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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Focus Group and Open Forum: Encampment @ Soap Factory
Wednesday 23 July @ 15:19:00 |
 by Valerie Valentine
Size matters in a show like this. The Soap Factory uses its huge 40,000 square foot space for extensive showcasing of radical ideas. The sheer volume of new art is easily overwhelming. Inspiring thoughts in a hundred different directions, the space takes a fresh approach, featuring “No Name” emerging artists.
open forum - Tents
Open forum: encampment, curated by Todd Bockley of Minneapolis, features artists taking a creative, ecological approach to space. The gallery’s huge rooms allow for installation of a waaginogaan, or “bent poles house dwelling.” The artists will eventually use the Native-American inspired structure as a living space in Minnesota. The shelter is built of fresh wooden branches with green leaves still attached. The sticks are covered with vinyl advertisement banners. The slogans for “Easysave Cards” and McDonald’s leap out in commercial contrast to the actual waterproofing function of the material. Commodification of corporate detritus makes this structure imaginative and revolutionary.
Another installation suggests organically-improved surroundings by using green plants and wood for color and texture. The plants grow under lights, and there is a watering system invented to nourish a small swamp in an inflated tub. A tricycle contraption is on display, to be used for transporting water to new plants in their encampment. Artists actually lived in the space as they were creating it. Tents on scaffolds above the scene propose living close to the elements, yet elevated, much like the ideals behind the show’s concept.
The other main gallery is home to Focus Group. Eric Heist, of Momenta art in Brooklyn, N.Y., curated this brilliantly depressing showing for the Soap Factory. Effectively calling into question everything humans understand as society, the show stuns.
A video collage by Omer Fast decontextualizes individual words of CNN and other news broadcasters, then pastes the word scraps together. The result is a barrage of language that flows directly into the viewer, making it personal, as opposed to the neutrality of watching a general news broadcast. The monologue attacks humanity’s impotence in the face of massive media structures: “Don’t talk, don’t move, don’t even react. Have you lost your voice all of a sudden? Maybe you never had anything to say in the first place.” It then goes on to collage an apology.
Other Focus Group artists address consumer appropriation of traits, computer limitations, erosion of privacy, sex as distraction, and corporate power in the United States.
Along with all this, the Soap Factory also manages to fit in two surreal video installations, and paintings by Tracy Nakayama of slightly silly sex stills that put joy into fetishes.
You may agree, that’s a lot of action.
FOCUS GROUP and open forum: encampment run through Aug. 24. No Name Exhibitions @ The Soap Factory, Loading dock on 2nd St. SE between 5th Ave. & 6th Ave. SE, Mpls. 612-623-9176.
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