Author: Ann Klefstad

Sitting thirty feet up in an old spruce tree, on a little metal throne tied onto the trunk, I’ve got quivering legs. My fear is intensified by the knowledge that old spruces are brittle, and this one is waving gently in a fairly stiff breeze.

A few hundred yards away, traffic and voices from the local shopping mall can be heard. Dogs from a nearby neighborhood bark. I’m observing the city deer hunt in Duluth, and one of the designated tracts is located on twelve acres near Miller Creek, sandwiched between the mall and a residential neighborhood. The hunters use bows and arrows, and special licenses include provisions to ensure that only deer are shot; that they are cleanly shot and killed, and not just wounded; and, finally, that their numbers within city limits are substantially reduced. (This means prioritizing the hunting of does over bucks, which are far more prized among deer hunters.)

Duluth is plagued by deer, apparently. This year alone, I’ve nearly hit three of them driving city streets, and that experience is common. My neighbor used to walk at five a.m. every day, and he routinely saw deer strolling right down Superior Street. Part of the problem is that Duluth has a lot of deer habitat. The city was originally supposed to be the new Chicago, so it was laid out with borders ranging far into the surrounding woods. Of course, Duluth never quite reached Chicago’s size, and in fact, it’s lost one-fifth of its human population over the last several decades. For the past two years, the city has called on bow hunters to stem the overpopulation of deer.

The ungulates probably don’t outnumber the primates in the city, but no one really knows how many deer there are. The only numbers are those that come from the hunters. Last year, hunters took twenty-two deer per square mile of hunted land within the city. According to the DNR, that statistic likely represents about one-third of the deer living in those areas, which matches up with another statistic suggesting that about one-third of any deer population needs to be killed (by wolves or coyotes or hunters) in order to remain stable and not overwhelm its own food supply. Which means there are quite possibly fifty to seventy deer per square mile of woods in Duluth.

This seems crazy, because when you walk those woods, you seldom see deer. They’re there, though—watching and hearing and smelling you. As I rambled the woods with Phillip Lockett, head of the Arrowhead Bowhunters Alliance, he noted that when people walk at a constant speed through the forest, the deer stand still, watch them go by, then proceed with their business. If you stand quietly for an hour or so, however—or better yet, climb a tree and sit still—you will see them.

During the three hours I spent up in the spruce, I saw four deer—and realized that had I not been looking out for them, I wouldn’t have been able to maintain such concentrated stillness and attention.

Bow hunters, bound by this attentiveness, are generally guys who really enjoy perching twenty or thirty feet up a tree, on a platform not much bigger than their boot soles, sitting stock-still and watching the forest. While not necessarily possessed by bloodlust, they do want to get their deer. After all, it’s an ancient instinct, hunting, and much of its appeal stems from the fact that it seems to open ranges of perception and emotion that are otherwise inaccessible. Bow hunters tend to be thoughtful, even meditative, and in love with the environment in which they spend so much time. (Deer season for bow hunters is three months long, and to be successful, hunters should be well acquainted with their stretch of woods in all seasons.)

Oftentimes, bow hunters return with tales of marvels. Lockett recounted the time two owls swooped together right in front of him, in close combat in the canopy of the tree he was sitting in. He told of hawks perched on a limb of the tree harboring his stand; they did a double-take, then flew off. There were stories of watching pine martens chase squirrels and hearing grouse move through the woods, making as much noise as any buck.

The strange juxtaposition of the wild and the urban—a man in green clothing pulling his prey, as big as himself and felled by a bow, out of some trees and onto a city street—is a thing that somehow pleases me. There is an essential honesty in this, the presence of some cold and merciful eye, and, ultimately, a recognition of the basic rules of life, which are not of our making but are what we must live by.

