Local Art Seen: Flight at the Zeitgeist Cafe

Last night I attended the opening reception for Ann Klefstad and Bridge Riversmith's exhibition titled Flight at the Zeitgeist Arts Cafe. The art primarily features paintings related to birds, though a few pieces reflected other nature themes, including water, butterflies, and rabbits. The opening, on the upper level of the restaurant, was well attended, almost packed even.

Fascination with birds is probably as old as time. Bird characters appear in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and at the turn of the 16th century A.D. Leonardo DaVinci took an intense interest in birds, making drawings and writing a treatise on how birds achieve flight. He had a personal interest in manned flight.

I myself have done more than a few paintings and drawings of birds. Not sure what makes them so compelling, but it has been a recurring theme from long ago. Hence, it only feels natural to find an art exhibition in which birds are the stars.

As a young artist Ann Klefstad spent a number of years in Los Angeles before becoming a North Country transplant. Her love of our natural surroundings is reflected in her work, which includes sculpture, photography, painting and drawing. She has a wealth of knowledge about art and the arts, and served at one time as an art critic for the Trib.

Biomachine Whales Clean Up Trash Islands

I first saw one of Bridget Riversmith's creations at a Duluth Art Institute Steampunk show in 2012. Called a Recycl-O-Scope it was a variation on 19th century zoetropes. I've since been at a couple shows where her work was featured. Much of her work has a playful quality with titles like Red Rabbit Evades a Vaportrail, and Biomachine Whales. On one wall upstairs was a sequence of five pieces that were designed like frames in an animated short. This was titled "Letting Go" and featured a character releasing a bird.

Ravens and crows feature prominently in Klefstad's work, with a variety of titles like Angry Crow, Ukranian Crow, Crow Over The Lake, Crow In Snow, Inquiring Crow and Old Crow. There were other themes, however, from Catspaw and Sea Snake to Blue Fog and Lonely.

The show itself fits the space nicely with pieces both captivating and delightful. Recommended: take a friend to lunch or dinner and spend just a little extra time taking in the show.

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Riversmith's "Letting Go" (fifth picture)

Meantime art goes on all around you. Enjoy it. 

The Week Ahead: Opening Receptions at the DAI and the Zeitgeist Arts Cafe

"Angry Crow" by Ann Klefstad

I dislike food that is served lukewarm. Evidently I'm not alone because it's a recurring complaint amongst restaurant reviewers at Yelp. I very much prefer it when the server says, "Be careful. The plate is hot."

This coming week there are two more Twin Ports art openings that I'm with eagerness looking forward to tasting. The first is this coming Thursday, February 19, at the Duluth Art Institute (DAI). The second is next Monday at the Zeitgeist Arts Cafe. Both promise to provide satisfying experiences for the aesthetic connoisseur. Here are details on each.

DAI Opening Reception Celebrates Two New Exhibitions

Natural Contract features Japanese-American artists Ryuta Nakajima and Aya Kawaguchi; A Retrospective Response presents work by Lake Superior Watercolor Society members. The opening reception from 5 - 7 p.m. highlights both shows.

Natural Contract is the first regional show of Japanese-American artists Ryuta Nakajima and Aya Kawaguchi, who have been collaborating together for more than a decade, exhibiting their work throughout the nation, and currently call Duluth home. Both are curious about the sensory experience and use photography, sculpture, projection and paint to investigate the natural impulse to shape our environment. Nakajima, an associate professor of painting and drawing at UMD, finds source material in the way that cephalopods take external information and react by producing new shapes and colors. Kawaguchi explores the differences between experiencing something and interpreting it, adding or subtracting information from her photographs to transform the originals into something more personally meaningful.

The exhibition is curated by DAI Artistic Director Anne Dugan, sponsored by Jen Dietrich and Lew Conner, and will be on view in the DAI George Morrison Gallery through April 19.

A Retrospective Response showcases the Lake Superior Watercolor Society, an active, Twin Ports-based arts group. The exhibit will feature 41 watercolor paintings by 22 members. Each painting was inspired by regional artists from Duluth’s rich history (including David Erickson, George Morrison, and John Peyton), with works selected by John Salminen, a renowned watercolorist who lives and works in Duluth while traveling around the world to teach workshops and make presentations. He has won more than 230 awards and his work has been included in exhibitions throughout the United States, Asia, Europe and Australia.

