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.

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.

on self-concept and change

Fixed...

Around about twenty-four or so years ago, when I first started to have fully formed thoughts and memories, I began to develop an idea in my head of what my future would look like. At some point, I stopped conceiving of it as a disconnected set of attributes and started envisioning a complete person. Psychologists call this an Ideal Self-concept, the person you imagine when you imagine your most successful, most actualized self. For me at least, this concept has been pretty resistant to change, even in it's most superficial elements.

I was a writer in this fantasy, and always a successful one. I had achieved enough success that I could engage with writing fiction as my full-time job. Oddly, the actual act of writing featured very little; usually I saw myself giving a speech to a small group of fans or doing a book signing. I almost always lived in New York City, and in the few instances when I did not, I lived in downtown Minneapolis. I traveled often. I wasn't overly wealthy, but had enough money in the bank and lived a spartan enough lifestyle that I never, ever had to be concerned about running out of money or not being able to make monthly expenses. I was intelligent, theoretical and academic, but could also abandon those attributes when I wanted to so I could play beer pong with people who didn't have them.

What surprises me is that the oddly specific superficial elements have been the ones that I've clung most closely to and resisted questioning, especially when I was willing to consider alternative possibilities for myself. For example, in every version of the fantasy—whether I am a writer or a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher—I am always wearing an overcoat like this one. Always. Occasionally it's black; usually it's a foot longer than the one in the photo, and if I am not wearing it, then it's close at hand. That this sartorial element refuses to leave is highly curious. In all of the potential futures in which I am successful, my vision of success always includes that minuscule detail as what is essentially a uniform of success. Even now, to attempt to construct a future without it feels, on some level, fundamentally wrong. Why? Am I the Barney Stinson of the overcoat?

I have a similar relationship to cities. Although for school I moved out to what, to me, is a small town, I can't remember any imagined version of myself that was happy and successful and lived further out than a second-ring suburb. I've never seriously considered staying in St. Cloud longer than I have to, and I have an inkling that it has less to do with the town itself than with it not fitting my self-concept. I don't know why I cling to these superficialities, and I don't know whether or not I should. After all, isn't it the more holistic parts of yourself that you ought to draw strength from and anchor other things to?

It took an enormous effort of will to permit myself to change majors from creative writing to fine art. I had to convince myself that I could do the same sorts of things with drawing and painting that I could do with fiction writing, and that the world of art was broader than Duchamp and Pollock, who I couldn't imagine emulating. The resistance to doing something else was and is so strong that just now I had to exert some willpower to change "art" to "fine art" in that first sentence, probably because I conceive of the more specific field as too different from the writerly self-concept I still have. Even in changing majors, I had to prove I wasn't changing my self-concept.

...and Fluid. 

For as long as I have had a self-concept, it has included the idea that the successful me will have found the One True Calling, the thing that keeps a person awake at 3 AM thinking about it and that makes them excited to begin work on Monday morning. The job from which they do not wish to retire.[1]  I've always believed that once I found this thing, doing it would never be hard. If it was writing, I would never resist sitting down in front of the page. If it was art, I would draw constantly. If it was being a teacher, I would stay with students until 10 PM to help them get the most out of their education. And that I would want to do those things.

This is why I would harangue myself about not finishing projects. I viewed my inability to finish a complete novel as a wound to my self-concept of the successful author persona. I wasn't just failing to complete a goal, I was failing to live up to my ideal self.

As I've grown up and matured I've realized that even the most prolific and voluminous writers feel lazy and don't want to write a lot of the time, and even great teachers get frustrated and need to go home. One of the greatest things I've done for my mental health was to stop attributing a kind of legendary willpower to people who have found their calling and started to view "not wanting to write" or "not wanting to draw" as a natural human impulse instead of a moral failing.

But now I'm starting to take that revelation a step further. Maybe that calling doesn't exist as one thing. Maybe the thing that I'm supposed to do in life is to constantly discover new things. If that's the case, it makes sense that I'm not the kind of person who can see a long, arduous project through to completion. "Getting bored with something" isn't about a lack of willpower and isn't a form of giving up, but is my natural impulse to discover as much as I can.

