Jim Denomie & Andrea Carlson

Jim Denomie seems to have a door in his soul that won’t stay latched. It keeps swinging open to parallel worlds, where everything is more real than in this one. In the hilarious fantasies of his Renegade series, Indian men fly around surreal-colored mesas on rocket-powered horses and chase chickens through the sky with Volkswagen Beetles. He’ll show his painting-a-day series, too: hundreds of portraits he did every day for over a year. These paintings are radically different—they’re loose and wild instead of pictorial, intimate, and as scary as they are funny. Where Denomie is the natural, Andrea Carlson, a couple of decades his junior, is the virtuoso. But that doesn’t imply her work is tame. Like Denomie, Carlson is a member of the Anishinaabe nation, and she shares the great literature of this people through her work. Depth, humor, and dread arise from her elegant mastery of draftsmanship, strong pattern, and color. 612-870-3200; www.artsmia.org