Reviews

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With just ten minutes before the performance was set to begin, the line to enter the State Theatre still stretched down Hennepin Avenue. I stood at the back while Miranda, my partner, went ahead to look for another entrance. She called a minute later and told me to hurry to the front, where theater staff had just opened a second door.

We congratulated ourselves on our good luck until we noticed, under the marquee, three singers gathered in a semicircle, wedged between the two lines. Each had a blue and yellow flag draped over their jackets. Although the crowd that had since queued behind us quickly obscured our view, we could just make out a hashtag sharpied to a cardboard sign that one of the singers held: #NoFlyZone. The trio&rsquo;s presence was no coincidence, as the marquee above them announced that the Russian Ballet Theatre would be performing Swan Lake inside.

Though Miranda&mdash;who has trained in ballet for most of her life&mdash;and I had bought tickets a few months prior, when war felt like a far-off possibility, we found ourselves debating whether to boycott the performance in the week leading up to it. For their part, Russian Ballet Theatre has worked to draw distinction between the rich history of Russian ballet they aim to share, and the state with which&nbsp;they are now reluctantly identified. The company&rsquo;s United States tour launched just a week before the invasion of Ukraine, after which they changed their name to &ldquo;RBTheatre.&rdquo;

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CaVM4WGP_A6/" target="_blank">They&rsquo;ve also taken to social media</a> to highlight the transnational identities of their cast, including principal dancers Olga Kifyak and Evgeny Svetlitsa, both of whom are Ukrainian. As authorities redraw the world in red lines, RBTheatre&rsquo;s producers and dancers remind us that regimes rarely represent the people within their borders. Outside the theater, the singing trio&rsquo;s presence felt like another kind of reminder, pulling us&mdash;the thousands of Minnesotans spending their Friday night at a ballet while atrocities unfolded just far enough away&mdash;into this endless entanglement, asking us not to avert our attention. And yet, our rush to get in obscured their message.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY4OTIwMDAz/full.jpg" />Left: Outside the State Theatre before the performance.&nbsp;Right: Inside the theater at intermission. Photos by the author.

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The performance had already begun once we made it inside, though you might not have known it from observing the audience, who continued to file in through the first act, using their harsh phone flashlights to find their rows. A man carrying a White Claw in each hand cut through the accessible aisle, jumping over a railing and landing atop his seat. Despite these distractions, it seemed like nothing could touch Kifyak, who performed Swan Lake&rsquo;s leading role&mdash;known to be among the most demanding of any ballet&mdash;flawlessly.

After the curtain call&mdash;during which the loudest applause went to the Jester, the ballet&rsquo;s comic relief&mdash;we filed back onto the street. We half-expected that the trio would still be singing, and wondered whether the audience, no longer in a hurry, would linger like we hadn&rsquo;t previously. But standing in their place were two workers already changing over the marquee to announce the next show: a lecture by Jordan Peterson.

When we arrived back home, I did as I had every night since the invasion began, clicking from one news outlet to the next. Staying informed is one thing, but I&rsquo;ve developed an unhealthy habit, scrolling past images of bombed out hospitals and apartment buildings to find small Ukrainian victories: scenes of everyday civilians constructing sandbag barricades to protect sculptures, or a Russian tank regiment destroyed. I recognize the hypocrisy in this&mdash;that for every ounce of attention I&rsquo;ve committed to the invasion of Ukraine, I&rsquo;ve dedicated a fraction to protracted conflicts happening elsewhere. (My country occupied Afghanistan for the vast majority of my life, so how is it that I know so little of <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/09/21/1039393832/a-u-s-strike-recently-killed-afghan-civilians-but-its-far-from-the-first-time" target="_blank">the 5,900 Afghan civilians killed by airstrikes since 2001</a>, and yet I can recognize the precise pitch of air raid sirens in Lviv? If the fall of Kabul was projected as an inevitability, why does the threat to Kyiv feel so unacceptable?)

By the end of the night I felt sick. Not because of the performance, of course, but for the realization that I held more in common with its audience&mdash;who could choose when to tune in and out&mdash;than the trio under the marquee. Kafyik, her country invaded in the middle of her tour, carried the world&rsquo;s weight with each fouett&eacute; turn. We, the audience, were unworthy of her performance.

Fortunately, I wouldn&rsquo;t need to consider this quandary for long, because to live in the United States is to always have something else to look at. And so, the next day, I pulled up the Walker Art Center&rsquo;s Insights Design Lecture Series, where I came across <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoQ5CJpZ_oc&amp;list=RDCMUC_7GFqFFwqFIAaHVLkiMsOw&amp;start_radio=1&amp;rv=eoQ5CJpZ_oc&amp;t=15" target="_blank">a recording of the lecture that artist Piotr Szyhalski had given earlier that week</a>.

