2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project

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Walkers are &#39;practitioners of the city,&#39; for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.&rdquo; ― Rebecca Solnit, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1419449-wanderlust-a-history-of-walking" target="_blank">Wanderlust: A History of Walking</a>

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During the annus horribilis that was 2020, more specifically between the vernal equinoxes of 2020 and 2021 (and aren&rsquo;t these years of pandemic, racial violence, and political destabilization starting to bleed together?), artist and curator John Schuerman went for a walk. Many walks, in fact. &nbsp;

He did the walk a friend often takes. He and another friend started from their homes and stopped when they were six feet apart. A long-time participant in the annual Mayday celebration, he ventured to the parade route and pondered the festival&rsquo;s absence.

After George Floyd was murdered, not far from Schuerman&#39;s&nbsp;Minneapolis home, the artist went to the memorial site. &ldquo;I got to the mural of George Floyd, appreciated the beauty, and kept walking,&rdquo; he writes in his recently released&nbsp;book Unstillness: A Book of Walks. &ldquo;I saw rampant destruction and thought about the losses. Dreams up in smoke, deep costs&hellip;.&rdquo; &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU0OTAwMDAz/full.jpg" />A hand-drawn map of Schuerman&#39;s walk along Lake Street after the uprising in June of 2020, past the 5th and 3rd police precinct buildings,&nbsp;the sites of protest and destruction, and the relative calm of the neighborhood south of Lake. Powderhorn Park is noted in green and blue.

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Such ponderings inspired Schuerman to investigate the &ldquo;repository of other possibilities&rdquo; the city held as he continued his walking practice, expanding the parameters as he delved more deeply into &ldquo;other ways to go,&rdquo; as Solnit put it. As evidenced in Unstillness, he&rsquo;d already begun pairing his walks with photographs, drawings, and reflections. Then, Schuerman decided to walk the perimeter of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis, several times &mdash; not the abandoned police&nbsp;building, but the whole&nbsp;section of the city it oversaw. &nbsp;

The book records how he negotiated the concrete edges and sharp corners of the built environment, made art from &ldquo;arsonist ashes,&rdquo; filtered water from lakes and streams to drink, tented at a former homeless campsite, and drew colorful sketches of places he encountered (sometimes while sitting on a stool made from refuse nearby). &nbsp;

He posted much of this material on Facebook &mdash; along with his comments on the destruction he found, police defunding efforts versus the rise in violent crime, gun-toting vigilantes safeguarding a block, a city-sanctioned homeless encampment, and his own intentions. Unstillness is a record, an archive, of those posts. &nbsp;

&ldquo;I felt like I had to do this walk,&rdquo; he writes at the end of his first precinct venture. &ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t pleasant, but it was real. I took some risks to reckon with things. I&rsquo;m left with many questions. How much safer was I on this walk because I&rsquo;m male? Because I&rsquo;m white? Will dis-empowering and demonizing the police lead to more violence in the long run as it has in the short run? Can police reform happen with a corrupt union in place? (A&nbsp;problem not exclusive to the police.)&nbsp;Is America capable of working for its collective? Or are we bound to a culture of self-interest? Am I?&rdquo; &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg4ODkwMDAz/full.jpg" />Self-portraits drawn with &quot;arsonist ashes,&quot; from Schuerman&#39;s walk around the border of the Third Precinct.

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While he doesn&rsquo;t provide any answers, he asks the right questions. Some of which deserve an unequivocal &ldquo;yes&rdquo; in response; others are part of ongoing public discussions as well as private self-reckoning. Paul Klee&rsquo;s quote, &ldquo;A line is a dot that went for a walk,&rdquo; comes to mind, not least&nbsp;because Schuerman is an artist with formidable technical expertise (see his exhibition drawings), a proclivity for material innovation, and a keen eye for organizing space and symbol as an abstractionist. &nbsp;

He&rsquo;s also a person of depth and commitment. Being male and white certainly protected him, as it does in almost any area of the United States. But being thoughtful, compassionate, respectful, open, and observational didn&rsquo;t hurt either. &nbsp;

