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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Three-Way Vision @ Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Wednesday 06 November @ 09:40:08 |
 by John Tribbett
Three-Way Vision is a monolithic bohemian playroom strewn with objects and images never intended to inhabit the same space. The pieces from three artists, disparate in technique and outcome, are not supposed to fit together. Yet they do. It is a symmetry borrowed from the land of the Looking Glass.
Sixty-nine Southern Black Outsider Artists (detail) by Todd Severson
Todd Severson’s “portrait collections” physically dominates the space. His “Sixty-nine Southern Black Outsider Artists” series looms before you, appearing as a stack of primitive one-dimensional TV sets glued to the wall. Severson layers plywood with colored acrylic paint, coats it in black and etches the faces of histories dismissed with the tip of a chainsaw. The violent technique belies a surprisingly delicate rendering of these creative men and women’s signature ghost-souls.
Next, he makes portraits of America’s favorite television cowboys and cowgirls on bullet-riddled corrugated steel canvases hacked from the last remnants of a gentrified wild west. In “The Complete Set of American First Ladies Dessert Plates” he embosses our first ladies’ busts, from Martha to Hillary, on plaster paper-plate casts so inviting and fine, you wish to place them on your tongue to melt like a communion wafer.
Clea Felien is a classically trained portraiture artist. This is confusing. The scratchy ink lines splashed with gouache seem devoid of scholastic realism. Jittery images capturing grandparents on vacation, upended elephants and coked out Twiggy models seem far from the academic schools of France. But it is all deliberate. Felien broke her right arm in 1993 and discovered her left hand led her into creative domains silenced under the rigors of her technical training.
Here, it is the untrained hand at work, exploring a love/hate relationship with fashion. These are pages ripped from a sketch book where models stall under the glare of the walkway and bad acid to reveal themselves; a Hitler-faced female in a blue dress, an Iggy Pop look-a-like standing long and charming and two chittery flappers. In her Grandparents series, this same left hand distills love into simple lines, creating a dreamlike reflection of the worn family photo album.
Mary Carroll takes the ancient tradition of Greek and Roman vessel forms into vegetative terrain normally reserved for the telling of pagan fertility rites. Using common objects like popcorn, dog toys and cabbage, she makes plaster casts that mimic natural forms. The finished relief is pressed into the clay and layered sensually in polychrome glazes.
It appears as if Venus, while simultaneously making love to Van Gogh and Monet, reached down into the fecund waters of the earth and uprooted these lush vases with hands dripping with fauna and foliage. This is ceramics as fantasy; baroque gone mad. But here also is the gift of selflessness. Carroll offers us a beautifully seductive refuge from a world of chaos and fear.
The art in Three-Way Vision goes together the same way the obsessive and quirky stylings of your uncool uncle from south Florida make him irreverently hip. It is a happy accident. It is weird, confrontational and playful. You don’t question it, you just let it be.
Three Way Vision runs through Dec. 1. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2400 3rd Ave. S., Mpls. 612-870-3200.
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