The video fades in as he approaches the podium. Where there typically might be applause, he&rsquo;s met with silence, and the camera pans out to reveal that the near-400 plush seats of the Walker Cinema are entirely empty. Szyhalski speaks slowly, projecting a series of numbers on the screen behind him: 437,842,762, 80,647,343;&nbsp;5,978,461, 975,150.&nbsp;Each figure representing the number of Covid-19 cases confirmed worldwide and in the United States to-date, followed by the corresponding number of deaths. &ldquo;As if this was not a picture dark enough&mdash;&rdquo; he says, choking up before clicking to the next slide, which holds an image of that now familiar blue and yellow flag, &ldquo;&mdash;I am really feeling the weight of history today.&rdquo;

Szyhalski was invited to discuss his recent Covid-19: Labor Camp Report, a project he took on at the pandemic&rsquo;s beginning. (The artist defines his &ldquo;Labor Camp&rdquo; moniker as the framework for his practice, which he describes as his &ldquo;ceaseless work of trying to make sense of the world.&rdquo;) With the Covid-19 Report, he provides the essential labor of re-interpreting what our leaders have termed &ldquo;unprecedented times.&rdquo;&nbsp;For 225 consecutive mornings, he made a daily ink drawing based on the dissonant headlines he&rsquo;d been struggling to make sense of, posting each to <a href="https://www.instagram.com/laborcamp/" target="_blank">his Instagram account</a> in the afternoon. While his initial illustrations represent the uncertainty of the pandemic&rsquo;s early days&mdash;depictions of disinformation, of homes turned inside out&mdash;the content builds on itself much as the horrors of 2020 did, with renderings of the uprising for racial justice and the fight for voting rights as spring became summer and summer turned to election season. Leaning into the madness, Szyhalski ended the series on election day&mdash;what he called a &quot;point of no return&quot;&nbsp;in <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CHJJtSdnUC-/" target="_blank">his accompanying post</a>.

The drawings have since been widely exhibited at a number of venues, <a href="https://new.artsmia.org/exhibition/piotr-szyhalski-labor-camp-covid-19-labor-camp-report" target="_blank">including at the Minneapolis Institute of Art last year</a>. In these installations, the prints function collectively as a visual encyclopedia. But in his Insights lecture, Szyhalski explains the painstaking process behind every individual entry. He&rsquo;d begin by assembling &ldquo;news shrapnel&rdquo;&mdash;lists of words and phrases that arose from consuming the news. That shrapnel became cards that he&rsquo;d shuffle around and connect with visuals collected from both contemporary media imagery and historical propaganda aesthetics. Next came pencil sketches that would evolve into full ink drawings.

Picturing Szyhalski descending to his basement every morning before sunrise might conjure the image of an obsessive artist absorbed in his work. But in reality, he made the Covid-19 Report for us. (&ldquo;We do not operate in a vacuum. We do not work for ourselves only. What we do is a social act,&rdquo; he states at the presentation&rsquo;s opening&mdash;the &ldquo;we&rdquo; referring to artists and designers.) He looks back with amazement about the ways the project was embraced by the public, who shared the drawings widely on social media, giving the illustrations legs that stretched beyond the exact dates they emerged from his basement; a section of the project&rsquo;s <a href="https://frankfrank.org/laborcamp-report-book/" target="_blank">accompanying book</a> is further devoted to those who printed and wheatpasted copies onto utility boxes and underpasses in their own cities. With its wide embrace, Szyhalski has found himself not as the series&rsquo; sole creator, but as the steward of an &ldquo;autonomous entity&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;as somebody who tends to this organism, who tends to a garden.&rdquo;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkyOTAwMDAz/full.jpg" />Left: Szyhalski&rsquo;s April 20th, 2020, entry to his Covid-19: Labor Camp Report.&nbsp;Right: A recent illustration the artist shared on his Instagram account.

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The lecture concludes in a Q&amp;A. Rather than stumble through questions sent in through the Zoom chat, Szyhalski instead tasks the audience with asking questions amongst themselves. &ldquo;If you&rsquo;re not alone, then ask each other. And if you&rsquo;re alone, ask yourself.&rdquo; For the next twelve minutes, he stands at the podium in silence. I have the urge to skip ahead, to close the tab. But I realize that, much like the Covid-19 Report itself, this too is a lesson in attention. And so I sit alone in my apartment and listen to this strange stillness&mdash;to the exhalations that Szyhalski&rsquo;s microphone picks up, and to the humming sound of the radiator next to me. The recording was made days ago, but surely we&rsquo;re breathing the same air.