Fear, grief, violence, destruction, and threat permeate Schuerman&rsquo;s entries. What he&rsquo;s recorded, in essence, is a practice of walking as witness. That word, from the Old English, says an online etymology dictionary, means&nbsp;&ldquo;attestation of fact, event, etc., from personal knowledge.&rdquo; Circa 1300, to &ldquo;bear testimony.&rdquo; Twenty miles over 24 hours; that&rsquo;s how long the Third Precinct walk took. That&rsquo;s a pilgrimage. Late 1300s: an &ldquo;act of journeying through a strange country to a holy place.&rdquo; Strange, indeed, the Third Precinct had become; apocalyptic, contested, full of sorrow and heartbreak, with a memorial, a holy place, at its core. &nbsp;

At the same time, as Michel de Certeau wrote in The Practice of Everday Life, &ldquo;if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker&nbsp;actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform, or abandon spatial elements.&quot; &nbsp;

In his entries and&nbsp;his book, Schuerman curates his walking practice with a visual history that includes his doctored maps, his artistic responses, photographic documentation, and images of himself looking solemn or perplexed. As such, it&rsquo;s an extremely personal or subjective take on this experiment; also one that pulls us back into a time period of tremendous anxiety and recognition. &nbsp;

It&rsquo;s a relief when&nbsp;Schuerman&nbsp;turns to his own block, drawing his walking practice inward with a geographical tightness that feels safer, more familiar. Soon enough, though, he starts walking to places in the Third Precinct where more recent crime has occurred. The most haunting image in the book is of a sheet for covering the deceased, still unused, crisp and folded. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc4OTEwMDAz/full.jpg" />

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg2ODkwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Schuerman&#39;s photo from a walk to the site of a recent murder in Minneapolis. Bottom: A Trump sign with footsteps, seen on a walk into Scott County, south of Minneapolis.

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Schuerman takes a stand: &ldquo;I think we need to expect better of our city council and our police department. Neither choice we are being offered is acceptable: a police force built on systemic racism or the lawlessness and rising violent crime without police presence. There are better options. If the city council can&rsquo;t find these, vote them out.&rdquo; &nbsp;

He also walks to Scott County (17 miles away) after the January 6th&nbsp;insurrection to experience Trump Country: &ldquo;I did not expect to figure anything out on this walk. Just needed to do it.&rdquo; He walks in search of waterways not impeded by storm sewers, roadways, or development. He walks to Accent Signage Systems, where he used to work, reflecting on the mass shooting that occurred there, then continues on to other former workplaces &ldquo;remembering the playful hard work that happened here.&rdquo;&nbsp;He ends with a pilgrimage to the Brooklyn Park Police station, joining people gathered in memory of Daunte Wright. &nbsp;

He also includes, in Unstillness, a line drawing he created of his driveway, &ldquo;where I started my walking projects a few years back. I memorized this line drawing and practiced walking it out step by step on a driveway,&rdquo; making his artistic practice a walking practice, and vice versa. That&rsquo;s just one part of a frayed and fragmented, holey and holy urban fabric Schuerman records in Unstillness, woven in skeins and patches from physical endurance and bold need, its entirety &ldquo;a long walk thinking&rdquo; as Schuerman writes, a testament of witness during a long, dark&nbsp;period in the city&rsquo;s history.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcyOTIwMDAz/full.jpg" />A recent painting that&nbsp;Schuerman posted to Facebook: &quot;For solstice I walked in circles on the frozen lake seeking stillness, which came after a while. Marking time, the cycle of light, the orbit of the earth, and all the other circles that guide.&quot;&nbsp;

Unstillness: A Book of Walks is available for purchase directly from the artist. You can connect with him and see more of his work at&nbsp;his website:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.schuermanfineart.com" target="_blank">schuermanfineart.com</a>. And you can follow him on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/instinctmpls/" target="_blank">@instinctmpls</a>.

