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| Mississippi Masala The Soap Factory launches a raiding party on stuffy art; the Weisman maps our cultural biases | |
 You are here: "Indian Country Today, 1996" by Juane Quick-to-See Smith |
More a freebooter's hideaway than an art space, the Soap Factory is located in an industrial zone just two blocks from the power station on St. Anthony Falls. A rough conglomeration of four or five squat brick warehouses that long ago lost any sense of regular occupancy, the place first strikes a visitor as raw, musty, and dirty. The artwork selected by the nonprofit No Name Exhibitions seems an afterthought, placed on the exposed brick walls and around the open holes in the raw wood floors, or draped from the exposed pipes and in between the wide, sliding iron doors marked "hazardous--do not enter."
As is typical, the current show in the Soap Factory, "DavidsonGatsonSklarKennedy," is replete with works that seem to deliberately court an image of being dangerous and severe. This is art as piracy, a sacking of our preconceived notions about what art is. Each of these young artists starts with mundane and ordinary subjects and then attempts to show us all the other ways we could perceive such things.
As if to emphasize the point, just three hours before the show is to open a sense of wide-ranging recklessness fills the space. Volunteers walk with open strides through the halls among the steel-framed, nylon-draped, nightmare sculptures of teacups and teapots by Kirk Sklar, and past Stacey Davidson's seething, Pepto-Bismol-hued portraits. In front of these hang small, eerie Punch and Judy-like homunculi, dangling from strands of twine that loop around their necks. "It's always a scramble," says No Name creative director Christi Atkinson of the last-minute preparations. "It's a little crazy, but that makes [the Soap Factory] a great space to show work, because everyone who's here wants to be here."
As we talk, Brooklyn video artist Aunrico Gatson arrives, a slight swagger in his walk and a nonchalant look on his face. He peers into the gloomy gallery for a moment, says he didn't realize the space would be so big, and shrugs before skulking off.
Meanwhile, over in building four, a dank, mostly concrete structure at the southwest corner of the Factory, St. Paul artist Shannon Kennedy is putting the final touches on her video display. Appropriately titled "building 4 (soap factory)," it is a hypnotic eight-minute video that shows queasying, pulsing views of stringy organic stuff and shadowy tunnel spaces filled with what looks like gray matter, moon rocks, and masses of tumescent tubers. Overall, the display has the kind of creepy, otherworldly quality of the best parts of The Blair Witch Project, with the kicker being that all the scenes were shot at this exact site using a gastroscope, a lighted tube ordinarily used to film the human digestive tract. Kennedy spent several weeks exploring the open pipes, shadowy corners, and dark holes of the building as an act of mapping out the mysterious hidden space that lurks beyond our consciousness. We experience a growing sense of shock and dismay as our perceptions of the space are shown to be incomplete and false. This shock is what instructs us that perhaps we should take more care in reaching an understanding of the realm we occupy.
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About Michael Fallon
From the Archive
- A Hot Radiator (Culturata - Sep 15, 1999)
- The More the Merrier Are the "published" and decorated prints of Edina's Fingerhut Gallery the same as collectible originals? Or are they exceptionally expensive posters? (Arts Feature - Aug 25, 1999)
- The Birth of the New Meet Jason Kassel, founder of the Eat Bugs Gallery, inventor of the New Expressionism, and a master in the art of self-invention (Arts Feature - Aug 11, 1999)
- Public Image Limited A new exhibition moves public art out of the town square and into a conceptual realm (Art - Jul 7, 1999)
- A Fine Day for Pressing Pulp Cave Paper rides the renaissance of fine-arts papermaking (Art - Jun 16, 1999)
- Two for the Show Amy Toscani sizes up sculpture; Carol Padberg pictures quilting and collage (Art - Jun 2, 1999)
- Seeing Red Lakota artist Francis Yellow turns historical injuries into polemical offensives (Arts Feature - Apr 28, 1999)
- Mistaken Identity Artist Lorna Simpson separates the photo from the caption and the woman from the stereotype (Art - Apr 14, 1999)
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