The patterns in Andrea Carlson’s paintings swirl in the corner of your eye and hold a fierce repose when you look at them straight on. There’s something living in there. It’s not so much complicated as simply un-nameable. In Aadinzookanaag (Spirits), for instance, angular cloud shapes stay just at the edge of resolving into figures of animals and birds, while the black and white chevrons of the receding landscape indicate a charged ground, a place where anything could happen. Still, representation isn’t quite the point here; invocation is. The meaning that Carlson conjures isn’t an interpretation, it’s a force.

These complex, demanding, funny, lavish, and sexy paintings (it’s typical of Carlson’s work that you keep coming up with words that you usually don’t think of together) are something completely new as well as ancient, and they’re getting their twenty-six-year-old creator noticed in many quarters. Along with her solo exhibition this month at Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis (Culture Cop opens September 8), Carlson has shows coming up at Banfill-Locke Art Center in Fridley and in London at the October Gallery; she will be featured next April at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in a two-person show with fellow Ojibwe painter Jim Denomie.

Carlson, who grew up in International Falls and Hutchinson, is a Grand Portage band member with Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) and Swedish roots and, as of last year, an MFA graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She now lives in Minneapolis and keeps a studio in the north loop warehouse district. The work she makes there looks immediate and current; its intensely designed surfaces, thinly painted in glowing colors and sharp black and white, refer to a vivid world, one that is purely of her own making. Yet its images are faithful, in their own impure way, to two traditions.

Since 2004, she’s been painting a series called Aadizokaan, works that powerfully embody the sacred stories of her Anishinaabe ancestors. The Aadizokaan works will be featured in the exhibition at SooVAC alongside a new series that brings the artist’s Swedish heritage into the mix—and her individual life, as well.

Carlson’s earlier work took its motive force from the impossible, the catalyst that supplants the ordinary with the fantastic. A wooden stump, for example, becomes the round ass of a demigod. In her new series, the transformations build. Swedish Dala horses—those red-painted carved wooden steeds that seem, here in Minnesota, empty nostalgia—appear, in the context of Carlson’s work, newly energized as sacred creatures (which they once were, back in the old country). Teapots and carnival glass also turn up: These were charged objects in the house of Carlson’s grandmother, carefully tended things that accumulated meaning from their passage through time. And in one new piece, a vibrator makes explicit a strong sexual thread that also lurked in the earlier mythic paintings.

Carlson studies the Ojibwe language (she describes her skill as “conversational,” but not up to the fluency of elders). The tribe’s traditional words and stories have given her many of the threads of imagery that appear in her paintings, and the amazing subtlety of the language has been an influence, as well: There are thousands of ways to conjugate verbs, and compound words can be breathtakingly precise. She explains this in describing a painting titled Gagiibwaabimo. “It’s actually the image of a dead wolf, gutted, ripped out on the inside. This is Naniboujou’s nephew who has just been killed and eaten by the Mishipiizhiw, the water lynx, a bad guy, so Naniboujou’s going around crying. When I was studying the stories and retranslating them, and I came across this word gagiibwaabimo, which means ‘His eyes are puffed from crying.’ I was so floored by it, that there was one word that described this whole thing, that I wanted to paint an image that went with it.”

Another characteristic of Anishinaabe language—its robust humor—appears in Binewidgee, a piece whose word means “the ruffed grouse’s asshole.” This word comes up in a traditional storytelling at a climactic point, telling listeners they’ll have to wait for the end of the story the following night. In the painting, the little x that marks the relevant point on the bird’s stern has an exquisite comic force among Carlson’s elegant forms.

Part of what’s striking about Carlson is how sure she is in her work, how confident in her mastery of an absolutely original and sophisticated style. That may well be because she has been working at it since she was a toddler. Her father still has a small sculpture she made back then, a reindeer created from a stuffed nylon stocking. “He keeps it in this little box,” she said, “my first piece of art.” Even back then, she had confidence that she would be understood and her efforts would be taken seriously; her father, Rudolf Carlson, taught art in schools in International Falls and Hutchinson, and is a painter working with hyperrealism and abstract subversions of hyperrealism.