Banner image: Schuerman&#39;s&nbsp;imagining&nbsp;of the nonexistent 2020&nbsp;Mayday Parade, with the artist shown at right. All images are courtesy of the artist.

The recently published book collects drawings, photos, and thoughts from the artist's ongoing practice of walking through the urban and suburban landscapes

'Unstillness': A review of John Schuerman's Book of Walks

Reviews

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Liminal is the state in which many of us find ourselves right now, as the certainties of western life, what we might call the givens, increasingly fall away. As all that we might have assumed to be &ldquo;solid melts into air.&rdquo;

There&rsquo;s more to Marx&rsquo;s celebrated phrase, and it&rsquo;s worth quoting here with a few annotations to bring its meaning into 2021: &ldquo;All that is solid melts into air, [i.e., jobs, careers, financial security, health care, physical safety], all that is sacred is profaned, [ex: government, democracy, common decency, personal agency] and man [sic] is at last compelled to face with sober senses his [sic] real conditions of life [climate change, ongoing pandemics, white supremacy] and his [sic] relations with his [sic] kind [e.g. white supremacy, political divisiveness, hetero-hegemony, toxic masculinity].&rdquo;&nbsp;

If we&rsquo;re tired, angry, frustrated, dizzy, it&rsquo;s no surprise. But liminality needn&rsquo;t always be a negative state. The anthropological definition of liminality (from the Latin meaning &ldquo;threshold&rdquo;) includes existing in a nebulous middle stage during a rite of passage or a change to something else. It&rsquo;s a period of transition. We&rsquo;re between, in-between, the past or previous ways of structuring our identity and/or sense of community or what we hope to create for our future. As individuals and as communities.

As if that weren&rsquo;t enough, consider adding hyper to that liminal state. Panic-inducing, yes. But, also, the point at which, if we haven&rsquo;t already, we turn to art. For solace, for direction, for inspiration, for reflection, for meaning. All of which was present in the recent exhibition at Form+Content Gallery, HyperLiminal: Exploring In-Betweenness, An Inter-media Collaboration by Kathryn Nobbe and Philip Blackburn.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjU4ODkwMDAz/full.jpg" />Installation view of Blackburn&#39;s Breath+Skin&nbsp;sound installation&nbsp;(at right: birchbark, metallic ink, light, sound transducers, and 29 minute&nbsp;audio) and Nobbe&#39;s&nbsp;mixed media works.

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Let&rsquo;s start with Blackburn&rsquo;s atmospheric, ethereal sound score, which surges and recedes from speakers housed in his hand-crafted birch-bark cylinders, the &ldquo;skin&rdquo; of which has been inscribed inside with mysterious symbols, and which are strung through with thick electrical cables along a tree limb. Just as the score melds the electronic with the acoustic (string instruments?) and natural (insect sounds?), so does the work reflect an intersection of technology and nature that&rsquo;s all too familiar.

Below this hanging piece? Crystalline &ldquo;rocks&rdquo; in blue and green, gathered into curves, appearing like a flowing stream. Where does one artwork end and another begin? What is representative and what&rsquo;s abstraction? Here&rsquo;s where Nobbe&rsquo;s work comes in.

 
Large long wall-hangings depict&nbsp;richly painted shapes that release their energy in long lines&nbsp;of color; in one work, into a deep blue pool, in another into two streams that flow right off the paper and down onto the floor and across the gallery. Beneath these two works are also piles of white debris, a granular substance resembling blown-in insulation or crumbled chalk, into which are embedded black stones and glittering rock not unlike yellow quartzite.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY2OTIwMDAz/full.jpg" /><img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkwODYwMDAz/full.jpg" />Top: Installation view of&nbsp;Kathryn Nobbe, HyperLiminal VII (reecho XIV, 2021), mixed media (Ink, watercolor, Golden acrylic media and paint, chalk, pencil ) on Hahnem&uuml;hle German Etching Paper, 44&nbsp;x100.&quot; Bottom: Installation views of&nbsp;HyperLIminal I (blu- cataract) + 3D details;&nbsp;ink, watercolor, pencil on watercolor paper, 118 x 44&quot;; charcoal, perlite, and tomatillo and ground cherry husks on floor;&nbsp;2021. Charcoal lines extend the length of the gallery floor.