&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid we&rsquo;ve run out of time for questions,&rdquo; Szyhalski&nbsp;finally says, breaking the silence. After thanking the virtual audience, he straps on his mask and walks off stage, leaving us with one final image: that of Ukraine&rsquo;s flag projected in an empty theater. As he exits, I remember <a href="https://twitter.com/meghamohan/status/1499620570232766464" target="_blank">a video I saw earlier in the week</a>, where the crew of TV Rain&mdash;Russia&rsquo;s last independent news channel, which was shuttered after referring to the war as a &ldquo;war&rdquo;&mdash;walks off set following their final broadcast. The crew departs, and the station switches to a recording of Swan Lake, referencing <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgqgd/russias-last-independent-news-channel-plays-swan-lake-as-it-gets-shut-down" target="_blank">the history of Soviet state media playing the ballet during times of turmoil</a>, like during the failed 1991 coup attempt, when the same recording played on a loop for hours. Here again is another lesson in repetition, in accumulation: that no trouble is new, but the way we speak about it can be.

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgyOTYwMDAz/full.jpg" />Left: A final frame in Szyhalski&rsquo;s lecture.&nbsp;Right: A screenshot from TV Rain&rsquo;s final broadcast, as the staff walked off.

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As Szyhalski and TV Rain&rsquo;s crew stepped offstage in their respective corners of the world, they stepped into uncertainty&mdash;the crew into a new atmosphere of intensified censorship, and the artist back into his endless labor of trying to make sense of the world. In the time since, Szyhalski has returned to his ink pens and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/laborcamp/" target="_blank">created new drawings responding to the invasion</a>, focusing repeatedly on refugees crossing the border into Poland, where he grew up. These recent illustrations feel like a continuation of the Covid-19 Report; while his early pandemic routine has been interrupted, Szyhalski remains an artist who refuses to operate in a vacuum, whose work never stops.&nbsp;

From my bystander perspective, it also seems the war is digging into a new, uncertain phase. Though the images pouring out of Ukraine are no less horrifying, the initial shock of invasion has churned into a grinding thing around which I can sense my own attention beginning to flag. And yet Szyhalski&#39;s drawings demand that we hold onto these words, these images, these moments, even when the theater empties and the marquee changes over.&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:0.1686830073595047px">◼︎

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To witness a recording of Piotr Szyhalski&rsquo;s Insights lecture, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoQ5CJpZ_oc&amp;list=RDCMUC_7GFqFFwqFIAaHVLkiMsOw&amp;start_radio=1&amp;rv=eoQ5CJpZ_oc&amp;t=15" target="_blank">visit this link</a>. To view the full Covid-19: Labor Camp Report chronologically, as well as his recent drawings responding to the invasion of Ukraine, visit Szyhalski <a href="https://www.instagram.com/laborcamp/" target="_blank">on Instagram</a>. Additionally, more copies of the series&rsquo; accompanying book will soon be printed, with details to come on IG.

 
If you feel compelled to support Ukrainian peoples&#39; continued resistance to Russia&#39;s occupation, there are many places to donate. Here are just a few:

&bull;&nbsp;The Kyiv Independent is continuing to provide independent&nbsp;journalism throughout the country.&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent" target="_blank">Follow them on Twitter</a>&nbsp;and support their fundraising efforts&nbsp;<a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/kyivindependent-launch" target="_blank">here</a>. 
&bull;&nbsp;<a href="https://razomforukraine.org/razom-emergency-response/" target="_blank">Razom for Ukraine</a>&nbsp;is a pro-democracy organization working to provide critical medical assistance&nbsp;across the country. 
&bull;&nbsp;The Switzerland-based&nbsp;<a href="https://www.icrc.org/en/donate/ukraine" target="_blank">International Committee of the Red Cross</a>&nbsp;has been working in Ukraine since 2014, and is now providing urgent humanitarian aid to civilian victims of the war. 
&bull;&nbsp;We also suggest following photographer&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artforum.com/slant/a-wartime-diary-by-yevgenia-belorusets-88035" target="_blank">Yevgenia&nbsp;Belorusets&#39;&nbsp;daily dispatches from Kyiv</a>&nbsp;that the artist has been writing for Artforum International since the invasion&#39;s onset.

Banner image: A scene from the recording of Szyhalski&rsquo;s Insights Design Lecture Series at the Walker Art Center.

Szyhalski is also a participating artist in our 2021 Sketchbook Project,&nbsp;has a work on display currently at Gamut Gallery&#39;s <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-exhibition">Sketchbook Project Exhibition</a>, and will participate in the <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/2021-mplsart-sketchbook-project-exhibition">Artist Talk Exhibit Finale</a>&nbsp;on April 9th.

