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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Visible Fringe @ Thorpe Building
Wednesday 04 August @ 15:52:04 |
 by Valerie Valentine
The curators of Visible Fringe managed to collect a huge variety of media. Steel sculpture, block prints, ink drawing, all kinds of painting, and even photographic tableaux are shown. The warehouse-size exhibit at Thorpe serves as a sampler overview of the chosen seventeen.
 Artists involved range from the newly anointed to the more experienced, at least by the nature of the work. Some of these creations are highly skilled in construction; others wield marks of neophyte technique. All are valid, in that the Visible Fringe offers venue to any artist living and working in Minnesota. Yuri Arajs, Executive Director of Outsiders and Others Gallery, chaired the Curatorial Committee.
Kristine Cottom gets the groovy gross-out award for compelling, sensitive portrayals of grotesquely obese bodies. Lester Hoikka’s painted sheet metal sculptures are numerous and unique—in several, he segments the human body in three dimensions while delightfully corrupting the proportions. Cheerful brilliant color schemes are highly detailed, examining internal anatomy on the outside.
Gregory Euclide’s “fringe” status is a bit suspect to me, as I’ve been seeing his work all over town. No matter, though. The scientific nature of Euclide’s art may be the draw for curators, as many artists focus more on the philosophy of expression, than on mathematics and study of systems. His work involves maps and blueprints, and “calculation of motion as a verification of time’s continuum/existence.” That’s pretty heavy context, for paintings so airy and pleasing to behold.
 Other notable inclusions are Lynda Angelis’ warm color shapes that seem to grow organically right off the surface on which they are painted. Susy Bielak’s water paintings successfully experiment with light. A. Bill Miller’s ink grids on paper are oddly attractive—odd because they’re so incredibly simple. The wavy, inexact lines provide a nice contrast to the precise graphs and charts we’re familiar with in daily life, and also stand out against Euclide’s formulaic shapes.
The digitally modified works by various artists are not a great representation of photography as medium. They’re all highly processed, and oddly similar in that each artist has somehow managed to mutate the human form into a scary, unappealing shape, with the victim of mutilation most often being female. John Largaespada is a slight exception in that his work is a little less creepy, and more poetic.
Overall, these works really are not all that “edgy” or “raw”; most are professional, finished pieces with traditional subjects, primarily, the human figure. Interpretations of that subject, though, reach into the abstract realm, and occasionally twist the typical representations wildly.
Visible Fringe runs through Aug. 15. Thorpe Building, 1618 Central Ave. NE, Mpls.
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