The Other David Salmela

Walking north along Second Street through Northeast Minneapolis, one eventually happens upon the most unusual variant of a white picket fence: Based roughly on piano keys, it has the occasional cutout or half-missing panel that allows passersby a peek into a thriving vegetable garden. This artsy parapet belongs to David Salmela, a musician, software designer, and, most visibly, the owner and co-curator of Creative Electric Studios, the gallery and performing arts space adjacent to the gardens, which seems to collect rock musicians and all their tangential art projects. Although the fence was built to look more welcoming than forbidding, Salmela said that neighbors subscribe to varying opinions about it. As one old-timer strolling by recently asked him, “Did you make that fence? Were you drunk when you did it?”

With uncombed blond hair, saucer-shaped blue eyes, and a wardrobe of rumpled T-shirts and jeans, the thirty-five-year-old Salmela exudes the sort of youthful exuberance that might be mistaken, by cynics, for naiveté. Certainly, there’s a pipedream quality about his plans for the old storefront. But that impression would overlook the considerable amount of muscle and thought he’s already put into improving the place, which was essentially a floor-to-ceiling trash heap when he bought it in 2001. Today, the building and its grounds serve not only as an art gallery, performance space, and community gathering spot; the upper-level apartment is also home to Salmela, Jenny Adams (his girlfriend and Creative Electric co-curator), and pal Kurt Froehlich (also a curator at the space).

The fence came about when Salmela contacted the renowned, Duluth-based architect with whom he shares both a first and last name (but to whom he is not related). “I asked him if he would like to do a project with me and he said ‘Yes, but I have a waiting list of two years,’ ” the non-architect Salmela recalled. “‘But I have this son-in-law in the Twin Cities … ’” And that’s how Salmela hooked up with another architect, Souliyahn Keobounpheng.

Keobounpheng designed the fence, and drew up the plans for an ultra-modern shed that juts off the back of the building like a caboose and is made of various found materials, mostly wavy corrugated sheet metal. The architect’s plans for a third-floor addition and renovation of the garage into art studios are yet to be realized. Salmela is still chewing over the presumably steep price tag for those projects; but, he insisted cheerfully, where there’s a will there’s a way. “I’ll figure out a way to do it. I want to do it,” he said.

Salmela’s gumption is not dependent on Keobounpheng’s involvement. Inside the building, he and friends have hammered out a loft that doubles as a guestroom for visiting artists and storage space. Upstairs, he installed a handsome tin ceiling as well as an eco-friendly (and newly trendy) corn-burning stove, which he and Adams discovered at the Living Green Expo. Another ecological feature: To minimize storm-water runoff (and the associated tax the city slaps on “impermeable surfaces”), Salmela designed and built a rain catcher. The contraption collects water from the building’s rooftop and deposits it, via a large pipeline, into a two-hundred-gallon tin tub, where it stands ready to water the beets, peas, and squash.