At the beginning of March 2022, Piotr Szyhalski, the artist behind the 'Covid-19: Labor Camp Report,' gave a lecture at the Walker Art Center while, across town, the Russian Ballet Theatre performed 'Swan Lake'

Learning Not to Look Away

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Each time I enter the Minneapolis Institute of Art&nbsp;I end up getting lost, mistaking one marble hallway for another. I&rsquo;d like to think it&rsquo;s not my fault &mdash; after all, it&rsquo;s dizzying to navigate even a portion of the museum&rsquo;s 90,000-object permanent collection, which covers 5,000 years of human history. But I kept a strict itinerary on my most recent visit, stopping at only one show: Aaron Dysart&rsquo;s Passage, a presentation from the Institute&rsquo;s Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP). &nbsp;

The gallery was easy to find because&nbsp;a child&rsquo;s birthday party had overtaken the exhibition space. Children&rsquo;s jumps and laughter reverberated through the polished corridor when I approached. Within Passage, the party had found a playground, its main attraction a series of seven colorful inflatables, or &ldquo;noodle dancers&rdquo; as Dysart calls them. With their pointed paper hats, the children mimicked the dancers&rsquo; movements, rising and falling along with them; they dared each other to dart between the tubes, happily ignoring the black tape that runs along the parquet floor. Yes, the art was touched. &nbsp;

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[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GklgEnx0_c8] 
Installation view of Latitude. Video courtesy of the artist. &nbsp;

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Eventually an adult hollered and the party paraded out. As the room emptied, their shouts were replaced with the whirring sound of the dancers&rsquo; fans&mdash;white noise that coalesced into a chorus, enveloping the space. Only one other visitor remained, squatting in a corner of the rectangular room; I followed their cue and squatted in the opposite corner. For ten uninterrupted minutes, we watched as the nylon tubes slowly collapsed and built themselves up again, before collapsing and climbing once more. I felt my own breath steady, matching the tubes&rsquo; rhythms. When I rose to my feet and neared the wall label, I learned my breath was tapping into something deeper: the planet&rsquo;s own respiration. &nbsp;

The seven noodle dancers correspond to specific geographies &mdash; one&nbsp;a shrubland in northeastern Russia, for example; another&nbsp;a South African savanna &mdash; where scientists have established towers to collect atmospheric data. Dysart has plugged the dancers into ten-year datasets gathered from those towers which, among other things, measure the flow of carbon dioxide through these ecosystems. He programmed the lights at each tube&rsquo;s base to turn cooler blue tones when an ecosystem sequesters more carbon than it emits, and warmer red tones when the opposite is true. In this sped-up visualization, every three seconds of gallery-time represents a day&#39;s worth of data, meaning two hundred days passed in the minutes I sat transfixed in the corner &mdash; two hundred days marked by an impossible number of plants growing and decaying, marked by humans burning more fossil fuels, inflicting further stress on our own lungs. &nbsp;

Honestly, I&rsquo;m struggling to explain the science. But that&rsquo;s beside the point. Latitude offers many ways in: You can approach it from a scientific perspective and observe how a forest in Ontario absorbs carbon at a greater rate than one in coastal French Guiana, but you can also approach it while wearing a paper party hat, your arms flailing in the air. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjg2OTIwMDAz/full.jpg" />Installation view of Latitude. Image courtesy of the artist. &nbsp;

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Dysart spoke of the multiple entry points into Passage on February 6th, when he joined Jessica Hellmann, a climate researcher and the director of the University of Minnesota&rsquo;s <a href="http://environment.umn.edu" target="_blank">Institute on the Environment</a>, and Nicole Soukup, Mia&rsquo;s Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, for a talk organized through <a href="https://thegreatnorthernfestival.com" target="_blank">The Great Northern</a> festival. During their wide-ranging conversation, they discussed the need for collaboration between artists and scientists, given the responsibilities of both to illuminate new understandings of entrenched issues. To this point, Dysart shared his frustration with the orientation of existing discourse surrounding climate change: &ldquo;The first article that talked about greenhouse gasses and its effects came out in 1953 in Popular Mechanics. We&rsquo;ve known about this for decades, and we&rsquo;ve used the same language [to describe climate change] over and over and over again.&rdquo; Though much of Dysart&#39;s work reinterprets heavy data &mdash; previous collaborators include lockmasters with the Army Corps of Engineers, workers from the District Energy Saint Paul power plant, and, while developing Latitude, scientists at the <a href="https://www.woodwellclimate.org" target="_blank">Woodwell Climate Research Center</a> &mdash; you&rsquo;d be forgiven if you didn&rsquo;t immediately recognize these sources. &ldquo;I like to be really underhanded,&rdquo; he told Hellman&nbsp;and Soukup. &ldquo;I love humor, and I love joy in the way that it can loosen people up.&rdquo; Readily found on the grounds of used car lots or in front of cell phone stores, the noodle dancers are the latest form Dysart has employed to trick us into conversations we might have otherwise grown weary of. &nbsp;

Another spectacle is found in the center of the gallery&rsquo;s smaller room. Dig Down to the Stars features the root bulb of a tree that Dysart salvaged from <a href="https://www.ever-greenenergy.com/project/environmental-wood-supply/" target="_blank">Environmental Wood Supply</a>, a wood waste dump site in St. Paul that provides much of the city&rsquo;s biomass fuel. Rather than being chipped and burned, Dysart gave this root system a joyful and heartbreaking final chapter; he fixed mirrors to the ends of each cut lateral root, creating the impression of a mirror ball and, as he describes it, &ldquo;a constellation of stars&rdquo; thrown onto the gallery walls. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgwOTcwMDAz/full.jpg" />Installation view of Dig Down to the Stars.&nbsp;Image courtesy of the artist. &nbsp;