“He taught me a lot,” Carlson said of her father, “and now, I guess, my job is to ruin everything. It’s one thing to carry your family’s identity and it’s another to find your own style. There are things that I remember from him, about what colors go together, formal patterns—but the thing is not to just follow.”

By that she also means not just following herself, either. A brand-new painting, Under the Blanket, included in the SooVAC show, prominently features a blue-willow teapot. Describing its origins, she recalled, “I was up north, on an island, at a sacred site. There were graves where people leave tobacco and things, and there were other kinds of offerings, too: all these sparkly barrettes with horses on them, really girly, and I realized that modern things can be offerings. I’d been making the Naniboujou paintings, really traditional and formal, and I wanted to break it up, and this tea set seemed so much part of the other tradition. It kind of started off being in opposition to the Naniboujou imagery, but then I was speaking to an elder and he said he’d seen the exact same tea set left as an offering at a burial site. I thought, ‘Well, I guess there’s a reason besides all the meanings that are loaded onto this thing in the European world.’ So I did the teapot, sort of Victorian kitschy, as if it was left behind as an offering in a mysterious landscape.”

Carlson performs the magic trick of using absolutely specific material to create art that is universal. Her family has a long involvement with artifacts from all sorts of cultures, collecting everything from beadwork to teapots to McDonald’s toys to Scandinavian décor. Carlson is a collector, too; she says she particularly likes objects that feature landscapes, which she might portray in her work: “I can have in the painting a place within a place, a world within a world.”

Given the controversy over the last few years about “authenticity” in native art and writing (most recently, David Treuer offers some blistering thoughts on this in a new book of essays), one wonders if Carlson anticipates a reaction to the multiple worlds she includes in her paintings. Or, more pointedly, whether she, as a person of dual heritage, gets labeled “inauthentic,” not a real Ojibwe artist.

“I started questioning authenticity, what is ‘real’ native art. A lot of native artists are questioning this, a lot of people are angry,” she said. “It angers me to have someone determine what’s authentic. Damien Hirst can have a herd of artists painting his work for him and no one questions the authenticity of those paintings. But if you’re, say, transgendered and native, then your art isn’t ‘real.’ So I just started playing with it. An elder said to me once, ‘Human beings are ninety percent water, so get over yourself. We’re all water, water is ancient. We all drink it, we share each other’s cups.’ ”

It’s not blood but paint that Carlson puts her faith in. She believes that pattern has always been a home for spirit, and that artists can make forms and rhythms that spirits recognize. She’s very matter-of-fact, although also a little embarrassed, when talking about it. “There’s a spiritual relation to pattern. There’s something out there, it’s drawn to something of its own nature, like a hummingbird to the color red. To me, patterns are a representation of spirits to themselves … Spirituality is out of fashion now, but if you don’t look at it as a religion, but as a ‘spiritual practice,’ you can get people to talk about it,” she said. “I started thinking about it as a methodology. You say, ‘I had a vision,’ or ‘spirituality,’ and people just shut you off, but if you say, ‘I stop food and water for a while, it increases my dreams,’ any scientist can respect that.”

Ultimately, though, she’s forging her own path, regardless of where criticism might be coming from: “I look for a way of navigating the world without stepping on too many feet.”

Duluth has a polo club left over from the days when it was one of the richest cities in America. Old Italian men still play bocce ball in the city’s West End. The Coney Island hot dog stand is the same one my dad went to in 1922, and the menu boards are still up from those days. If you walk in the woods you find, in the middle of the wild, a lilac bush that once stood by someone’s front door, and sometimes the stones of that doorsill, too—an archaeology of the mundane. There used to be more people here, not less. The green is sprawling back over the built land (which is the opposite of what happens farther south, where stone and asphalt spread in a ceaseless glaciation).

Skyline Parkway is part of this—Duluth’s future receding into the past. It’s an almost-continuous route that lies along the crest of the basalt hills like a stone boa, running parallel to the lakeshore through the entire city. The views from almost anywhere along its length are spectacular, except when it disappears into the scruffy forest that replaced the original white pines. The road has a long and interesting history, tied up with the abortive dream of Duluth becoming the “largest city in the nation.”

