lost in space: britt oman's world of flat dimensionality

Britt Oman is a personal friend, which makes it a bit sketchy of me to write about her and her recent gallery opening, Personal NOT Precious. I could easily face accusations that I'm just a puff writer trying to improve the profile of my friends and colleagues. I feel compelled to write, however, because this is some of her best and most accessible work, and I say that as someone who often has a difficult time connecting to purely abstract art.

Can shape have an emotion? Probably not. But what if you put it with other shapes in front of and behind it? Maybe. Abstract artists have been working this way for quite some time, but there's a newness to Britt's paintings that comes from their viscerality. Frank Stella worked with line and its relationship to shape, too, but his work is clean and careful, the antithesis of the almost violent combinations that we see in this show. These paintings use not only the canvas but also the floor, wall, the ceiling, the empty space around them, and even other paintings to distort the expectations of looking. They also combine the raw stroke of the paintbrush with the printmaker's clean and pressed line for an almost alien contrast.

Britt's work is a kind of painted collage. Whether it's painted to the wall to create confusion between the painting and the gallery space or created from cut fragments of paintings that we've seen before (thus distorting our perception of time as well as of space), everything here is about combination.

We talked a bit in her artist's talk about her process and her willingness to second-guess herself. She said that she works intuitively, responding to what's in front of her, but also always starts with a template, usually a print. This helps in understanding why the work comes out the way that it does and helps with the more conceptually minded who might be overwhelmed with the attack of formalism seen here. But, if pressed to the wall and forced to give a concern rather than a compliment, I'd have to say that the one thing this show could really use is a binding conceptual theme. Personal NOT Precious for some reason doesn't quite do it for me. The loud and hot nature of the art makes me want a feeling or an emotion to think about as I get lost in the whirlwind. It's a minor concern, however, and I enjoyed the show in spite of it.

There's plenty more going on than I've been able to articulate. The feeling of fragmentation underlies a lot that's found here, but again, it feels secondary to spacial disorganization. The tension between front and back, square and broken square, also squeaks in. This is a big jump for Britt, and it'd be a mistake to skip it.

Personal NOT Precious runs through February 18 at the Gallery Vault, which is located at 708 W St. Germain in St. Cloud.

puzzle and mirror: infinite field at gallery st. germain

With a puzzle, not only are pieces expected to combine properly, but also, they're supposed to make an image of something when you complete the thing. A puzzle seems an apt metaphor for Infinite Field, the recent show at Gallery St. Germain by Peter Happel Christian and David Ruhlman, but an incomplete one. Of course, no self-respecting fine artist would conceive of their work as a puzzle with a specific meaning to be figured out by the viewer, but while at the show I couldn't shake the sensation that, more so than with other art exhibitions, this was a puzzle, even one with no specific meaning or answer.

That's probably the influence of David Ruhlman's work. The piece above is The Fox sisters receive the first 12 letters, and is fairly representative of the general tone and feel of the paintings he presented for the show. He mentioned that he became interested in the Fox sisters and their contribution to the development of the American spiritualist movement. His paintings seemed to touch on mystery and its relationship to spiritual awakening, but also incorporated letter-forms as an aesthetic device. His letter grids encourage you to see a word, then bounce to another, then back again, just as gestalt images like the face-vase encourage you to bounce between images.

Several of the paintings are also sculptural, which not only allows, but actually encourages you to view them from multiple angles. At one point I had a strong desire to crawl on the floor to see if there was painted material that I couldn't see standing up or crouching. In the culture of the gallery space and the universal survey museum that sometimes zombifies us into viewing work in one way from one angle, this, I feel, is quite an accomplishment.

Work from another show that's quite similar to the work presented at Infinite Field

I'm more familiar with Peter's work, which is significantly different on the surface. Peter self-identifies as a photographer, and I think it's fair to put him in the more conceptual camp of that medium. His work at this show varies greatly. I saw crisp, black-and-white photographs formally reminiscent of the golden age of black and white photography, but taken of the everyday sawhorse. The black mirror and the black hole are repeating motifs that show up in Peter's work quite a bit, and this show is no exception. Probably the most striking piece of the whole exhibition is Infinite Field IV, a large, table-like structure of Plexiglas held up by two very different sawhorses, with a black glass in the center. The unnatural curvature of the table makes it feel as though it's about to burst, and the black glass serves as an implied mirror for the sawhorses.

