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.

review: and the moon was hungry

Morgan is weird. It's hard to describe in exactly what way her music is weird. I mean, I could say that she sounds like dark symphonic pop-metal mixed with nightmare cabaret mixed with 1950s lounge singers mixed with Amy Winehouse, but that doesn't actually mean anything unless you're intimately familiar with all those genres and performers AND have a good musical imagination. And if that's the case, then you've probably already heard of the Album and are getting some tracks off YouTube as you read. For the rest of us, I'll have to do a whole damn article.

I first discovered "...and the moon was hungry...", her album with The Romanovs (which she fronts), through Pandora. Honestly, I discover most music through Pandora these days, and I'm usually impressed and heartened to discover the degree to which tiny and otherwise totally unknown performers have penetrated the medium. "King" was the song that got me to create a new station based on it, which is always a good sign when that happens. This track sounded a lot like half the tracks on Fallen by Evanescence, and yet despite what you might think that's actually a compliment coming from me. I really liked the album and still do.

I expected more of that kind of heavy and layered harmonic sound from the other tracks, but was pleasantly disappointed on hearing tracks like "China Shop". This is where the piano comes to the front, and her strategic use of expletives and silent spaces speaks to Amy Winehouse. Sometimes that silence can seem a little jarring when it comes in the midst of that heavy layering, like on "Kiss", but maybe that's the point. Kiss is actually the weirdest track, the one that convinced me to write this review rather than a short paragraph as an incitation to listen. I can't place it. At one point it descends into a folk-carnival dance that seems appropriately out of place, as though we've been trained to expect the unexpected. Nevertheless, the album seems to always return to the dark layering reminiscent of the best of Evanescence, but with beautifully obtuse lyrics.

It's no coincidence that the most common artist to come up on my Pandora station inspired by her is Florence + The Machine. This might be the best way to describe The Romanovs. But if Florence is the sun, burning bright in majesty, then Morgan is the moon, covering us in milky shadows. She's the glorious and sickly negative of Florence. Morgan is quiet when Florence is loud, loud when she's quiet; Morgan inspires doubt where Florence gives us confidence. Florence lifts us up; Morgan drags us down to drown in her aural swamp. And what a sweet drowning it is. To borrow a phrase: 10/10; would drown again.

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.