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Indepth Arts News:
"American Gothic, Saturady Night/Sunday Morning AND Homo Domesticus"
2001-08-03 until 2001-09-23
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Minneapolis, MN,
USA
Two separate exhibitions by two Minnesota artists whose work is
related through the power of their quasi-theatrical narrative opened August 3,2001, at The
Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Chris Larson and Melissa Stang are driven and prolific
artists who, while different in many ways, strive to find resolution to the paradoxes of
life.
Chris Larson is a sculptor and filmmaker whose pragmatic approach to life and to making
art is infused with a brilliant imagination. He creates artifacts inspired by his rural
Minnesota upbringing that combine machinery , architecture, and folk art. In the last
decade. Larson has produced enormous, oversized, stationary wooden machines that
nevertheless imply movement and function. Larson s most recent work is fully
operational. A shift that may be attributed to his belief in the extension of energy through
a formal visual vocabulary.
American Gothic {Saturday/Sunday Morning) is Larsons second film project.
With director Jason Spafford and sound designer Alex Oana, Larson again utilizes his
sculpture as a theatrical set. As executive producer, actor, set and prop designer, and
builder, Larson uses the poetic themes of Americana and vaudeville to extend his inquiry
into metamorphosis and paradox. Just like the country-and-western singer who plays
drinking songs on Saturday night and sings Gospel on Sunday morning, Larson
reconciles the dark with the light.
Melissa Stang creates complex, drawing-based installations that broker three-dimensional
ideas. She plays with the relationship between site and installed artwork while exploring
the tension between object and the image drawn or painted on its surface. Stang said of
her process I treat im.ages as sculptural elements and search for sites to draw upon,
I draw on anything that crosses my path and enjoy drawing on ready-made consumer
objects that either reinforce or blatantly contradict the sources of my imagery.
Stang creates complex amalgamations of images and objects with an exquisite linear
precision and sensitivity. In Homo domesticus, Stang presents two new works. The first,
entitled From the ReaL Life Drawing Co-on: Still Life with Domesti is a
monumental, irregularly shaped painting that seeks to reconcile the often unattainable
cultural expectations she experiences as a female artist. The painting incorporates
cartoon-styled images trom her own life and includes many personal details.
The second part of Stangs exhibit, Period Room for a Moist Temnerate Environment
(Or, A Natural History Guide for Interior Decorators), depicts the domestic interior of a
female herpetologists house crammed with period furniture and assorted crafts as well as
lizards and amphibians. Through this work Stang challenges the formality of museum
presentations and ideas of high and low art.
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