“I was a troublesome model,” said Karen Ilvedson, who is now mostly retired from the business. “There’d be shoots where I just said, ‘I have to go.’” She was, however, quietly gracious during our Rake Appeal shoot (see page 53), even as the photographer asked her to pose in increasingly complex, contorted positions; even as a gaggle of stylists, assistants, and staffers, plus assorted construction workers, trained their gazes intently on her. What she was thinking, staring back at us?
A lot, it turns out. Ilvedson enjoys thinking so much that, while modeling, she was also earning a degree in philosophy with a focus on metaphysics from the University of Minnesota. “People in New York would make jokes about me, the ‘model philosopher.’ They think the two don’t go together, but they do! Through modeling, I learned that so many things are illusion. I went from being a student to being a model in a matter of days. And so how do you define reality? When you’re traveling around the world, you start to wonder, is reality in my head, or in this physical place I’m at?”
It’s understandable to question reality when stylists are dressing you in see-through plastic shorts with strategically situated fur patches, or when Yohji Yamamoto is using you as a muse for his new season. It’s also easy to understand how someone with so many passions of her own might resist serving the whims of other people’s creative endeavors. Ilvedson grew up shooting Super-8 movies and is now preparing to remake The Theory of Distractions, her thirty-minute, “tongue in cheek” film about how to “see beyond illusion, beyond the veil of reality.” (Who says philosophers can’t be funny?) She is a certified scuba diver and, more recently, a serious tea aficionado, inspired by the wealth of opportunity at the
St. Anthony shop TeaSource. And in between practice sessions with her band, Ildved, she’s patiently reworking a two-hundred page “Faustian tale,” whose manuscript cover bears a picture of legendary ex-Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett. “It might be decades before the time is right to publish it,” she said.
Since moving to Northeast Minneapolis a year ago, Ilvedson has been drawn to a sprawling, gnarled tree on a vacant lot near her home. It gives off “a weird kind of energy,” she said. Having had her fill of Western philosophy—“the newer philosophy of the mind focuses soley on science; it’s too cold and rational,” she said—she is delving into the often misunderstood Hegel and older traditions that include a holistic, mystical, or more feminine dimension. The kinds of philosophy, in other words, that allow for sitting in a tree, taking in its energy.—Julie Caniglia
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