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The work, it seems, can&rsquo;t be contained within the traditions of the frame, or the wall. Wall, floor, and space itself combine in surprising ways, breaking through their own boundaries, erasing the notion of where one work ends and another begins. Similarly, in Nobbe&rsquo;s other pieces, imagery springs from its two-dimensionality on paper to the wall where it becomes sculptural. Intricate drawings appear, at first glance, like a wire mesh bent or contorted or folded into itself to create organic, albeit alien, shapes.

In their press material, the artists said they &ldquo;encourage visitors to investigate the entire space, finding the in-between places and making their own interpretations from the multi-sensory elements that go beyond visual to include sound, spatial relationships, touch, and smell.&rdquo; What if, however, the work is viewed and reviewed, fittingly, from a place of liminality? In a geographic locale far from the gallery in which the exhibition occurred? Not in the urban North, but a small desert town in the Southwest? And moreover, from a computer?

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[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIgWKMycjgc] &nbsp;

Video documentation by Philip Blackburn.

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&ldquo;Conceptually, the work explores metaphorical relationships of the human body as mother earth in transition, simultaneously vulnerable and resilient,&rdquo; the artists wrote. That may be so. Perhaps more&nbsp;so if viewed in person.

And yet, as a pandemic continues and we struggle to adapt to all of the political and cultural liminality in which we currently exist, an exhibition like this one serves to, most of all, remind us of how boundary-less creativity can be, how nature and culture &mdash; when reflected as inextricable &mdash; can confirm the potency inherent to liminality, and how art viewed on a screen can be as evocative and inspiring as that seen live. Liminal is where we all live right now.&nbsp;<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); background-color:rgb(250, 250, 250); caret-color:rgb(237, 22, 144); color:rgb(237, 22, 144); font-family:roboto,helvetica,arial,sans-serif; font-size:15.75px; letter-spacing:0.1686825007200241px">◼︎

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY2OTAwMDAz/full.jpg" />

Kathryn Nobbe, HyperLIminal IV (Autopsia XIV),&nbsp;mixed media (Ink, watercolor, pastel chalk, pencil ) on Arches watercolor paper, 30&rdquo;&nbsp;x&nbsp;22,&rdquo; 2021.

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<a href="http://www.mplsart.com/events/hyperliminal-exploring-in-betweenness">HyperLiminal: Exploring In-Betweenness</a>&nbsp;was on view at <a href="http://www.formandcontent.org" target="_blank">Form + Content Gallery </a>from October 28 - December 4, 2021. On Instagram, you can follow the gallery <a href="https://www.instagram.com/formcontentgallery/" target="_blank">@formcontentgallery</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;Kathryn Nobbe <a href="https://www.instagram.com/k.nobbe.art/" target="_blank">@k.nobbe.art</a>. For more info on&nbsp;Philip Blackburn, visit&nbsp;<a href="http://www.philipblackburn.com" target="_blank">philipblackburn.com</a>.

Banner image: Kathryn Nobbe, HyperLIminal VII (thresholds III) (detail),&nbsp;Ink, watercolor, pencil on Arches watercolor paper, 30&rdquo;&nbsp;x&nbsp;22,&quot; 2019.&nbsp;All images courtesy of the artists.

In a recent show at Form + Content, Kathryn Nobbe and Philip Blackburn ruminated on being in-between through 2D works, sculpture and sound

Hyperliminal: Where We All Live Now

The Scene

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/space369_michon_carolyn.jpg" />

Left: Carolyn Swiszcz, Universe Building (detail), 2017. Right: Michon Weeks, Electric Sign, 2017.

