Of Landscape and Place: Megan Vossler’s “Overlook: Landscape Studies.”
By Christina Schmid
Places not only are they happen.
—Edward Casey
The forest is awash in hues of green: spring leaves on beeches, elms, and birches, interrupted by the occasional conifer or a cherry tree in bloom. The scene could be idyllic, were it not for the terrible legacy this forest harbors: [...]
A Bean Story or Art, Accused of Trying to Teach.
By Christina Schmid
On my kitchen counter, looking out into the yard, sits a mason jar that holds about two large handfuls of beans. They are a curious shade of purple, with markings in even darker purple centered around what I think of as their navels—although I’m sure a botanist would be [...]
“We All Live in the Opera:” Negotiating Resistance and Nationality at the Venice Biennale
I did not expect to like the Venice Biennale; but I did.
Much maligned as yet another tourist trap, the Biennale of my imagination revolved around nauseating crowds and sensationalist, market-driven art. Instead, the range of work on view, the plethora of questions this very range sparked, made for a fascinating, multi-facetted experience. And, of course, [...]
Color Me Nostalgic
By Christina Schmid
A few days ago, the news became official: electronic book sales have topped those of paper books. Does this mean that the era of the book as a material object is over? No longer economically profitable, no longer needed for the proliferation of ideas, questionable in light of the environmental terms of its [...]
Art’s Outsides: A Reflection in Six Parts
Investigating the idea of outsides when art is concerned might seem like a futile endeavor at best, a hare-brained waste of time at worst. But that initial insight should not stop us from entering this particular fray: the cycle of outsides becoming part of what happens on the perceived inside, the push and pull between [...]
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From Project to Practice: Imagining Communities
by Christina Schmid
Public art’s role in addressing a community’s concerns, bringing communities together, and being created for—or with—a particular community in mind has been much discussed by proponents of relational aesthetics, dialogic aesthetics, and relational antagonism.[i] Rather than treading this already well–trodden ground, I want to explore a different take [...]
The Edge of Reason: Shedding Light at the Phipps
By Christina Schmid
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
– Albert Einstein[i]
Trust Einstein to articulate what reconciles two seemingly opposite ways of making sense of the world: science with its prerequisite distance to ensure analytical dissection of [...]
Tilting the World
Grace, MN. — Preparations for the annual celebration of wish-making are well under way in Grace, MN. In the fair weeks of spring, residents and visitors of the small town prepare for the event by exercising particular mindfulness, consideration, and care for each other and the place they inhabit. Spontaneous acts of kindness, gift giving, [...]
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The Art of Returning
By Christina Schmid
At the heart of each return lies an absence undone.
On a bright day in December, I stand inside the white cube of the Leopold Museum in Vienna’s museum quarter and furtively dab at my eyes.
Caution: Art can cause public displays of emotion and embarrassment.
A man and a woman stretch across the canvas in [...]
Death on the Road: Rob Fischer at Franklin Artworks
“You’re dying now. Get used to it!”
- Jim Crace, Being Dead
Death is an odd subject. It is everywhere, happens all the time, and yet we go to elaborate lengths to pretend it doesn’t affect us. Perhaps it takes a fictitious doctor of zoology, courtesy of Jim Crace, to state the obvious. Perhaps it [...]