It's the theme of this piece that binds the show together, I think. Though the metaphor of the incomplete puzzle makes sense for David's work, and clearly influences Peter's, a better and more well-rounded metaphor might be the imperfect mirror. Most pieces in the show can be viewed as a distorted reflection. Some, like the table with unique sawhorses, reflect themselves. Some reflect other works in the show, as when David titles two different pieces exactly the same. Many reflect your own expectation, such as when we're forced to view what we know to be a flickering light through a black glass, or when we search for words that aren't there in a letter grid.

The imperfect reflection and the black mirror make me think of the modern LCD/LED screen. I've never known either artist to work with technology as a theme, and in Peter's case he sometimes seems to work against it by creating handmade books and photographing natural spaces, but I'd be interested to see what their artistic sensibilities would make of the ubiquitous nature of modern technology.

But I digress. The show comes highly recommended, and I haven't touched on half of what's to be found there after a careful examination. Infinite Field is open through March 5 at Gallery St. Germain, which is located at 912 W St. Germain in St. Cloud. For further questions, the artists can be contacted through their websites, linked in the first paragraph of this article, and Gallery St. Germain can be contacted at studio@paramountarts.org.

a vivid start

Beginnings starts off this Gallery Vault season with a bang, or maybe it would be more appropriate to term it a splash, as the vibrancy of color seems to be a major theme here. Diverse student artists are represented in the show, but each presents their (usually painted) work as an attack of pigment on the viewer.

   

This kind of work is pretty representative of the painting that's coming out of the department these days, and it's refreshing to see a shift from the more cool and conceptual type of art that's been common. There's not anything wrong with work that engages primarily with ideas over form, and all work does both to a degree, but ideas have been a bit over-represented compared to medium and the physicality of materials. It's interesting, but a broader discussion than we can have here.

Suffice it to say that anyone interested in the Cloud art scene can expect more of this work out of GV, especially considering the next show is new works from Brittany Oman. Britt's paintings seem to have a depth and complexity somewhat separate from the formal quality of the paint that she uses. It comes, I believe, from an interaction with title. This reminds me of the tesseract and other four-dimensional geometries, for example. We await the rest with trepidation.

review: soon it will be cold enough

After most of the tracks on Emancipator's Soon It Will Be Cold Enough came up on my downtempo electronica station, I felt like I had to review it sooner or later. I trust Pandora enough that when it feels I'll like something that much, I give it a chance. It's usually right, and in this case it is, though not without reservations.

Emancipator is Douglas Appling, an artist out of Portland who seems to have burst self-formed out of the Zeus of that culture's music scene. He released Soon and within a few years and one more album release formed his own label, Loci Records. He's now touring solo and has also toured with Pretty Lights, a true titan of the genre. Since Soon he's put out four other studio albums that I haven't yet had the pleasure of hearing, and though his first offering might fall short in a few places, it shows enough thought, depth and craft that I'm anxious to finish out this review so that I can go listen to his more recent releases.

Soon starts with "Eve", one of its strongest tracks, a melancholy number that mixes piano, assorted rhythm samples, and a soothing but also haunting female voice. "Eve" holds together very well and guides us through heights and valleys without forcing the point. Its blisteringly fast beats don't conflict with the twinkling of the piano melody and the ghostly character of the voice that we want to hear more of, but never quite do.  Moreover, they combine and weave together nicely. It's this weaving and smooth combination on "Eve" that makes "First Snow", two tracks later, easily the strongest song on the album and the one that I keep coming back to week after week. "First Snow" also plays with samples of speech appropriated from other sources, a technique that comes all the way from Dark Side of the Moon, but its holistic use in Soon reminds me most of the way speech samples were used so expertly in Endtroducing..... by DJ Shadow. I can't help but be reminded of "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt", despite the differences between the two tracks.

