at the Mall of America. The bags are arranged in rows overlapping each other like shingles. The scale of the piece underscores the impossibility of attaining satisfaction through this kind of consumption, and yet at the same time highlights how shopping is impossible to escape. The piece invites viewers to come closer and identify the individual stores through their logos and designs, and relate to the act of shopping through the memory of their own past retail experiences."
"Rosemary Goes to the Mall is a podcast which developed out of The Wall of Mall. After being told by salespeople that I couldn't have bags for my piece without purchasing something from the stores, I began a long shopping journey with the goal of buying one item from each store at the Mall, and then returning it without the bag. Each podcast represents one shopping trip to the Mall, usually covering between 10 and 15 stores, and is an audio blog covering the events of the day, including the psychology of the kinds of choices I make in each store, interesting interactions with the salespeople, rambling philosophizing about shopping, and occasional trips to the fortune teller machine in the amusement park."
In one podcast Rosemary visits oxygen bar Oxynate, where, "buoyed by waves of freshness, all she really wants to do is call everyone she knows and tell them about how awesome she feels. She forces herself to keep shopping, winding her way to Radio Shack, where, having lost all sense of propriety, she drops $580 on a Magellan Portable Auto Navigation System."
Other projects by Ms. Williams include CEO Views, a video that couples images of the literal views out the windows of high-level executives' offices while their own metaphorical views on their role as a leader of a large company play on the soundtrack; and Bodega Booty a de-branded recreation of a New York City corner store that operates not only as a, "love poem to bodegas, [but also to raise] awareness of the energy created by these idiosyncratic community centers." As another former New Yorker I couldn't agree more--there are a few faces that are more consistent to New Yorkers than the people behind the counter at their neighborhood deli, even fewer places in the city where people of such contradictory backgrounds all frequent, and the only place you can see movie stars and homeless people both pay $8.00 for a pack of cigarettes.
In addition to her work as an artist Rosemary is also professor of New Media at St. Cloud State University. More of her work can be found at RosemaryWilliams.com.
The Walker/McKnight site mnartists.org is a treasure trove of weird and well-produced art. Case in point, the curious couture of Northeast Minneapolis’ Rebecca Yaker. An artist and entrepeneur (and Minnesota Rollergirl), her portfolio includes an un-Prom dress made from sock monkeys, an entire outfit crafted from “toy foods (tomatoes, cheese slices, roast beef, white bread, bologna, hamburgers, and lettuce), clear vinyl, and plastic coated metal,” and this sweet Fruit Roll-Up Western Shirt:
This shirt is constructed entirely out of various fruit roll-ups–strawberry, tropical fruit, and electric blue (not really a recognizable favor, but it’s tasty)–finished with rhinestone snaps up the center placket. It was nearly impossible not to eat my supplies, but somehow I managed not to.
Powered by WordPress
