Visual Arts

David Bowen’s Networked Bamboo and Pete Driessen’s White Fleet are among works in the MMAA’s 3D II biennial exhibition.

You can drive by the Science Museum of Minnesota every day and be forgiven for overlooking the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the bastion of homegrown visual art that, until not long ago, shared walls with the jail in the Ramsey County Government Center.

The MMAA’s Minnesota Biennial is the only so-named exhibition in the Twin Cities. Two- and three-dimensional work get alternating showcases — the latest 3D turn, the museum’s first since 2002, opened Saturday. 3D II is at turns bright, trite, engaging, unpolished, unpretentious, flat, fatuous, funny and wholly unique on the local gallery and museum scene. A sole juror — Jennifer Jankauskas, associate curator of exhibitions at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in Sheboygan, Wis. — winnowed down more than 150 artists to select the 27 in this show. 3D II closes February 3, 2008.

Jankauskas leans to the wry and socially relevant, emphasizing installation over static sculpture, and much of the work begs for direct interaction. At the well-attended opening-night party, visitors easily lost their heads the moment after walking in the door — Julia Kouneski’s pinhole cameras are like hexagon helmets. David Hamlow of Good Thunder, Minn., cast his life between 1994 and 1998 into a giant cardboard ball taped together from every box of cereal, crackers, soap, razors and other products he bought and used during those years. Friends and family weighed in with their own takes of Hamlow, made from the artist’s discarded materials.

My favorite pieces were David Bowen’s Networked Bamboo, an installation carrying deliciously creepy Borg overtones (the water-injected stalks make jerky, pained movements through light and electrical impulses) and an unnamed piece by Todd Severson of Minneapolis, a ceramic artist who created a web of figures in a frozen free-fall. I want to see more work from Pete Driessen, whose White Fleet, a stark comment on African colonialism, traces its influence to the work of Kara Walker.

3D II celebrates artists worth discovering.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

It is often the norm that exhibitions take a great deal of time to conceive and to organize and very little time to be experienced. This is not the case with the Brave New Worlds, an exhibition that includes more than a dozen of videos and 16 mm and 35 mm films, or to be really precise, 3 hours and 33 minutes and 96 seconds of moving image. While imagining the show, my colleague and co-curator Doryun Chong and I sketched out the floor-plan of the pieces in relationship with one another formally and conceptually but also chronologically, taking into consideration their duration in relation to other pieces. We roughly estimated that it could take at least four hours for a visitor to see the entire show, maybe without reading labels. It might seem like a large amount of time to spend in the galleries but we imagined the exhibition as a journey of investigations, where the juxtaposition between time-based pieces along photographs, sculptures, drawings, and paintings allow for shifting levels of contemplation as one walks through each room.

During the preparation process we switched the location of several pieces all the way until the last minute until we were able to feel the fluidity between the narratives and their movement. Afterwards, Doryun mentioned to me that he understood the exhibition as a musical piece in three movements. I’ve come to see it as a chart of proximities, like the one drawn in the bottom left-hand corner of Jorge Macchi’s collage Liliput (2007), where individual works of art are interconnected with one another in a number of common areas in each of the galleries where they meet and share sightlines, floor and wall spaces, sound, light reflections or a cast shadows from their neighboring pieces. As its title suggests Brave New Worlds is not a swift stroll through one world but a journey through a constellation of worlds, viewpoints, and moving images that range from the open sea to a public park, from a narrow corridor to a deserted road, and from a floating satellite to mesmerizing skies. I recommend to leave your watch at home.

Slate, the online magazine, has posted a brief but smart slideshow of Kara Walker. Several pieces are drawn from the Walker collection, with some photos shot from within the Walker galleries by our Gene Pittman. No mention in the accompanying text of Queen O beyond Slate’s headline.