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Consider, if you would, the familiar; the idea, adage, or common wisdom that the things we experience the most become invisible to us, that the quotidian becomes something that we take for granted, to which we no long pay attention. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, &ldquo;The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something&mdash;because it is always before one&rsquo;s eyes.)&rdquo; What re-awakens us to what lies before us, to what we pass by or walk through or hear or see on a daily basis, might be two things: change and/or art.&nbsp;

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Take, as an example, the St. Paul neighborhood known as South St. Anthony Park. Bordered by University Avenue, Highway 280, Energy Park Drive, and Raymond Avenue, the small enclave of curved streets and mostly small homes was long a white working class neighborhood also ringed by a train switching yard, warehouses, and industrial buildings. That began to change about 10 years ago. A diverse array of families (in terms of age and generations, race and economic status, gender and sexual orientation) had already moved in and upgraded the housing stock. But coffee shops, microbreweries and mid-century vintage furniture stores also appeared. Some former industrial facilities were converted into artist housing.&nbsp;

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/space369_1.jpg" />

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Then came news of the train: a new Metro Transit light-rail line down University Avenue connecting the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Opportunity called. More restaurants opened and record stores, microbreweries, artists&rsquo; studios, design companies, and myriad other creative enterprises set up shop in empty storefronts and industrial spaces. The area around the neighborhood was rebranded as the Creative Enterprise Zone and expanded to include areas south to Interstate 94 and east to Prior Avenue. That&rsquo;s a lot of change. Still, some retail establishments closed.&nbsp;

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To walk down University Avenue and through the Creative Enterprise Zone today is to experience an urban fabric that&rsquo;s a patchwork of old and new, renovated and dilapidated, vibrant and vacant, commercial and nonprofit. At one corner, signage for various ministries vies for attention in juxtaposition with Christian picketers outside Planned Parenthood and a billboard for &ldquo;compassion and care&rdquo; for girls&mdash;as if implying that the women&rsquo;s healthcare services provided by Planned Parenthood are neither. Here&rsquo;s where we get to the art part.&nbsp;

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That corner&mdash;where Planned Parenthood, a vacant Pirtek hydraulic hose store occupying the curiously named Universe Building, a bank, and the Green Line light rail intersect&mdash;is where Carolyn Swiszcz has focused her attention for Universe-ity, a two-person exhibition with Michon Weeks at Space 369 in the Dow Building. Occupying one wall is Swiszcz&rsquo;s giant mural (created in sections) of the Universe Building: a soft, thoughtful work in which finely wrought technical acuity and fast loose brushwork, realism and abstraction, blurred and defined textures coexist.&nbsp;

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/space369_6.jpg" />

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Talk about the quotidian: Despite its grandiloquent name, the Universe Building is the blandest of the bland, a beige one-story structure that, even though still brandishing the primary colors of Pirtek signage, remains a quintessentially unnoticeable, boring building. And yet, what Swiszcz has done with her painting is re-contextualize and de-familiarize the Universe Building. She&rsquo;s called it out, made it the object of her attention and considerable artistic talent and given it a treatment that entices viewers to pay tribute to it, too.&nbsp;

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Moreover, she&rsquo;s included that portion of the billboard on top of the building that proclaims &ldquo;compassion and care.&rdquo; Below that, she&rsquo;s painted one of the windows with the notice, &ldquo;24 hrs 7 days.&rdquo; Taken together, these phrases convey a humanitarian or even spiritual message that quietly defines the most commonplace of street corners, but also defies the warring pro-choice, pro-life activity nearby.&nbsp;

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/space369_3.jpg" />

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On another wall of the gallery is Swiszcz&rsquo;s finely detailed iteration of a nearby fire station. The building&rsquo;s banner, &ldquo;Help Your Heart,&rdquo; is also part of Swiszcz&rsquo;s artwork. Once again, subtle and multiple meanings can be derived from her word play, in this case the message being not only physical and medical (the banner is for free blood-pressure checks) but also one of, well, compassion and care.&nbsp;