Other parts of Soon are appealing as well. "Maps" has a well textured background to contrast against its piercing piano, and the inclusion of audio from Ernest Shackleton's expedition to the southern polar regions are a masterstroke in how they are placed as an epilogue to that track. Ultimately, though, the concept that I keep coming back to in trying to describe the experience is texture, and it's here that Soon leaves me with a yearning I can't quite place. Trip hop is largely about different kinds of sounds with very different timbral qualities bumping around in the same staff space, and sometimes the album achieves this well. Some tracks, especially in the meandering middle of the album, seem to rely on unique sounds too much in lieu of complexity of notes and phrases.

The greatest failing of Soon is that I seem to want ten percent more of something that I can't articulate. Ten percent more kinds of sounds, ten percent more interplay of notes, ten percent more background texture. "Smoke Signals" is a good example of this, as is the title track, "Soon It Will Be Cold Enough To Start Fires". Many tracks feel like they want to build to something, some musical exclamation point or question mark, but never do. Small and minimalist can work, of course; see Boards of Canada. But many of Soon's tracks seem just a bit too fast paced and rhythmic to really work as quiet meditations, even though they seem to want to. That they're also too slow and thoughtful to work as upbeat dancy tracks is beside the point, though a few ("Father King") feel like they're leaning in that direction.

For a first release, however, Soon has plenty to recommend it. What it needs is not polish around the edges, but expansion and elaboration at its core. And, as I mentioned before, enough tracks really do hit the mark in a solid and memorable way that I'm excited to hear the rest of Emancipator's work, which is probably the best thing to take away from an artist's first album.

from aphrodite to athena

Weirdly, there are no male angels in the Magic: the Gathering cosmology, at least in recent years. This is confusing to me. The game has of late been criticized for having a particularly regressive set of tones, themes, and artwork especially as compared to its early days. In particular, art before the Weatherlight block was much more open and accepting of a variety of artistic styles, whereas contemporary card art is essentially neoclassical painting. But the angels are weird conceptually. Why do we have an entire race of good looking women when no other fantasy trope is so gender biased? And why angels specifically? Why not goblins or orcs or vampires?

But it's not just the art, and it's not just M:tG. You could argue that the Asari from Mass Effect fulfill the same trope considering their affinity for space magic, though I think there is more sex at play there. Can we just chalk this up to something as basic as the male gaze--the sexualization of women for an assumed-to-be-male audience? While I don't doubt it's a contributor, I don't think it's the whole story. It still doesn't explain why a race of characters that are literally a messianic symbol are gendered female. Consider the Innistrad set.

Avacyn is specifically referred to as the angel of hope, and her return from exile names the final expansion of the block as a coming out from darkness. Until this point, the themes of the set can basically be said to be "We're all going to die." She is implied and seen in narrative to be extremely powerful, and in gameplay she actually prevents every card you control on the field--including herself!--from being destroyed. On top of this she is barely sexualized, perhaps less than any other female in M:tG.

This isn't the male gaze, or, at least, this is a different kind of male gaze than the sexualized one which has characterized the history of fantasy pop culture. This isn't your girlfriend; this is mom.

Although this is but one example, it's a representative one. This is a different kind of "troping" of characters, and females in particular, than I've grown up knowing and reading about in the context of gender, but I feel that it speaks to a change in the way that games, especially high fantasy games, create superheroic characters. The male fantasy is no longer the submissive, biddable woman that serves his every desire but has no agency of her own 1. It is the powerful, sheltering mother-warrior-goddess woman that can protect him from the terrifying world and, most of all, save the day in the nick of time. Men don't want Aphrodite anymore; they want Athena.

To some degree, this is understandable and not even that problematic. When we fantasize about an ideal partner, we want someone who is strong enough to help us when we are in trouble and kind enough to act as a balm to soothe our wounds. Furthermore, when you look at forms of media that are at least perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be created for a female audience, you find that the same kinds of power figures there are weighted male. Supernatural? Twilight?

