The Wake

“Many years ago, the first time I went to the Soap Factory, it was a wild, drunken art opening,” says Chris Pennington, who’s building a haunted house in the Soap Factory’s basement for the volunteer exhibit next month. “It was packed with the salty underbelly of the art world. It was sweaty, and it didn’t smell very good. There was good art and crazy spontaneous happenings. The place was ripe, and I was sure at that point that I would dedicate my life to it.”

Since local artists founded it in 1988, the Soap has been dedicated to emerging artists in the Twin Cities area, though they do show international exhibits. And those artists, lending their time as volunteers, have likewise been committed to maintaining The Soap’s presence in the community.

According to Sergio Vucci, artist and co-curator of October’s biennial exhibit, Minneapolis is an insular but exciting art world: there’s a lot of funding, but not a lot of sales. As a result, artists create simply because they want to.

To recognize this dedication, the Soap is hosting Earth From Above: The Volunteer Biennale 06, where artists who put in their time at the gallery without monetary compensation can exhibit their work.

As curators of the show, Vucci, Andy Sturdevant and Lisa Grunwald don’t have the opportunity to look at any finished work. Rather, they meet with people and throw out ideas.

But this isn’t a disadvantage. Since all the contributing artists are familiar with the space, the artwork becomes very experience specific, and most pieces are created with the Soap in mind.

“The Soap isn’t about showing art,” says Vucci. “It’s about instigating the production of it.”

Sturdevant’s piece will be a series of line drawings of deceased Minnesotan politicians, blown up to larger-than-life size and subtly placed around the gallery where the wall meets the ceiling. The tentative title is “Dead Flying Democratic Governors”—or senators, depending which way Sturdevant decides to go.

The ghosts of Minnesota fit appropriately in the blatantly aged Factory, and Sturdevant says this can be felt in the gallery.

“In the Soap Factory, the past and present are living very happily together.”

The building’s first floor is a former fat-rendering room of an actual soap-making factory, and there’s been no effort to strip it down and make it look like a traditional gallery. “It’s a live space in a way that no other gallery is,” Vucci says. “You are in the innards of some kind of beast, so it is either blazing hot or freezing cold. It’s just raw, living functional space.”

An old elevator shaft with an elevator that doesn’t work remains, and artist Eric Joas is going to unobtrusively feed eerie industrial sounds down the shaft as a sonic reminder that this was once an industrial setting.

“It is truly an alternative space that moves beyond the notion of an art gallery as being a clinical ‘white cube,’” says Fiona MacNeill, an artist exhibiting her work in the show. “I’m originally from Britain where the notion of adopting an unconventional space like a disused factory is nothing new. However, in Minnesota, the Soap is a young and fresh-faced alternative. It has a different flavor than the other galleries that I have visited in the Twin Cities.”

With 12,000 square feet of gallery space, the Soap is the third largest contemporary art gallery in the Twin Cities, after the Walker Art Center and the Weisman. This space allows artists to show massive works, catering well to installation projects and a wide array of media.

Artist Kaitlin Busse will be showing a 12-by-8 foot yurt, a dwelling that she created last summer and has spent some time living out of in Northern Minnesota. Inside the yurt will be a life-size beeswax figure, a found object, and used soda cans. Through the yurt windows you’ll see charcoal figure drawings and, she hopes, a view of the city skyline through the Soap’s window.

Vucci will be showing his piece “Hilary,” a Jacquard weaving of a digital photo ID, repeatedly photocopied until the image was broken down. Though the loom he used is programmed to lift or drop thread itself, Vucci stood at the machine passing the thread shuttle back and forth for a total of 12 hours in two days to create the piece, which he thought of while reviewing loan applications for mortgages.

“The ID portrait is a found image, in a way,” Vucci says. “The photocopier degrades and changes the image as does the Jacquard program and weaving process, though the manual part breathes a bit of life back into it.”

Similar media is used in unique ways throughout the gallery. Another artist, Skye Gilkerson, will be using fabric in a project he calls “Conversation Piece”. She uses the fabric to make relief sculptures that relate to table settings.

Some artists, MacNeill for example, will interact with the audience as a physical part of their work. In what MacNeill describes as one of her most ambitious projects to date, she’ll be executing an untitled live performance with a small PA system, telephones made from molded plaster, a physical installation using real-life objects like a table and chair, and her own physical presence as creator and performer. MacNeill hopes to make a statement about different facets of life, including corporate ideology, notions of identity and privacy, and proletarianism.

“My motivation is always to highlight symptoms of the modern world, whether good, bad or indifferent,” MacNeill says. “I aim to shift people’s perceptions of how fine art can exist within society and how they can engage with it.”

So far, the piece has taken about eight months to develop and she still has quite a bit of physical work to do.

Ellen Mueller will be nailing squares of paper with ink, charcoal, and graphite drawings to 31 1-by-1 pieces of plywood in a piece called “Calendar.” The series will mesh science with art, juxtaposing the sensory perceptions of time travel with scientific perceptions.

“I explore the idea of people making active versus passive choices to live in the past, present or future,” Mueller says.

In the basement of the Soap, Pennington started building a haunted house out of debris, which will show from 10 p.m. to midnight. For about a month, Pennington and friends, including Aaron Wojack, Nichole Macklem, and David Pitman, have been building it—and they still have much work to do. They’ll also be importing a real working replica of a 17th century French guillotine with a 70-pound blade by local artist and stuntman Willy Nordstrom. Visitors will guide themselves through the haunted house with lanterns in hand, as if they were exploring an abandoned building.

“You don’t need much to make that basement put you on edge,” Pennington says. “On two different occasions when I have been in the basement by myself just checking stuff out, I heard what sounded like horses galloping through the upstairs gallery. Totally freaked me out. I thought I was alone, and then I heard hooves sliding on wood directly over my head and go off into the other rooms.” According to Pennington, Executive Director Ben Heywood has had a similar experience.

Considering the circumstances, Pennington has one request: “Please do not freak out and start punching people. Just yell that you have had enough, and we have people who will escort you out.”

In the 2005 exhibition season, running from May through October, the Soap Factory’s audience reached a total of 8,000, according to Heywood. Open four days a week, The Soap sees an average of 83 visitors per day. For the entire exhibit, Heywood expects about 2,000 people.

“Opening night will be an evening to remember, guaranteed,” Vucci say. “Whether in a good or bad way will be determined then.”

In a conversation over dinner at the Bryant-Lake Bowl, Vucci and Sturdevant consider the consequences. “We’re hoping to lose no more than three or four visitors down there,” Vucci says.

“We’re going to lose a few people in this,” Sturdevant agrees.

“But that’s the price you pay for having badass art,” Vucci says.

Hothouse 06, The Volunteer Biennale, is open Oct. 15 to Nov. 19 at the Soap Factory; .