Like all good minimalists, Rollin Marquette trains his focus on the materials he works with: individual servings of pasteurized cheese-food product poked through chicken wire, or plastic tubes filled with electric-green antifreeze, or, in his latest installation, balsa wood and steel. Wedged into two galleries at the MIA (and piercing the wall between them), this untitled work offers up a series of contrasts: Dark industrial steel beams play off the bright, clean elegance of the gallery space; the sheer heft of those beams ironically holds aloft a ring of balsa wood—which is itself given weightiness and depth by being charred and waxed. (Or do those beams keep the ring from floating away?) On the whole, this assemblage comes off as some oddball feat of engineering, or a mysterious monument from a long-gone militaristic society. 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org
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