Multipurpose

Exhibitions discussed in this article:

Information Sickness and Time Fever by Molly Roth
At Thomas Barry Fine Arts through July 3rd

Roger Roger by Traci Tullius, and Meander, including work by Andrea Selese Carlson, Angela Zammarelli, Bethany Kalk, Brian Jorgenson, Caleb Coppock, Chad Rutter, Dan Tesene, Emily Smith, Erika Ritzel, Isa Gagarin, Joe Sinness, Markus Merkle, Mitchell Dose, Molly Roth, Robin Cotton, Ryan Macintyre, Sally Grayson, and Shepherd Alligood
At the Soap Factory through July 6th

The Multipurpose Statement

It is by now customary that single-artist shows come conjoined with texts like the one that accompanies Molly Roth’s Information Sickness and Time Fever, at Thomas Barry Fine Arts. Striking a tone between the breathless and the merely descriptive, and often loaded with jargon, these multipurpose documents serve as a press release, advertisement, and curatorial explication in one. They argue for the significance of the work, and they often obviate the individual spectator’s response, (or the critic’s, for
that matter).

Perhaps such a text, useful before and after the exhibition should be kept out of the gallery space, where it can interfere with the work. In the case of Roth’s work, postcards peppered throughout the space assure us that it is "labor-intensive." We’re told she works in "tiny bows," and currently her medium is "newspaper." Approaching the work will also reveal these things.

Could this text, that so carefully anticipates the correct response, be intended to alienate? After all, we’re told that the work involves "the post-modern depressed subject." And if there is one thing that such a subject knows, it’s that everything has already been said, read and interpreted.

But don’t let anyone tell you that Roth’s work isn’t intriguing. Giant cursive words are mirrored across their midlines to create insect-like shapes. The resulting encryption leaves one final task, even for a subject thus interpolated. I won’t spoil it for you by translating. What depressed this subject about the exhibit is that the work — one that suggests the crazed empowerment of creating a single bold and lasting word from the cultural detritus of millions of words that are instantly obsolete — was limited by its multipurpose document. The potential of discovery was, to a large degree foreclosed.

The Multipurpose Room

Before I tell you of my trials on the way to see the current exhibition at the Soap Factory, I’ll say that you should hurry down to the show, if not to see the interesting failure of a collective work that is Meander, then to immerse yourself in Traci Tullius’s majestically melancholic video installation work, Roger Roger.

I made time to see the exhibition on the Friday after its opening. But when I arrived at the gallery, workers setting up for a weekend wedding informed me that the gallery was closed. Upon asking when it would reopen, I was told, "Sunday."

The collapse of the interstate has left access to the gallery an endeavor. Second street is buried under rubble. North of Hennepin, Main street is closed indefinitely. Traffic clogs the remaining routes most days and evenings. Not to be denied again, but wanting to see the work before the gallery’s Monday-Wednesday weekend, I phoned the number on the website during gallery hours and reached a recording. There was no mention of the closure, nor the resumption of regular hours. Discouraged, I elected not to waste another trip but left a message. I received a call the next day informing me that it had been open Sunday and would be open again on Thursday during regular hours.

Thursday, I ducked in briefly on my way to a meeting to confirm that a special trip on Saturday would be warranted. But when I returned, an unannounced arts and crafts sale was filling the entire gallery. DJs had set up in the center of one of the galleries and were playing dance music for the attendant shoppers. The throb of commerce obliterated the layered audio track that accompanies Tullius’s work. A video advertisement for the Sound Unseen film festival had been installed so near to Tullius’s piece that it appeared to be a part of it. "I’m pretty sure that wasn’t there before," I said to my companion. A fourth visit confirmed this.

I finally managed to have the experience with Tullius’s work that it deserves. In the cool and vacant gallery, six large video screens are hung like sheets on washing lines. Video projections show performances and private moments. Yet everything is shot through with the profound loneliness of place — a vacant venue, a deserted car dealership, and a weather-beaten farmhouse. In most of the videos, the lens observes a private moment, attended by no one but the camera. Contrasted to this, family videos evoke the homey nostalgia of filial companionship and harmony. Tullius has an eye for the evocative moment, and she understands that as a video artist, her effort should be focused on selection and subtraction. In the black space at the end of one loop, one can see another screen reflected, suggesting the idle mind’s movement to memory and repetition.

The Soap Factory is an unconventional art space, and it owes some of its success to its cross pollination — hosting craft events, film screenings and a haunted house to generate the revenue that keeps its doors open. But it’s worth questioning whether a gallery that is effectively closed during two weekends of a six-week run is really fulfilling its obligation to the featured artists. If nothing else, The Soap Factory needs to be honest about when it is open for art viewing and when it is open for other functions, or closed altogether, so that viewers serious about seeing the art on display don’t get discouraged.

The second work on display at The Soap Factory, Meander, is a collective work by artists too numerous to list in the text of this article. It’s a mishmash of roughly hewn sculpture, drawing and painting laid directly on the unfinished timbers of the gallery, where it seems likely to be eaten by a passing swarm of silverfish. Most of the works are unsigned. Some are identifiable to those familiar with an artist’s idioms and thematic concerns. With its varied light, its unfinished aesthetic, and its wide-open rooms, The Soap Factory can overwhelm all but the most focused and brilliant exhibition. Fellow writer Andy Sturdevant has noted that Meander is explicitly an attempt to deal with this problem. Its partial success is a testament to the specificity of the space.

The urge to blanket such a work with the some textual analysis, some manifesto of hive mind pluralism conjoined with a fictional unity must be almost irresistible. More on group shows next time, but I’m grateful in this case for a silence that bravely foregrounds the in-itselfness of the diffuse, collective work. The exhibition ultimately lives or dies by its own merit on the gallery floor, dependent on the eyes and ideas of the individual viewers as much as on those of the artists and curators who have placed it there. Its rugged, rangy self-sufficience is an extreme example of art unhelped and unhindered by self-analysis.