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The mirror ball has been a symbol that Dysart has repeatedly turned to&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;see <a href="http://www.aarondysart.com/work#/surpirse-party/" target="_blank">Surprise Party</a>, where he transformed one of Mia&rsquo;s rotundas into a spontaneous light show &mdash; but Dig Down to the Stars hardly reads as one, in part because its motor runs at just one revolution per hour. While I examined the root, a group of teenagers wandered in and began placing bets on whether it was moving all. &ldquo;Our number one comment for the show is that the work is broken, because people expect movement to be quick,&rdquo; noted Soukup during The Great Northern conversation. Dysart&nbsp;is aware of this unease, but rather than cede to our expectations&nbsp;&mdash; to tease the audience assembled at Mia a bit more, he mentions that he could change the motor&rsquo;s speed at any time from a phone app &mdash; he lets Dig Down to the Stars reward slow looking. After standing stationary for a few long breaths, one of the mirrors suddenly caught a spotlight from the gallery&rsquo;s ceiling, temporarily blinding me. This felt something like proof. &nbsp;

Latitude and Dig Down to the Stars share an aesthetic and conceptual language, but their precise linkages aren&rsquo;t clear. Dysart would be the first to admit this. &ldquo;I like shiny things and colorful lights, and in the end I just try to jam them together,&rdquo; he says. When he builds these objects, he seems less concerned with some predetermined meaning than he does with enjoying the process of exploration and discovery that each project brings. That joy carries over to us; though he doesn&rsquo;t offer any solutions to climate change with Passage, he gives us permission to wander and wonder, to get back in touch with a planet we thought we already knew. &nbsp;

As I prepared to leave the gallery, one of the boys from the birthday party returned, this time accompanied only by his father. &ldquo;There they are!&rdquo; he shrieked, pointing to the noodle dancers. He ran to them, not thinking of the precarious future they signaled, but enjoying their falling and rising nonetheless.&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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Passage is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art until February 27th, 2022. To see more of Aaron&rsquo;s work, visit <a href="http://www.aarondysart.com/" target="_blank">aarondysart.com</a> or follow him on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/aarondysart/" target="_blank">@aarondysart</a>. You can also find a past interview with Aaron regarding his 2015 installation Solar System <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/2015/12/interview-aaron-dysart-plume-project" target="_blank">on our site</a>. &nbsp;

For more on MAEP, visit <a href="https://new.artsmia.org/exhibitions/maep" target="_blank">Mia&rsquo;s website</a>. Jovan C. Speller will be featured in the next MAEP presentation, <a href="https://new.artsmia.org/exhibition/jovan-c-speller-nurturing-and-other-rituals-of-protection" target="_blank">Nurturing, and Other Rituals of Protection</a>, which will run from March 19 &ndash; June 26, 2022.

Banner Image: Installation view of the exhibition Aaron Dysart: Passage. On view at Minneapolis Institute of Art through February 27, 2022. Image courtesy of Minneapolis Institute of Art.

In his Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program installation on view through Feb 27th, Dysart transforms the gallery and shifts conversation with movement and light

Breathing In, Reaching Out: Aaron Dysart's 'Passage' at Mia

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In March 2020, we were told&nbsp;&mdash; and maybe&nbsp;told ourselves &mdash; that our transition online would be temporary. Exhibition openings and artist talks were postponed to some undetermined time when &ldquo;the spread&rdquo; had been stopped and we could gather together once more. But, now nearly two years on, our adaptations have become more permanent: wearing masks, working from home, absorbing the occurrence of mass death in every corner of the country, of the world. &nbsp;

We&rsquo;ve all responded to this moment&rsquo;s uncertainty in different ways. For her part, Jenny Wheatley, Augsburg University&rsquo;s Coordinator of Galleries &amp; Exhibitions, has had to adapt the programming of a gallery situated on a campus suddenly emptied of its students. To help chart a path forward, Wheatley had conversations with a grief specialist and an art therapist, both of whom explained how people will struggle to grapple with the slow-moving, grueling weight of the pandemic for years to come. &nbsp;

I&rsquo;ve long admired the programming that Wheatley has organized at Augsburg. She&rsquo;s a true champion of the university&rsquo;s students, and utilizes her platform to help embed current students and recent graduates in a larger artistic community. After those initial meetings with mental health specialists, she decided to restructure the gallery&rsquo;s programming to explicitly address students&rsquo; feelings of isolation and grief, &ldquo;focusing on how the galleries can be a space of respite for people when they return to campus, a place of calm, connection, and care.&rdquo; &nbsp;