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Michon Weeks, whose whimsical mixed-media works and sculptural installations are created from everyday stuff&mdash;stacks of Amazon delivery boxes, shoe boxes, cardboard, pieces of wood, and paper&mdash;also focuses on the area and uses messaging from the Metro Transit light-rail train line to similar effect. Her installations are towers of stacked boxes on which she&rsquo;s painted images and instructions in a graphic style that recalls a playful form of street art combined with woodblock printing and sophisticated cartoons in an underground zine.&nbsp;

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On one tower are Metro Transit&rsquo;s instructions for buying and validating tickets&mdash;in English, Braille, Spanish, Hmong, and Somali&mdash;while on a different side are brightly colored backgrounds for gem-like shapes. On another tower, circles with lines through them to signify &ldquo;no&rdquo; contrast, on a different side, with Weeks&rsquo; delightful paintings of the things we like to say yes to&mdash;skateboarding, cigarettes, coffee, a cold beer, loud music&mdash;not allowed on the train. In her re-contextualizing of transit and the experience of riding the light-rail train, Weeks has generated symbols that embrace the diversity of riders served and convey a sense of magical realism that enlivens that everyday experience.&nbsp;

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/space369_5.jpg" />

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Weeks has also created a plethora of one-dimensional works gridded with &ldquo;systems for abstraction,&rdquo; as she describes them, and with simple, geometric outlines of the trains, fare instructions, or announcements in boxy lettering. In one of these works, she lays her imagery over a photograph of the train tracks down University Avenue. In another, Weeks juxtaposes the matrices and abstracted train imagery with painted, exaggerated faces. Weeks also distorts these matrices like a funhouse mirror might, further altering viewer perceptions of just what&rsquo;s happening on that flat piece of cardboard or paper, as the dots, zigzags, and voids move kinetically across the surface.&nbsp;

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Wittgenstein suggests that, in order to counter our tendency to take the familiar for granted, we should seek out ways to find amazement in the everyday. With their work for Universe-ity, Weeks and Swiszcz have done precisely that. Together, they&rsquo;ve originated an outlook on one of the most humdrum, colorless, featureless stretches of University Avenue that brings it into clear relief. The show de-familiarizes and reanimates that familiar stretch with their fresh perspectives, aesthetic approaches, and purposefulness.

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In other words, what the artists have done is create and capture a memory. Not only by collaborating with Nathanael Flink and Julie Buffalohead, the artists who run Space 369 and live in the neighborhood, and by collaborating with each other as they created the work, but by making work that&rsquo;s integrally connected to its context. This is abundantly evident in the works Weeks and Swiszcz produced together. Works in which Weeks&rsquo; block text and swaying grids and Swiszcz&rsquo;s color washes and textural layering combine in rich assemblages of luminous symbolism.&nbsp;

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And so no one forgets, the artists also collaborated on a series of &ldquo;boppers,&rdquo; hammer-like tools constructed from found materials, or portrayed as such on other media, with which to tap oneself on the head&mdash;or not, as some are soft, malleable or sewn with fabric and others are built from wood. The point is the boppers are tools with which to remind oneself of daily tasks, such as not forgetting one&rsquo;s cell phone or &ldquo;to err on the side of grace.&rdquo; Or to not take any moment, place, or person for granted. And to listen for the train.&nbsp;

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/space369_2.jpg" />

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<a href="http://www.mplsart.com/events/universe-ity-michon-weeks-and-carolyn-swiszcz">Universe-ity</a> is on view April 1 &ndash; 30th with an opening reception on Friday, April 7th, 6-9pm. Gallery hours: Saturdays 1 - 4pm and by appointment. Closing and artist talk on Saturday, April 29th, 2 &ndash;4pm. For more info, visit <a href="https://www.space369.online">https://www.space369.online</a>.

Camille LeFevre takes a survey of the new exhibition, Universe-ity, on view throughout April at Space 369 in St. Paul

Written by Camille LeFevreWebsite

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