Author: Ann Klefstad

Lynn Geesaman’s photographs always draw one in. And after that, you stand around in the image, thinking, Now what am I doing here? I came here to get something; what was it? The fuzzy, melting landscapes have the memory-dissolving qualities of a late spring day—and, quite honestly, who knows whether that’s good or bad? But these days, which seem to be an era of doldrums in the art world (however well masked by stratospheric speculation and its attendant glamour), art that affects its spectator with this kind of subtlety is worth a second look.

Thomas Barry Art Gallery, 530 N. Third St., Minneapolis; 612-338-3656.

Scrap yards and paper recycling form Michael Kareken’s usual subjects (though he has other, more conventional ones as well—figures, usually); many of the works in this show depict the Rock-Tenn recycling yard near his studio. Tough-love limnings of crushed heaps evoke the huge stone Aphrodite that stood at the old Getty Museum on the Malibu cliffs, her voluminous draperies blown by a hurricane and torn and broken by two thousand years. The formal visual qualities of these raw heaps is exciting in itself, but Kareken also manages to infuse the drawings and paintings with the pathos of drapery—material that takes on the shape of that which it clothes, be it divine flesh, the force of tearing winds, or the mindless crush of waste. These scraps record the currents of our desires.

Groveland Gallery, 25 Groveland Terrace, Minneapolis; 612-377-7800.

Creativity is a double-edged sword. This was something I first realized after reading a detailed account of the torture regimen used by the Sforzas, a Renaissance-era Milanese family whose fortune had been made in arms sales. They called it “Lent”: forty days of inventive and excruciating pain-inducing practices almost guaranteed to leave the victim alive at the end. And the Sforzas were renowned arts patrons to boot; Petrarch did their PR, in fact. What does this have to do with Lopez, who is getting a lot of attention in New York for her big, complex, print-based installations? These works, which explore infrastructure and built environments, are baroquely inventive, while also enacting the menace of urban sprawl and so-called progress; Lopez herself is an artist with enough sense to see not just the beauty in human creativity, but also its potential detriments.

Franklin Art Works, 1021 E. Franklin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-872-7494.

Immigration to the United States is at its highest level since its historic peak in the 1920s; there really are a lot of people roaming the world, either forced by war or economics or driven by curiosity or circumstance. And many of them, artists included, end up here. (Read some of their stories in the current issue of 10,000 Arts, the supplement to The Rake and mnartists.org.) This show promises an interesting look at the growing local community of international artists.

Altered Aesthetics, 1224 Quincy St. N.E., Minneapolis; 612-378-8888.

Fantastical, magical creations are very popular as of late—lots of dragons and magicians and cyber-wonders fill pages and screens—and the art world is stepping into that terrain as well. Does it mean dreams will become reality, or does it mean dreams will keep reality at bay? That’s for the viewer to decide. But these artists’ confected worlds will be interesting to contemplate regardless. Curated by Minneapolis sculptor Andréa Stanislav, Enchanted is colored by her surreal tastes: Local fabulists Chris Larson, Alexa Horochowski, and Erik Ullanderson will show alongside Hawaiian Scott Yoell and Londoner Isha Bohling, among many others. Tune out the evening news; when reality sucks, these artists create new ones.

Katherine Nash Gallery, 405 21st Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-624-6518.

Taken up by fans, feminists, malcontents, ideologists, and ax-grinders, Frida Kahlo has become much more than an artist over the last couple of decades. Yet somehow she is also often presented as less than an artist. In conjunction with Walker Art Center’s Kahlo exhibition, Grupo Soap, an alliance of artists who share a Hispanic heritage as well as robust senses of occasion and humor, will give its take on the Frida phenomenon. Last year the group produced four-by-eight-foot woodcuts printed by steamroller for a Día de los Muertos show. A poster for a 2001 show featuring the artists as luchadores (Mexican wrestlers) still hangs on walls all over town (the show was good, too). So expect their efforts to restore Kahlo as a complex artist and Mexican citizen as well as an iconic sufferer—Our Lady of a Thousand Coffee Mugs—to be both serious and facetious.

Grupo Soap del Corazón and Art Jones Gallery, Casket Arts Building, 681 17th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis.

This major exhibition of Native artists includes Rick Bartow’s paintings, Preston Singletary’s glass sculpture, and Sonny Assu’s weaving, among work from more than a hundred others. The curators of this traveling show, Ellen Napiura Taubman, former head of the Department of Native American Art at Sotheby’s, and David Revere McFadden of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, where the show originated, focus on presenting the work as part of the larger art world rather than as ethnological artifacts. For a long time, people referred to Indian art if they wanted to know more about, say, Indian spirituality. This show insists that Native art, like all other art, captures the world through the eyes of individuals who have unique experiences and identities—but are not necessarily defined by them.

Weisman Art Museum, 333 East River Rd., Minneapolis; 612-625-9494.

Eagerly anticipated by sculptors across the state, this overview of the medium promises to be quirky and eye-opening. Jennifer Jankauskas, associate curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, chose just twenty-seven sculptors from 147 submissions. Some, such as Pete Driessen and Ruben Nusz, are better known as painters than sculptors; others, like David Swanson and Anastasia Ward, predicate alternate realities that are by turns amusing and disturbing. Some are well known in the Cities; some are completely new. Expect some surprises; sculpture has been spreading out to embrace new territories. Perhaps it is the medium best able to absorb the constant shifts in contemporary culture.

Minnesota Museum of American Art, 50 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul; 651-266-1030.

Despite limited hours, Art of This is becoming an important place to visit; these two very different installations show the range of the gallery. Jade Townsendis an Iowan who passed through Minneapolis at one point and now worksin New York, where his crisp and often funny-though-harrowing buildinginstallations have gotten good reviews. Razor wire, all-whiteinteriors, holes in the wall, some contradictory emotional play betweenhumor and horror: familiar stuff but interesting in person. Kristina Estell,by contrast, produces emotionally distant but evocative and sensualinstallations based on the overwhelming presence of water and rock inher current home, Duluth.

Art of This, 3506 Nicollet Ave., Minneapolis, 612-721-4105.

Colleen Sheehy, curator at the Weisman, put together a nature-themedshow with this Bob Dylan epigraph: “The sky cracked its poems in nakedwonder.” She chose Mark Dion’s candid deer portraits, Eleanor McGough’spaintings of natural subjects subsumed into lushly decorative patterns,and Christine Baeumler’s paintings from her recent trip to theGalapagos and the Great Barrier Reef. Sheehy chose “curator artists”:Dion has always been interested in what museums do to their subjects,the animals or art that end up in them; McGough seizes flowers,branches, cells, and proliferates their patterns, creating a decorativecontext that acts much like a museum in deracinating the subjects.Baeumler seems better able to stand back—in the past, her paintingsoften contained such patterns and grids, but these new ones seem tofind rather than seek.

Gallery Co., 400 First Ave. N., Suite 210, Minneapolis; 612-332-5252.