Author: The Rake

Despite every possible setback, The Minneapolis/ St. Paul International Film Festival soldiers on, though with fewer films (which is, perhaps, a blessing). Screenings will include Waitress, the comedy hit of this year’s Sundance film festival; it was also, tragically, the directorial debut for Adrienne Shelley, who was murdered soon after completion of this film project.…

Bonnie is a Dutch girl with a problem: She believes her mother is bonkers. The woman suffers from manic depression, with highs so high and lows so low as to send the family into a tailspin. But when Bonnie’s grandmother, both the foundation and rudder of the clan, is killed in a car accident, the…

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…

From Europe come two politically torqued shows by young women. Carey Young is a London-based artist whose Consideration installation makes plain the degree to which lawyers run our lives. Lene Berg, from Oslo, makes video and text artworks that explore the role of art in war. Young designed her installation with the help of a…

Form, meaning, use—can you make them from clutter and waste? At Altered Esthetics this month, artists from around the world are trying just that. This funky space, near the Northrup King building in Northeast Minneapolis, is stuffed with everything from candy-wrapper ball gowns to more traditional scrap-steel sculptures—more than a hundred works in all. There’s…

David Lefkowitz is painting again. He hadn’t really stopped, but he’s dedicated the last few years mostly to his sculpture and drawings—graphite renderings of monumental cardboard boxes and witty constructions of tree stumps from the same brown materials. This show brings back an earlier style: These “Tangles” are oil-painted hybrids of electric-cord kudzu and tropical…