Does this mean my self-concept has changed from "author" to "author/artist" to "creative person of all stripes/adventurer/discoverer"? I don't know. That's one solution to feeling better about your choices and making them fit with who you are. I think it's more likely, though, that my schema for what a-self concept is has changed, from something that is set in stone and that you build your life around into something that can change and that your goals can change to adapt to.

I'm still never getting rid of the coat, though.

[1] For reasons I can't entirely articulate, the value of the search for this thing has been seared into me at the deepest level. It probably has to do with a combination of the values of the broader culture and growing up with a mother who would come home from work sobbing 50% of the days of the week.

quiet minimalism in vogue

(This post was written in 2014, a year before this blog began in earnest. I considered throwing it out, but a lot of the concerns and ideas in it are still accurate to my opinions. Consider it a sample of my less developed writing style.)

A pair of gallery openings sponsored by the SCSU art department happened this week. Each was quite well done, and together they're emblematic of the personality and approach to art that the school promotes.

Night String Story, an exhibition of quiet, formalist works by Tetsuya Yamada, who teaches ceramics at the U of M, opened on Tuesday. As is usually the case, the opening and artist's talk were attended by professors from the department, students who had classes at 4:30 on Tuesday, and a smattering of individuals with some connection to the artist. There's something to be said for this more intimate and close gathering, as it provides each individual more face time with the artist. Still, I had hoped to see the gallery make a stronger effort to reach out to the greater campus community. Nevertheless, I believe the talk was a success, as it helped to illuminate Yamada's process and product a bit more. For example, the works showed dealt primarily with line, and the artist's talk revealed that he was thinking about Ayatori (the Japanese version of the game Cat's Cradle) when developing many of  them, which explained this linear focus.

Yamada's work is difficult to grasp upon first viewing, an attribute common to works in this style. Oftentimes one's first, visceral reaction to minimalism is nothing, which for the informed viewer is a good sign that one should sit and wait with the work, considering it and letting one's mind think "in the background", so to speak. The idea is that eventually, you'll alight on something interesting. The more I sat with Yamada's work, however, the more I was filled with a sense of emptiness, a feeling something like the absence of communication, as though I was looking at nothing at all. Perhaps this is the content of the work. Perhaps the simplicity of a few lines and their unwillingness to communicate anything which does not come from the viewer themselves was what Yamada found interesting.

Whimsey, an open call exhibition curated by the department's own BriAnna Lundquist, opened Thursday evening. Humor is difficult to communicate in art, but a few fine artists have made entire careers attempting to be funny--David Shrigley and Wayne White come to mind. Whimsey seemed to be more about the quiet chuckle than the belly laugh, though. Odd, quirky and fun are all attributes that could very easily be used to describe Lundquist's own work, and this clearly shows through in the pieces selected here. One work, "Brohemian Rhapsody", shows a man cleaning a pool with the lyrics "I'm just a pool boy, nobody loves me / He's just a pool boy from a pool family." Another is a Guy Fawkes eggplant high in the corner of the space titled "V is for Vegetable." Whimsy is the perfect title for this awkward collection, a kind of artistic curiosity shoppe.

It's refreshing to see humor in the gallery space, and I hope to see it pushed further. Both exhibitions come highly recommended. Yet there's a relationship between the minimalism of Night String Story and the quiet chuckles of Whimsey. Both express an art that is small and whispers its ideas. An art that meekly requests attention from the viewer. An art that says "Hey, I'm, um, here and stuff. If you, like, want to look at me."

I'm all for art which requires engagement from the viewer, and quiet and meditative images that don't show too much too early seem to have a resonance with artists and art viewers. My only hope is that we can make space in the world of the modern fine art gallery for art that proposes an opposite view: art that is big and loud and demands to be heard. Art that is raw and emotional and energetic. Art that exudes power and declares "I am here! Contend with me!" I think both statements are necessary.