The parkway was built piecemeal from 1889 on, initially pushed forward by William Rogers, the first head of Duluth’s parks board. Rogers had been President Rutherford B. Hayes’s private secretary, and later, as a real estate developer, acted as the agent for property Hayes owned in Duluth.

Rogers seems to have been pathologically optimistic. His estimate for building the first five miles of the parkway was five thousand dollars; it cost three hundred thousand. In a letter to Hayes, his statement regarding the future of the city was equally wide of the mark: “It is easy to read its future now, standing on the upper terrace of the bluff overlooking the City … [no one can] doubt that one of the great cities of the world is here in the making—one of the largest if not the largest on the continent.”

In those early days, tallyho parties in horse-drawn coaches rode the Parkway, which was to have served as the spine for an elaborate system of greenways and parks that would lace the hill to the shores of Lake Superior. These, sadly, were never built.

The Parkway, though, eventually extended east to Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve, and on to Seven Bridges Road, named for the stone bridges that were Mayor Snively’s legacy (this stretch of road was his gift to the city, and in the 1920s, Snively used to show up there in overalls to put in time with the work crews before heading to City Hall). To the southwest, it pushed on all the way to Jay Cooke State Park, though this segment is now in ruins.

Now, you can pick up Skyline Parkway at Beck’s Road, just west of the city. Intermittently graveled and paved, it runs up Spirit Mountain and along the ridge above the city, passing Enger Tower above and the old industrial landscape of Gary and West Duluth below, ’til it finally starts snaking into the city streets. It takes some persistence to follow the Parkway through this stretch, as it appears and disappears into the city grid, occasionally adopting other names in its circuitous route through the neighborhoods. But if you make it to Hawk Ridge, you’re back on Skyline proper. From there, the parkway goes unplowed in the winter and can be pretty rough any time of year, but its ridge offers the best place for watching migrating birds and thunderstorms.

From Seven Bridges Road, the parkway winds down through boreal forest and crosses Amity Creek, with its little rapids and waterfalls, seven times until it emerges onto Superior Street just past Sixtieth Avenue East, some thirty miles from where it began.

Chris Monroe, one of my favorite comic-strip artists, recently recounted the following “Lake Scene” vignette in her Violet Days strip:

Every time I drive down this road, I see this little lake through the trees. It is quite perfect, with no cabins and lots of tiny islands covered with pine trees. Each time I see that lake, I am filled with a memory … But the memory is not of a lake, it’s of a beer sign.

The beer sign hung in our basement behind the bar. It was loud due to its clunky rotation from scene to scene. All the scenes were lakes on a sunny day. It was lit within… In the summer, on hot days, us kids used to sit down in the basement at the bar and plug in the beer sign and play 45s, looking at that beach in the lake in the beer sign. It was so pretty. Who knew it was only forty miles away? Too far to bike, anyway.

Nature photography in Minnesota is brightly illuminated by that beer sign and its sky-blue waters; Les Blacklock, one of the patriarchs of the genre, likely made some of those images. But the point of this story for me is that the real experience of the little lake is a reverie in the basement, a dream of a lake.

In America, the development of nature photography as a genre paralleled this country’s gradual loss of wild places. Photography has always been a way to snatch and save something out of the welter of loss and change. Legendary photographers like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston captured the mountains and coastlines of the West in part to protect them from desecration.

Adams and Weston were charter members of f/64, the group of likeminded artists in the 1950s whose name referred to a camera’s smallest f-stop, and symbolized the kind of photos that one could make with such a pin-sized aperture: sharply defined throughout vast depths of field, with a full range of tones from white to deepest black. These images offered a kind of god’s-eye view of the landscape, a view that one could never have with one’s eyes alone. The camera yielded an apotheosis of the West that made it holy.

