It's easy to see why. One has the eerie sensation that his pieces have been torn from our shared imagination and transposed on the world in all their Technicolor lucidity. In the hands of a less masterful practitioner, Grider's subject matter would be easily mishandled. Sure—a bikini-clad bimbo sporting a ram's head may seem absurd on first viewing, but Grider's craftsmanship and composition ensure that his pieces always get a second look—and a third. Grider's is the kind of discipline that keeps the imaginative from being mistaken for the absurd, and which has kept him from the self-repetition that leads to the graffiti graveyard. Powered by an exhaustive visual vocabulary, his pieces bite down and don't let go.
But let's not get too heady here. Social relevance has a tendency to dissolve when you're gazing into the jaws of a 30-foot-high great white shark, savagely breaching from a brick wall. However hard you want to think about it, this shit looks good. Drive around. Open your eyes. Get stunned.
Jim Denomie, 'Koochie and Tuffy'
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David Hansen performs as Vicious Lee in local rap duo MC/VL.
By Steve McPhersonWhen Justin Vernon retreated to a cabin in Wisconsin, he wasn't setting out to make one of the warmest, most tender albums of the year, but that's just what he ended up doing. He was looking to hibernate and get over the breakup of his longtime band, DeYarmond Edison. Instead of succumbing to winter's chill, he built himself a tiny fire of hesitating acoustic guitar and falsetto vocals, cued the tape, and created For Emma, Forever Ago, his first album under the name Bon Iver.
It'd be easy to pin the album's resonance on a surfeit of the feelings on which melancholy feasts: loneliness, regret, heartache, and a fragile hope that it's all only temporary. But Vernon's done much more than simply document these feelings; he's taken that mustard seed of loss and softly moved mountains with it. The songs here bleed a careworn and handmade forlornness, from the first strums of "Flume" to the frosty choral gust that opens "Lump Sum" to the half-minute of silence broken only by a shuffle from chair to recording console that closes the album. Nowhere is this more palpable than on "Skinny Love," a song that reaches down into you, finds hurt you thought you'd forgotten, and pulls it out only far enough to catch in your throat. This is not a record that will grab you or demand anything of you; it's like a gentle touch on your elbow from a former love.
Each year sees the release of dozens of such albums, most of which will never rise above the murmur of background noise generated by thousands of musicians making their way through bedrooms, rehearsal spaces, bars, and recording studios. And in a sense, the very thing that elevates Vernon's effort is a fragility that says this could as easily sink as swim. Self-doubt born of loss is common enough, but it's the rare artist who can build a minor triumph out of such material over a lonely winter in a Wisconsin cabin.
Steve McPherson is a writer and editor at the online music magazine Reveille.
By Taylor Carik.It was another great year for the Twin Cities visual arts community. Anna Lee made a triumphant return with Voltage: Fashion Amplified; GQ named Rogue Buddha's Nicholas Harper an artist to watch; the Minneapoline beat out blogs from much bigger cities like New York and Monaco to enter the online street fashion finals; Gawker named 27 "the new king of New York street art"...the list goes on.
At nearly all the gallery openings, the dance nights, and the fashion shows stood husband-and-wife power duo Ben Olson and Emma Berg, two of the scene's biggest successes and coolest cheerleaders.
This year Olson was featured in several local galleries, had a successful solo show at Rogue Buddha, shared the "5" show at Gallery Co with four other Twin Cities veteran visual artists, and just recently showed at the celebrity-fest Art Basel festival in Miami. Anyone who's seen Olson's colorful, animated, and emotional paintings has also seen his wife, Emma, who's his accomplice, inspiration, and subject. Along with running the indispensable Mplsart.com, she's a ubiquitous socialite who often pops up in street fashion spreads for her creative clothing constructions.
While that kind of success can lead to bigger egos and moving on to bigger ponds, Olson and Berg have kept their feet planted on local ground and are some of the most cheerful and approachable people at local shows. At the 27 solo at the Soo Vac late last year, for example, as Berg and I chatted in the middle of a steady stream of art school kids trying to get a peek at the paintings, she took time to introduce a woman standing nearby: "Oh, by the way," she said, "this is the artist's grandma..."
That's about as grounded as it gets.
Taylor Carik is a freelance writer in the Twin Cities, co-host of the Flak Radio podcast, and author of the blog Mediation.
Michael K
By Sarah Askari