To figure out how this restructuring might take shape, Wheatley began to facilitate bi-monthly online gatherings where artists and designers from across the country connect with students from Augsburg&rsquo;s Art &amp; Design Department. &ldquo;At these gatherings, artists were acknowledging uncertainty and the effect it had on their own situation,&rdquo; she tells me via&nbsp;email. &ldquo;By sharing how they were processing and finding their way through this time, it offered points of connection to other artists. And as the past years have pointed out, connection can center us during difficult times.&rdquo; &nbsp;

The idea for Gradual Ascent derived from this expressed desire and innate need for connection. The year-long project asks twelve photographers to take over <a href="https://www.instagram.com/augsburg_galleries/" target="_blank">the gallery&rsquo;s Instagram page</a>, sharing their &ldquo;obstacles, changes, and joys throughout one particular month.&rdquo; Alongside many of the images, photographers have included a reflection about their process or state of mind when making a specific photograph. Now ten months in, the project drops us into the lives of the featured artists, meeting them where they&rsquo;re at; this openness makes Gradual Ascent a joy to interact with. &nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjc1MDIwMDAz/full.jpg" />App as exhibition space: recent Gradual Ascent posts by Yasmin Yassin, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/yazziz/" target="_blank">@yazziz</a>.&nbsp;

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Khadija Charif, one of the participating artists, has exhibited extensively around the Twin Cities, with shows at Soomaal House of Art, Yeah Maybe, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, among others. Though she has missed the energy of in-person openings, she finds value in the different forms of engagement that virtual exhibitions offer. &ldquo;The blessing in a virtual gallery lies in the softness and privacy of each viewer,&rdquo; she explains&nbsp;to me. &ldquo;As an artist, I find it wonderful that I get the opportunity to show my work and let the viewer experience the work however they interpret it, without crowds.&rdquo; &nbsp;

The anxiety that now underlies any social encounter has presented a challenge for Charif, whose multimedia projects often involve her own family and friends as subjects. In the beforetimes, &ldquo;to shoot a project was simply a few calls away and the gathering of friends,&rdquo; she writes. To counter these concerns, she turned her practice inwards, diving into her writing. &ldquo;I immersed myself in the language I found comfort in, and that was poetry,&rdquo; says Charif. Combining poems and photographs, her posts for Gradual Ascent reflect this transformation, granting us candid access to an artist expanding and deepening her practice. &nbsp;

The shift inwards that Charif has undergone is echoed by David Baboila, a 2018 Augsburg graduate who recently relocated to Tucson, Arizona, to pursue his MFA. A number of his previous series have been tied to particular geographies &mdash; exploring the residential fences and informal boundary-markers of a suburban St. Paul neighborhood, or visualizing how Arizona&rsquo;s desert landscapes embody the violence of border politics. The pandemic drove Baboila to investigate the geography closest to him: that of his own body. &ldquo;I was able to connect with people all over the world through Zoom, but I felt even more disconnected,&rdquo; he writes. &ldquo;This lack of connection was a huge force pushing me to consider the body.&rdquo; In the project he shared through Gradual Ascent, he poses &mdash; sometimes awkwardly, always endearingly &mdash; alongside figures in projected photographs, all originally made by a gay man from Tucson, who passed away without someone to inherit his slides. Incorporating himself into each image, Baboila adds a vital addendum to this appropriated archive &mdash; one where he examines his own relationship to masculinity. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkwOTIwMDAz/full.jpg" />David Baboila&rsquo;s November 19, 2021, contribution to Gradual Ascent. The artist is on Instagram <a href="http://www.instagram.com/saint__patrickryan/">@</a><a href="https://www.instagram.com/saint__patrickryan/" target="_blank">saint__patrickryan</a>.

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As a viewer, getting to witness Charif and Baboila as they sift through new forms and content is a rare privilege. Each of Baboila&rsquo;s posts are accompanied by open questions &mdash; about the role of an archive, or the potential of a photograph cleaved from its original context &mdash; and meditations on his methodologies. The virtual presentation of Gradual Ascent prompted Baboila to create this larger, process-oriented discussion: &ldquo;The Instagram posting allowed me to tap into a very intangible element of the work,&rdquo; he writes. &ldquo;Everything that happens when the camera is not pointed at me, sitting in my studio, working with these archives, and thinking through my experiences and the various meanings held in the archives are as much a part of this work as any &lsquo;final&rsquo; image.&rdquo; With the traditional hallmarks of artistic output &mdash; a tidy exhibition, with its associated artist talks and didactic wall texts&nbsp;&mdash;&nbsp;largely waylaid by the pandemic, online exhibitions like Gradual Ascent invite us to tap into a different kind of productivity, bringing our attention towards the behind-the-scenes labor that doesn&rsquo;t get celebrated enough within the conventional white cube. &nbsp;

