The Wake

On the landing of the steps outside the Regis Center for Art, atop a trailer flatbed sits a large, red “A.” Part of the “A Project” by Minnesota artist Peter Haakon Thompson and a component of the current exhibit inside the Katherine E. Nash Gallery this month, the “A” symbolizes a system like that of Scruff McGruff—the Crime Dog and pal—but for artists. Instead of posting a sign in the window to indicate that a house is safe for kids, the idea is for artists and art supporters to display a window sign with the red “A” (provided in the exhibit), in an effort to tighten the connection between and among artists and community.

Two years after writing a grant proposal to the University of Minnesota’s Graduate Research Partnership Program, curator Rachel Breen posed questions about how art creatively expresses social issues and how audiences react to these visual statements. These questions resulted in an impacting multimedia, multifaceted exhibit on the West Bank. Breen says she wanted to show that political art could be compelling without being “pompous, preachy or narrow.”

“Together the work expresses urgency, insight and incredibly thoughtful examination of issues and media,” Breen says about the exhibit.

Critical Translations is a collection of national and local work showing from January 16 to February 15, put together by curators Breen, Christine Baeumler, and Alexis Kuhr. Through diverse social subjects, the exhibit asks us to look inside ourselves for empathy, for a solution, and for a response to the tragedies that face our society.

As one walks through the door of Regis and towards the gallery, the first sound one may hear, besides the occasional roar of the coffee makers at Java City, is the crinkling of paper. On a flat screen by the entrance loops Shana Kaplow’s video Group, part of a series in progress which includes two oil on canvas portraits on large panels that appear later in the exhibit.

“As a white, Jewish woman,” Kaplow says, “I see from both the inside and outside of the mainstream in U.S. culture. I am interested in the ways that we are trained to act.” Part one of the video, called “A Training Process,” resembles a “‘Gap’ ad gone bad,” according to Kaplow’s artist statement. In front of a plain white background, people in pairs or singles struggle with each other or themselves as they force their limbs and facial expressions into gestures that serve as metaphors.

“I am less concerned with a message,” Kaplow says, “than I am with creating a space for people to contemplate a sensation of discomfort or empathy they may have when viewing my work.”

As a process that begins in struggle ends with an individual successfully trained for assimilation in the group politic, the sound of crumpling paper changes to an industrial sound effect. Part Two, “A Conversation,” portrays a similar situation of rebellion, frustration, and fear.

Towards the beginning of the exhibit is New York artist Martha Rosler’s c-prints from the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, an update on her previous work about the Vietnam War. The three images in the exhibit “Election,” “Hooded Captives,” and “Lounging Woman,” pinpoint a more specific social context, like some others in the exhibit. Iraq war images from American newspapers and lifestyle magazines are fluidly collaged with comfortable depictions of individuals at home, sheltered and hopelessly immersed in a different world.

Some pieces, like Harrell Fletcher’s The American War, address occurrences that have been further suppressed by a lack of media coverage. In this piece Fletcher displays his digital photographs of images and text from the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City to reinforce that perceived history varies across cultures.

Other pieces are more abstract. Behind a center room housing a large, interactive glassine installation by Ed Pien is a room with a 2-channel video projection called Endurance. What seems like a simple representation of an individual placed in the center of both facing screens is actually a complex project with multiple purposes and messages.

The 2003 project by artist team and interracial couple from New York, Jacqueline Tarry and Bradley McCallum, is a video is of a 25-hour performance in which 26 homeless Seattle youths took turns standing quietly still, looking directly into a camera on a busy street corner for an hour. The project received financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In the video, people and traffic pass, unaware of the cameras placed across the street, while the manipulation of the video, by use of a time-lapsed effect, gives the illusion that these frantic surroundings are moving at super speed around the virtually invisible subject.

The finished work amounts to two hours, each real-time hour compressed to five minutes. Before an individual’s performance, they were interviewed, so for the five minutes of screen time, the silent unmoving figure rambles of stories and insights of street life into a voiceover, until that individual is replaced by the next.

The project has two purposes. The first is a dedication to the memory of friends who died from life on the streets, including two participants who died of separate causes just months before the performance. The project is also a passive act of civil disobedience in opposition to Seattle civility laws that make standing or sitting motionless a crime.

Ultimately it shows that street kids aren’t that much different from everyone else.

One performer points out that “a lot of the junkies are kind of stuck here, like on fly paper,” while at the same time articulating that not all of them are junkies. Another reminds us that they weren’t always homeless, “At one point, we were just like them.”

“Art can often exist in a bubble,” Kaplow says, “separate from what most people consider to be the pertinent issues. But art is really a place that can approach difficult questions of our time in a very human way – with subtlety, variety, ambiguity, poetry, empathy, or unflinching honesty.”