The Wake

Imagine: evening, a large empty room. The pleasant smell of paint, woodchips, something else; the lonely twang of an electric bass rising through the wooden floorboards from the music studios downstairs. Jamie Schumacher, Altered Esthetics’ gallery director, begins to describe her vision for the upcoming videogame-inspired exhibition, “Level 13: Bonus Round,” and the empty room fills before your eyes. Pan around: See Pacman murals on the walls, a big projector for playing retro video games, a couch in the corner, a shag carpet, maybe some scattered checkered Vans sneakers—a perfect home for forty-something works of art which are, much like ourselves, lost children of the 1980s.

Schumacher created Altered Esthetics from the ground up with the help of friends and other like-minded artists. It is a cozy, quaint little alcove with the “bare pipes” feel, minus the bare pipes. “I wanted to create a place where artists can have a voice,” Schumacher says. In that regard, she has been successful. At the “Level 13: Bonus Round” exhibit, the only thing more eclectic than the art collection will be the artists themselves. Everyone has a story to tell—a story woven in art, and music, and profound revelations.

Meet Nicholas Straight, a young, self-described “up and comer,” chock-full of ideas and enthusiasm. Straight realized that he saw things differently from other kids at an early age. While other children drew crude caricatures of their faces when assigned a self-portrait, Straight drew an alien—with a green face and antennae. Many things have changed since then, but Straight’s defiance of convention isn’t one of them. Today, he works evenings as a graphic designer before arriving home at about 12:30 p.m., where, under the cover of darkness, Straight proceeds to craft the ebb and flow of his imaginings into works of art until four or five in the morning. This Minnesota-based artist is always eager to experiment with new mediums, but feels that his signature mark is fun textures and lighting in visual art. Straight is optimistic about a future in art and design. “Ultimately, life’s too short,” concludes Straight. “I just want to make beautiful images.”

Meet U of M alumni Caly McMorrow. She’s a musical artist who will perform at the exhibit’s opening. Something of a pioneer for female electronic musicians, she experiments and records in her lower St. Paul artist co-op apartment. McMorrow’s ammunition includes two keyboards, several laptops, synthesizers, samplers and her newest musical toy: a Game Boy. McMorrow has recently begun incorporating the handheld video game’s “nanoloop” program into many of her songs. “It’s like a portable drum machine that’s under $100 dollars,” she quips. McMorrow’s unique sound comes from a synergy of classical training as a saxophone player with her experience as a sound technician in theater and techno. “I don’t work in songs as much as in layers,” she says. “I start with a seed and build it.”

Meet easygoing Mark Rieger, whose work tends to gravitate towards humorous, unassuming social and political commentary. One piece, “Iraq Attack,” brings light to the ironies inherent in our culture by juxtaposing a video game to the conflict overseas. By slapping many of his pieces onto t-shirts and stickers, Rieger also takes his work out of the gallery and onto the streets where more people can be exposed to it. “I’d like to make people smile, or think, or maybe look at things from a different perspective,” Rieger says.

Meet Brent Gustafson: brilliant and nonchalant, a combination that often leads to wild success. He says that all his artwork begins with one question: “What if?” For example, “What if I play three different games all at the same time through the same connection?” or “What if I change some of the hex codes around in these Nintendo sound format files?” As a high school student Gustafson and a friend wrote a videogame review column for the Green Bay newspaper. Today Gustafson is a “New Media Designer” for the Walker Art Center.

Whimsical and articulate, Lisa Kuppinger is exactly what you think an artist should be. She contends that a studio should have no walls, jokes about throwing clay, and describes the subjects of her recent paintings as “curious little creatures with curious little agendas.” There is a pervasive joy to Kuppinger that saturates the viewer through her art. Kuppinger is less familiar with video game art than some of her Atari-hoarding, level 13 colleagues, but she refuses to be held back. “I exercise my right to make art wherever I find myself,” says Kuppinger, “whether on a train, in a bar or even in my dreams.”

So why videogames? Compared to exhibits like “The Art of War” and “The Art of Sacrifice,” the topic seems a bit light for Altered Esthetics. Is this exhibit more or less “just for fun?” “Yes and no,” answers Schumacher. “Videogames have influenced our generation almost more than politics.” For many of us, more hours of our childhood were spent playing videogames than anything else. In this technologically advanced world, where we’re sometimes starved for connections with real people, it’s reasonable that we find connection in society’s collective memory of the blinking television set.

We stand at the abyss on the edge of the world and see, not a sunset, not a stroke of lightning, but Pacman, majestically devouring a cherry: and we know that we understand one another. Imagine that.