A Preoccupation with Distraction
The 2008/2009 Jerome Fellows in Visual Arts exhibit at mcad.
In October of 2008, five Minnesota artists were notified that they had been selected from a pool of 317 applicants to receive the Jerome Foundation’s fellowship for the visual arts. The jurors who chose these five artists were Paul Ha, Director of the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Sara Krajewski, Associate Curator at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, WA, and Rob Silberman, Associate Professor of art history at the University of Minnesota. The following spring, I was invited to learn and write about the artists’ work as one of three Jerome critics. The essays in this constellation grew out of my series of studio visits and conversations with the artists over several months. They will appear in print in the catalog that accompanies this fall’s Jerome exhibition, scheduled to open on October 2, 2009, at mcad.
As a critic, I usually engage with work that is finished and on display in a gallery or a museum. But writing about these five emerging bodies of work presented me with a new challenge: as I sat down to compose these essays, the artwork was still very much in process. There was no finalized work for me to look at. As a result, these essays focus on the conceptual underpinnings and the development of the work.
Soon after getting to know the work of the five artists, several shared concerns or themes emerged, perhaps as signs of the times we live in. Photographer Evan Baden and mixed-media painter Kirsten Peterson both investigate the relationship between technology and perception. But while Baden’s photographs seek to shed light on the changing terrain of intimacy in thProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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age of digital technology, Peterson is more concerned with systems, structures, and their perceived trustworthiness. Barb Claussen’s work shares both of these concerns: her project focuses on the lines separating intimate from public spaces, and the systems of power that keep those lines—and us—in place.
In a similar vein, Ben Reed’s installation examines power through the lens of soccer games as microcosms of quasi-military strategizing and creative problem solving. Rather than suggest solutions, Lindsay Smith’s drawings invite intimate reflection on where our current consumerist way of life may lead. This line of inquiry in turn relates to Peterson’s deep ambivalence about the role of technology in our lives and the extent to which we habitually rely on it. Yet while Peterson incorporates cutting edge technology into her process, Smith purposefully steers clear of digital media altogether and works with only pencil and watercolor.
What these five bodies of work share is a preoccupation with distraction: Reed’s work reminds of the ways sport spectacles have functioned as an opiate for the masses, effectively concealing the power structures that benefit from such popular distractions. Concealed power also concerns Claussen. Her work investigates how power structures are hidden in plain sight: we are too busy fearing the future, chasing prosperity, or falling for seductive rhetoric to notice how very disciplined and docile we have become. The insistent whisper in her project is really one loud wake-up call.
Smith’s imagery conjures up scenes from a post-digital future, shaped by the consequences of rampant consumer culture. Her drawings ask us to slow down, focus, and look closely, because details do matter—in her work and in the way we consume natural resources. In Peterson’s work, perception plays an even more prominent part. Do we really see the systems that make a 21st-century technologically privileged way of life possible? Is the beautiful gadgetry we surround ourselves with as necessary as we like to believe, or does it simply serve as a means to keep us entertained—and distracted?
Baden’s photographs depict some of these digital gadgets in use: young women in nice rooms taking naughty pictures of themselves, in a haze of privileged oblivion. What are we to make of the phenomenon Baden’s work investigates? Does technology simply provide a distraction from the true work of intimacy? As distracted viewers, we might not even notice the subtle differences between Baden’s re-enactments and the imagery his work is based on.
The essays in this constellation aim at offering a counterpoint to the age of distraction we seem to live in.
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