Writing
For the most recent additions to the magazine, this is the page to visit. Here, we publish all of our content in chronological order: both the essays that are part of a constellation and essays that are sparsile – that is, unattached to any constellation.
Wit in Wood: Carving Vision in Castle Stone
By Thomas O. Haakenson
Works by master carvers and whittlers act as testaments to a seemingly forgotten past in the current exhibit, Wit in Wood: Nordic Figure Carving, on view through April 29, 2012, at the American Swedish Institute (ASI) in Minneapolis. Curated by one of the most accomplished Scandinavian-style figure carvers in the United States, [...]
Tweets on Ice
In which Lightsey Darst and MC Hyland discuss contributions to The Shantyquarian, a tweet-sourced letterpress paper that Hyland and friends are running at the Art Shanties.
mnicebike: Shanty Haiku I.
Biked here on Christmas.
Westerly headwinds blew
hard. Surveyed the lake ice.
LD: This one comes from your very first issue. My take: you’re just getting going [...]
A Place By Any Other Name: “Regarding Place” and “Power and Place”
By Mason Riddle
In a pair of discrete but related exhibitions the idea of place is explored, stretched, even pulled into unconventional territories by eight artists working in film, video and photography. However, here, place is explored less from a Jeffersonian ‘genus loci’ perspective, and more examined under a microscope to identify its physical, [...]
On One Room Schoolhouse
By Alyson Coward, Patricia Healy, Anthony Warnick
The One Room Schoolhouse project is a learning experience unlike any other, partly because it’s on a frozen lake. ORSH will reside for four weeks alongside the shanties of other artists in this year’s Art Shanty Projects currently taking place on Medicine Lake in Plymouth, [...]
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 Word on the Weather: Paula McCartney’s On Thin Ice, In A Blizzard.
By Andy Sturdevant
It’s difficult to talk about cold weather in a place like Minnesota in a way that feels authentic to the immediate way in which you actually experience cold weather. Talking about cold weather is so deeply ingrained in the region’s identity that any language you might use to describe the [...]
Voodoo Lilies and Devil’s Tongues: A Visit to the Marjorie McNeely Conservatory
By Marsha Olson
As a long term Minnesotan, I can recall multiple winters with six-foot snowdrifts, hoar frost, and icy conditions. Last year was one such winter, proving Minnesota’s long time reputation as a place of ice and snow. I remember the two snowstorms that hit the Twin [...]
Dance As Still Life
By Lightsey Darst
1.
On a Saturday afternoon at the Walker, in Dance Works I: Merce Cunningham/Robert Rauschenberg, people wander about. Lurking in the little study area under the guise of perusing books on Cunningham and listening to various people talk on headphones, I watch my fellow gallery-goers, who mostly give this gallery a hasty glance. They [...]
Semblances Re-Assembled
By Jen Caruso
Introduction:
Semblance [Schein] that must be explained (for example, error):
that must be eschewed (for example, Sirens); that should be ignored (for example, will-o’-the-wisps).
Another classification of semblance:
Semblance behind which something is concealed [….].
Semblance behind which nothing lies concealed […].
– Walter Benjamin, “On Semblance.”
The first time I see the Semblances show, it is in [...]
Work About Working Together: On Collaboration and Activism in Contemporary Art
By Jonathan Kaiser
What can be accomplished when many individuals answer to a single name – or namelessly act together? Group entities are powerful and charismatic forces regardless of how they choose to structure themselves: global corporations and off-the-grid communes, digital networks and hip hop crews, flash mobs and street [...]
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