The development of nature photography in Minnesota was driven in part by the same urges, but also by the desire to revel in beloved imagery, to sentimentalize it. Education also was a factor; nature photographers here are often naturalists. The Blacklock family, which was responsible for much of the formation of ideas of nature photography in Minnesota, embodies this more approachable image of Nature.

Les Blacklock was born in 1921 and started photographing the environment in the forties. He is Minnesota’s best-known practitioner of this type, and he was not afraid to work commercially. He created images for calendars and Hamm’s beer signs, and also documented deer in an educational film for Encyclopedia Britannica. His work had little to do with art-world issues, and had more in common with nature writers like Sigurd Olson, with whom Blacklock created The Hidden Forest, a classic of canoe-country nature writing.

Les’s son Craig grew up working with his father, using the same large-format cameras and color film. Les was his first teacher, but Craig also worked with photographers like Cole Weston, Edward Weston’s son. In both technique and content, the son began to tread where the father had not: He studied black-and-white photography and the arcana of Zone technique, and spent a great deal of his early career shooting mountains in the West. In time, Craig found his métier back home in northern Minnesota. Looking back over a selection of his work, which will be on view in a retrospective at the Minnesota Center for Photography’s new Northeast Minneapolis space beginning August 21, the younger Blacklock seems driven by at least two forces: the desire to capture Lake Superior wilderness, and an equally intense desire to break out of the nature-photography genre and do work that stands as photography, with no other qualifiers.

Published in 1993, Lake Superior Images documents Craig Blacklock’s circumnavigation of Lake Superior by kayak. This ambitious project resulted in an exhibit at the Tweed Museum of Art in Duluth and produced a book; it also established Blacklock’s reputation. It’s not a document of one trip, however, but images gathered from about 1984 through 1992.

It would be stronger if it documented a single trip, only what one particular journey gave—because, despite the beauty of many of these images, when taken together they can get thin. The human capacity for amazement, after all, is heavily taxed of late, and there are many gorgeous photos of magnificent settings out there. Still, in small doses, these photos can be ravishing—like the book’s final image, a small sapling completely whelmed in a massive frozen waterfall. As a group of images, however, there’s no concept that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

That’s not to say that Lake Superior Images was not an achievement. Blacklock’s pictures here left behind many of the clichés his father had helped to create, and introduced to color nature photography the kind of radical sublime found in the monumental photos of Adams and Weston.

Some Minnesota photographers have been expanding the genre of nature photography. The celebrated Ely-based photographer Jim Brandenburg, for instance, recently published the well-received books Chased by the Light: A 90-Day Journal and Looking for Summer. For these projects Brandenburg shot just one image per day, a restriction that gave the images it yielded a comparable power.

Others have done interesting work that takes as its subject the impact of the human on the natural, and vice versa. Suz Szucs, in recent works at the Soap Factory, depicted road-kill deer in big, lush photos, mostly in snow and backed by intense blue winter skies. The damaged grace of the deer is harshly beautiful and thought-provoking. Many of Alec Soth’s photos portray landscapes along the Mississippi, portraying the traces of the human creatures who dwell along the river.

Craig Blacklock’s approach has been different. In the 1990s, he made photos that looked like abstract color-field paintings but were based in the real. This produced Horizons, a body of work with no subject other than sky and water, printed with razor sharpness at immense size.

Blacklock was inspired by Grand Portage artist George Morrison’s paintings, which for decades used the sky/lake horizon as their only compositional element. Blacklock has noted that he found color-field paintings frustrating for their lack of reference; Horizons allowed him to work in a formalist mode while sticking to a comfortable, recognizable subject. This impulse—the attempt to cover all the bases, to be formally beautiful but also give some point of reference, to be challenging but easily comprehensible—is the main weakness of this work and this genre. Still, Horizons is Blacklock’s most successful body of work in the MCP retrospective in terms of its audacious fidelity to an idea and the grand austerity of many of its images.

In A Voice Within, Blacklock’s current body of work, we see Honey Blacklock, Craig’s wife, posing on the shores or in the waters of Lake Superior. This series’ obvious precursor is Edward Weston’s photography of his then-wife Charis; but the rhetorical force of Blacklock’s images is entirely different.