If this is what we think of when we think of a perfect woman, I say bring it on. This allows women to be idealized in a way that has nothing to do with their sexuality. Athena burst forth fully formed from her father's head. She never lost a battle, ever, marking her as perfect in the traditionally male dominated sphere of war. Her wisdom and compassion were legendary.

Is the mere presence of the Athena character empowering to real women, though? Doubtful, but I'm not convinced it's oppressive either. I think it's less that the standard portrayal of an ideal female is changing and that that's bad, but that we get more idealized females than we get idealized males, and that we have fewer non-idealized females than non-idealized males. Non-sexist writing doesn't mean we can't have Wonder Woman and Black Widow. It means every woman shouldn't be one or the other.

And more controversially, I think if we want to be fair and equal about the presence of some characters being idealized hero-goddesses that we can unconsciously fantasize about saving us, then maybe we need some male counterparts? Sometimes people talk about the muscled super-hulk being a male power fantasy rather than a female sexual fantasy, and I buy that to a degree, though I'd speculate it's probably more a matter of creators who imagine that's what women want. But there are a few examples of powerful male gendered characters representing both male power and female sexual desire.

More Thor? As a guy, I could live with that.

1 - Ironically, Avacyn is an artificial creature created by the wizard-vampire Sorin to protect his home from falling too far into darkness. This might say volumes itself, but this aspect of the character isn't emphasized on any card and is buried in the backstory, and by the time the set occurs, Avacyn is an independent character with her own agency.

civilization and ludic eurocentrism

Sid Meier's Civilization is a eurocentric game.

Now, I know what you're going to say to me. You're going to say to me "No way, Jake! You're full of crap! Look at the balance of western vs. non-western leaders and civilizations portrayed in the game. Look at the fact that those leaders speak their accurate native languages (or close approximations thereof), and that the units you control do also! Raargh, I'm angry that you're wrong!"

Well, hopefully you won't say that last part. But you're right! Civilization as a series does have a very good track record of representing traditionally marginalized societies and groups. It uses as a measure of who should be included not only expansionist success and historical fame, but also internal political achievement and successful defense against colonialism, as well as making an effort to include nations that might have been great had they not been outright exterminated.

But centrism is about more than that. It's not merely the erasure of certain peoples' contributions to history, which Civilization laudably doesn't do. It's instead a totalizing system of values that emphasizes some things and de-emphasizes others. It tells us--in the case of Civilization, through gameplay--what is important and what is not important. Civilization is Eurocentric not because it whitewashes history or under-represents certain groups, but because of what it is about: expansion, conquest, and technology.

As I see it, these have been the things that seem to have been viewed as important to western powers, at least in our understanding of them. What do we study in Western Civ 101? The expansion and conquest of the Roman Empire. The wars of the middle ages. Colonialism. The Renaissance. The Enlightenment. The Napoleonic wars. The world wars. The cold war. Granted, we do hit religion, industrialization, the rising middle class, and the change in theories of government, but I feel that the balance lies on the side of foreign policy and the Idea of Progress over the social.

For any historians who take issue with this, I am willing to concede that this might be a historiographical problem on my part. But if it is, it is a history that the designers have also bought into and that informs their decision making. Expanding your territory and researching new technologies are the two things that are absolutely critical to success in the games. Later entries have allowed a more peaceful and less expansionist approach, but even these are either dependent on earlier expansion (economic, cultural) or also easily facilitate the militaristic path (diplomatic, scientific).

This type of centrism is necessary, and we shouldn't fault Firaxis for participating in it. In fact, that's such an important point that I'm going to repeat it. We shouldn't fault Firaxis for participating in eurocentrism to the degree that they have. Because of game mechanical concerns (what some scholars have taken to calling Ludic elements), you could not have a non-centric game, or at least not a successful one. A game that attempted to give equal weight to all of the things that nations, states and societies have viewed as most important and have focused on would be terrible. It would be a nightmare for the player to micromanage and contain so many interconnected systems that it would collapse under it's own weight. Because Civilization is a game series and not a historical analysis, it must necessarily emphasize some things at the expense of others.