Gradual Ascent has functioned as a year-long initiative to understand how artists are coping with uncertainty&nbsp;and altering their practices as a result. The challenge is now on the galleries and museums that feature these artists to recognize that, in light of our new realities, they too must adapt their operations. As for Augsburg Galleries, Wheatley is done making predictions for what shows will look like in the near future. Instead, she&rsquo;s getting comfortable with the amorphousness of our times, planning programming that not only supports artists and students, but cares for them. &ldquo;This time has been a practice in slowing down, being flexible, and responding to what is needed in the moment,&rdquo; she writes. &ldquo;I think it is this perspective more than anything that will guide the gallery programming moving forward, whether in-person or virtual.&rdquo;&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/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjY4ODYwMDAz/full.jpg" />Jonathan Herrera Soto&#39;s exhibition Miel y Petr&oacute;leo / Honey &amp; Gasoline, in Augsburg&#39;s Christensen Gallery, just before the pandemic.

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Gradual Ascent is on view virtually now <a href="https://www.instagram.com/augsburg_galleries/" target="_blank">@augsburg_galleries</a>. A physical version of the exhibition is scheduled to take place at Augsburg this summer. 

Currently on view in the University&#39;s Gage Family Art Gallery is <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/resilience">Resilience</a>, a group exhibition on view through March 24th. Hours are Monday - Wednesday&nbsp;10am - 5pm, Thursday 10am - 7pm, and Friday 10am - 5pm.

Also currently on view in the University&#39;s Christensen Gallery is <a href="https://www.designandagency.com/augsburg-galleries#/in-the-midst/" target="_blank">In The Midst</a>, a collection of reflections from artists about the pandemic&#39;s impact on their practices,&nbsp;on view through March 24th.

For more from Charif&nbsp;and Baboila, follow them on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/blvcknotes/" target="_blank">@blvcknotes</a> and <a href="http://www.instagram.com/saint__patrickryan/" target="_blank">@</a><a href="https://www.instagram.com/saint__patrickryan/" target="_blank">saint__patrickryan</a>.

Banner Image: David Baboila&rsquo;s November 5, 2021, contribution to Gradual Ascent.

Under Jenny Wheatley's leadership, Augsburg University's Art Galleries reoriented its programming during the pandemic, turning Instagram into the exhibition space

'Gradual Ascent': Connection and Care @Augsburg_Galleries

2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project

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I have to begin with a confession: I&rsquo;ve long been skeptical of representational landscape painting. Like any other bias, there&rsquo;s no particularly good reason for this one. Maybe it&rsquo;s because I grew up in Maine, along the rocky coastline of Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth, where every field trip to the local museum felt like a rerun of the same breaking wave. Or maybe it&rsquo;s that the view of the ocean &mdash; that enormous, always-entrancing mass &mdash; from my family&rsquo;s favorite picnic spot was often blocked by a man in a fiddler cap and pleated trousers, his makeshift booth full of paintings reprinted for unwitting tourists. &nbsp;

When I was assigned to review Joshua Cunningham&rsquo;s exhibition of new paintings at Groveland Gallery, my bias resurfaced &mdash; this again? But, upon entering the exhibition I was greeted warmly by Sally Johnson, the gallery&rsquo;s director since 1983, and Joshua. We stood together in the foyer, making conversation about the previous night&rsquo;s snowfall &mdash; how difficult it was to dig ourselves out that morning, how bright it made the city seem. Then we visited the paintings, which lovingly evoke every Minnesota season. &nbsp;

Joshua grew up in Isanti, a rural community an hour north of the Twin Cities, where he now lives. He works in the plein air tradition, setting up his easel and palette in nature &mdash; or sometimes, when exposed to winter winds, in the cargo space of his Toyota Highlander. Though each painting represents a different physical landscape in one pocket or another of the Upper Midwest, he speaks of his process philosophically, emphasizing the importance of attentiveness and repetition when scouting for a site. &ldquo;The world&rsquo;s so much bigger than us, and it&rsquo;s always offering something unexpected,&rdquo; he tells me. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s just about staying open to it.&rdquo;&nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjgwODgwMDAz/full.jpg" />Joshua Cunningham,&nbsp;Mississippi Moonrise, oil on mounted linen, 28 x 22&quot;, 2021

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This approach is most evident in his story behind Mississippi Moonrise, which presents a moonlit hill spilling into a larger valley. &ldquo;I was driving around looking for where the moon was going to come up,&rdquo; he remembers. &ldquo;I wasn&rsquo;t finding anything and, as I&rsquo;m going down into this valley, I&rsquo;m thinking, &lsquo;This is the wrong direction to find that moonrise.&rsquo;&rdquo; Just then, he came across a horse in the middle of the road, and a group of farmers hustling to corral it. While this scene unfolded, he looked up. &ldquo;And that,&rdquo; he says, gesturing to the painting, &ldquo;was the scene out the window.&rdquo; &nbsp;