Charis was a superb model, her body well-suited to conveying the vectors of a composition. Her body’s angularity combined with a distinctive style of movement to create the line important to dancers. In a famous series of images, she threw herself down on the sand of the dunes in California. The poses were created not by posing but by the stresses of the fall, and the need to brace and push against the force of gravity.

By contrast, the images of Honey are of a young, strong, and attractive woman in largely relaxed, deliberately composed stances that do their best to avoid any real
erotic overtones. Craig Blacklock describes Honey as being “one of the words in my artistic vocabulary, used within my aesthetic style like the horizon line.” He describes the process as an important and collaborative one: “Once the composition is arranged, I make a Polaroid, which we study together. I am primarily looking at compositional issues while Honey is looking at her emotional balance within the scene, her body language… Through this process we investigate the language and traditional subject/photographer roles of photography, where the photographer will ‘make,’ ‘take’ or ‘capture’ an image of his or her subject. This aggressive language… becomes obsolete within the highly interactive method Honey and I use.”

This may well be true, but it produces largely bland, peculiarly virtuous-looking images of a likable unclothed woman in a variety of settings familiar from Blacklock’s earlier work. While focusing on what they want the images not to do—in Craig’s words, “not to have her seen as challenged by nature, over-romanticizing it, nor conquering it”—this husband-and-wife team seems to have at best a cloudy notion of what they want the images to do.

The intentions of A Voice Within are admirable, but also lamentable—especially in the need of the creators to stay above reproach, to seem clean-living and, when it comes to gender issues, ideologically sound. One of the curses of nature photography is its tendency to produce a sanitized view of nature; this series produces a sanitized view of the body in nature. Honey’s essay exhaustively details the discomforts of the shoots—the cold, the sand in every crevice, the hardness of rocks, the occasional onlooker; she takes pains to tell us that modeling nude was not at all a sexual experience. Why not, instead of trying for an illusion of peace, shoot what it actually felt like to be in that place? What would be wrong with documenting pain and pleasure, rather than comfort? The attitude overarching the work is prescriptive, rather than documentary, and this waters down the resulting images.

Human beings are not, in general, ideologically sound on gender issues; naked bodies do produce desire. This has, let’s face it, been a major reason to use the human figure in art and photography. The challenge, I think, would be to produce images full of complex and interesting desire. Or at least of the overwhelming presence of a unique, complex human being. True relations between people—or for that matter, between people and nature—are full of the push and pull of power relations, of longing, projection, the attempt to know what is not the self.

There are some fine images in this group, however. Close-ups of Honey’s body are often beautifully handled. These images may be more sexual; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The attempt to erase desire from images of nakedness seems foolish—what makes sense is an attempt to link a real sense of presence and power to that desirability. For example, in one image, a kind of challenge and invitation are constructed by wandering lines of wavemarks on sand leading to a strongly cocked foot poised in front of the pubis; elsewhere, sinuous interlockings of the lines of the body are seen as closely as any lover would see them. My favorite is a wonderfully witty shot of the model’s feet, locked together at the soles like lovers, wrestling just under an innocent moon of buttocks.

Where some poses seem truly natural to this strong body, the heavily staged shots that “compare” Honey’s body and a feature of the landscape don’t work very well. I am pulled away from a knowledge of humanness and forced to admire the photographer’s compositional skills—never very much fun.

The Blacklocks’ wish to broaden the genre they have done so much to create is admirable; what’s needed now is for them to set aside its usual proprieties: the need for beauty and calm; the erasure of dark elements like sex, death, and garbage. Even in Minnesota, it’s okay to be fully human. The introduction of the human figure into the landscape is a good strategy for opening nature photography into fuller life and meaning—but what if that figure had all the attributes of humanness, not just the pretty ones? A photographer with Blacklock’s skills and his knowledge of the natural world could create great work if he would grant the human condition full membership in the natural world.