But...what would a different Civilization game look like? What if we made a conscious effort to emphasize the traditional concerns of East Asian civilization, for example? I am not a historian or an East Asian studies major, so my understanding is limited, but I'll speculate.

Given collectivist tendencies, a sinocentric game might focus a great deal more on internal rather than external strife. Your empire could have a "harmony" value that represents your overall social cohesion. Let it fall too low and face the risk that groups of your cities could attempt to break away into independent empires, or that pretender armies might try to seize power. You could be forced to balance the competing demands of accumulating technologies from foreign trade and preventing foreign cultural influence. If ahead in tech, you could play the cultural colonialist role and sell your advances for influence or exotic resources. Expansion and warfare would still be a big part of your strategy, as these are things that every state has struggled with, but they might have an impact on your harmony stat or your foreign cultural influence. It's a matter of what's emphasized.

This is obviously a cursory speculation, and if anyone with more knowledge about both East Asian culture/history and strategy games wants to fill out my ideas, or call me out on where I'm wrong, I'd look forward to hearing from you.

waking nightmare on west st. germain

Hypersomnia, a gallery show by Anna Ault, just opened at The Gallery Vault, and it's a terrifying beauty to behold. Although the physical gallery space itself remains the faux cheerfulness of the white gallery cube, but nothing beyond that has even the slightest inkling of cheer, simplicity or even sanity. Rather than visiting a gallery show, the experience of Hypersomnia is more akin to falling into a version of Alice's Wonderland written by Wes Craven with the Mad Hatter played by Heath Ledger's Joker.

Anna's work is a chaotic mess, but that's a credit to it on even the worst of days. When it's great, like in Hypersomnia, you end up with either a visual or conceptual call to madness, a controlled chaos that evokes Hitchcock's Birds and Lévi's Baphomet in equal measure. This makes sense considering both the title and the artist's own struggles with the specter of death at an early age. In these contexts, the works take on a somnolent quality that brings to mind the twisted worlds of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle and the feeling of being trapped in a world of imagination, longing for a return to real life. Chaos reigns here.

The formal quality of the work is predominantly linear, but is balanced by these well known animal images, which draw you out of the visual as soon as it begins to become overwhelming. Birds and goat-demons are simultaneously a threat and a friend for Anna, like an alternatively abusive and loving relationship that one cannot escape from. Fish and snakes are more humorous and playful, to the degree that anything can be in Anna's warped world. Once you have a moment to ponder the meaning of a bizarre image like that of a purple rat in a full hazmat suit devouring the neck of a human man, the tangle of lines and overlapping shapes draw you back in.

This Matisse-like push and pull of image and concept continues as you pass each of the exactingly worked 204 pieces in the show. By the end you're dizzy and profoundly disturbed, and in my case, profoundly affected with a desire for more. Perhaps hearkening just a touch back to the cacophony and speed of the Italian futurists (though without their juvenile love of war and the machine), lines and shapes and collide with printed and drawn matter in a way I'd hesitate to call controlled chaos. A better metaphor, if I'm not overloading you with enough comparisons already, would be to the kaleidoscopic nature of David Lynch's films had he worked with H. R. Giger. One thing leads to another that it shouldn't naturally lead to, but the connections seem to be implied nonetheless.

Anna's work pushes against the Duchampian trend toward minimalism and high concept that characterized the art of the second half of the twentieth century. But it also proves that a formalism of exacting detail need not neglect a gut-punching emotional character. Anna's going places. I'd recommend you get to the show and grab onto her coattails (or, rather, tail feathers).

Hypersomnia is open 12 pm to 3 pm October 16th, 17th and 18th, and The Gallery Vault is located at 708 West St. Germain Street in St. Cloud.

Most of the works in the show are for sale, and the artist can be contacted for price and availability at annaault@yahoo.com