My trepidation around landscape painting boils down to the field&rsquo;s historical attempts at representing an idealized, capital-w Wilderness, which brush aside the messiness of living ecosystems. However, the opposite is true in Joshua&rsquo;s compositions, which are the by-products of sustained engagement in singular locations. As he writes in his artist statement, many of the works featured in Further In were &ldquo;created over half a dozen visits to the same place at the same time of day.&rdquo; Each of these visits could stretch from three to six hours &mdash; enough time for Joshua to integrate into the local environment.&nbsp;

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<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjcwODUwMDAz/full.jpg" />Joshua Cunningham,&nbsp;Fog and the Fall, oil on mounted linen, 30 x 40&quot;, 2021

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This commitment also provides enough time for the local environment to accommodate him. When he shows me Upper Mississippi Twilight, he recounts the families of river otters and beavers that encircled him while painting; with Fog and the Fall, which depicts a decaying barn alongside a dirt road, he acknowledges the farmers who slowed down when passing his station to avoid kicking up dust clouds. For each painting, there&rsquo;s a rich periphery just outside the frame. These peripheries sometimes leak into the compositions, as is the case during summer evenings when his oils catch passing gnats. &nbsp;

Further In demonstrates that, at their best, landscape paintings are not simply representations of environments, but records of reciprocal relationships. In this sense, Joshua&rsquo;s paintings seem like tender portraits of subjects enduring life cycles and transitions &mdash; between planetary rotations, seasons, and droughts. &ldquo;Each painting felt like an invitation, and you want to show up in the best way to do right by it,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t want to be a bad guest.&rdquo;

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjkyODIwMDAz/full.jpg" />Joshua Cunningham,&nbsp;Crimson Crown, oil on mounted linen, 30 x 40&quot;, 2021

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The exhibition&rsquo;s title, Further In, refers to each landscape&rsquo;s invitation to Joshua to notice more, to dig in deeper. But it should also serve as a suggestion to visitors of Groveland Gallery whose close examination will be rewarded. One of the largest paintings in the show, Crimson Crown, draws attention to the carved, tree-topped ridges of the Driftless region. From across the room, the painting holds the final hour of light on an early winter day. But closer in &mdash; an arm&rsquo;s length, a breath away &mdash; the image transforms, as the whole forest recedes to individual trees. The effect is the result of Joshua applying an initial layer of paint on his linen canvas, and returning the next day to add another.

&ldquo;As I was painting over that first layer, the ridges of the textures below caught the paint in different ways than would have been possible had I been doing it all on a clean canvas,&rdquo; he notes. &ldquo;Those recessed areas end up holding what feels like shadow.&rdquo; While ecosystems are the outgrowth of increasingly complex interactions, Joshua&rsquo;s landscapes are another form of accumulation &mdash; of oil layers, of hours, of moisture from the morning dew, of whatever invisible things the wind happens to blow onto the canvas. &nbsp;

Back at Groveland Gallery, it&rsquo;s no wonder we began our conversation by chatting about the weather. In her acclaimed book How to Do Nothing,&nbsp;the artist Jenny Odell writes, &ldquo;The fact that commenting on the weather is a clich&eacute; of small talk is actually a profound reminder that the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to.&rdquo;1&nbsp;In the discussion that followed, Joshua brought up the farmers and hunters he grew up with in Isanti as much as he did any other artistic influence. After all, he pointed out, a hunter and a plein air painter share the same fundamental practice: waiting quietly at an easel or camouflaged in a blind, staying open to whatever might come their way. &nbsp;

As I walked back to my car, I suddenly became aware of the sun and the almost overwhelming brightness it emitted when reflected by the snow. Distracted, I nearly slipped on a patch of exposed ice, but managed to recover and murmur a thank you before unlocking my door &mdash; a thank you to Joshua, an acknowledgment of our common ground.&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">◼︎

&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMjYyODQwMDAz/full.jpg" />Joshua Cunningham, Upper Mississippi Twilight, oil on mounted linen, 9 x 12&quot;, 2021

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Further In is on view at Groveland Gallery through January 8, 2022. Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 12 - 5pm. For more info, visit&nbsp;<a href="https://grovelandgallery.com" target="_blank">grovelandgallery.com</a> or follow the gallery on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/grovelandgallery/" target="_blank">@grovelandgallery</a>&nbsp;and the artist <a href="https://www.instagram.com/joshua.l.cunningham/" target="_blank">@joshua.l.cunningham</a>

Banner image: Joshua Cunningham, Evening Between the Lakes&nbsp;(detail), oil on mounted linen, 30&nbsp;x 40&quot;, 2021.&nbsp;All images courtesy of Groveland Gallery. &nbsp;

1Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2019), 148.

The plein air painter’s new series of landscapes offers lessons in attention and embraces the unexpected in familiar terrain

Written by Mike CurranWebsite

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