The exhibition will be on view in the DAI John Steffl Gallery though May 1.

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Flight

Next Monday, February 23, there will be another hot serving of cool art at the Zeitgeist Arts Cafe. The exhibition is titled Flight and features new work by Ann Klefstad and Bridget Riversmith. The opening reception will be from 5 - 7 p.m.

Ann Klefstad has had long experience as both artist and art critic. Her work in this show consists of sumi ink paintings on the theme of crows done on maple panels, and a group of photographs printed on shaped steel depicting water surfaces. She lives in the room with no ceiling—her home the world of forest and water. "I strive to create work mimetic to my experience here, which will evoke both the grace of the natural world and the discomfort of its fit with our built world," she states.

Klefstad has lived by the shore of Lake Superior, and a five-minute walk from forest and river in the city of Duluth, for twenty years. During this time she has been creating sculptures and other works that respond to this environment. She is not an adherent of a signature style, but instead chooses media and ways of working that allow her to serve the aesthetic needs of her environment, and that communicate well. She works as a features writer and critic as well as a public artist, and is open to commissions. She has created many sculptures and sculptural environments by commission and is currently working on two commissions, one for St. Louis County, a plaza environment tentatively called “Wild in the City,” and one for the city of Fergus Falls, called “Freedom,” which features birds.

Bridget Riversmith outlines the ideas behind her work in this statement:

Art is a place to put things so they’ll keep. Moments can be preserved in dance, song, on pages and walls…. These containers fill with things we may find difficult to contain within ourselves. I create art that moves using bright water-base paints, 2D animation, recycled machines and other junk, and am persistently drawn to and motivated by art, science and the vital need to reconcile these two halves. Experimenting and making mistakes are my primary techniques. The artists who have influenced me the most are inventor-innovators like Dr. Seuss, Lotte Reininger, Yuri Norstein and Charles-Émile Reynaud. 

BIO: Bridget Riversmith is a self-taught multimedia artist with a disability, and an advocate for disability rights. Riversmith has received grants from Arrowhead Regional Arts Council (made possible through an appropriation from The McKnight Foundation), VSA Minnesota –The State Organization on Arts and Disability (funded in part by the Jerome Foundation), as well as a Jerome Foundation Stipend for the Arts Retreat of New York Mills Regional Cultural Center. She received the Jaehny Award for Most Active and Visible Minnesota Artist with Disabilities at the 11th Annual VSA Minnesota Arts Access Awards. 

If you are unable to make it to the opening next Monday, then be sure to go out of your way to eat lunch there some time soon and take in the visuals while dining fine. 

Bridgett Riversmith’s Recycl-O-Scope

It's finally here. This week is the 2nd Annual Steampunk Spectacular, May 16 & 17 at the Depot. Steampunk art, steampunk fashion, a steampunk emporium and live entertainment all conspire to make this year's Duluth Art Institute Steampunk Show even more of a spectacle than last year's stunner. Day one of the event is being called a Steampunk Symposium. You may visit the Steampunk Art Show from 10:00 a.m. till 7:00 p.m. with a strong collection of local steampunk enthusiasts as well as some visiting artists from New Orleans and the Northwest.

Concurrent with the art show will be a Steampunk Marketplace from noon till closing as well. If you haven't created your costume yet for the Friday night train ride (Yes, you get to go back in time!) you may pick up a few embellishments for your costuming here.

And if you're not sure what all this steampunk fuss is about, you may attend a lecture on the subject in The Underground at 6:00 p.m., presented by UMD professor Dr. David Beard along with myself. David will present a framework for understanding Steampunk's roots and I will share the various ways in which steampunk culture has been manifesting itself in our local art scene.

For a complete rundown of Friday's scheduled events visit the dedicated DAI Event Schedule.

Bridget Riversmith's Recycl-O-Scope Returns
  

Bridget Riversmith

If you attended last year's Steampunk event here in Duluth I'm sure you were overwhelmed by the astonishing variety in the costumes, the wares and the context... going back in time to be with steam powered locomotives in the once great depot train museum. In the midst of all this there was an unusual device that utterly fascinated... Bridget Riversmith's Recycl-O-Scope. If I were a judge I'd have declared it Best of Show, and this was a show that already was over-the-top. So, it made me happy to get another chance to see it on display and in action.

What, pray tell, is a Recycl-O-Scope?

Well, if you go back in time, before film and film projectors, there were inventive people who strove to create a motion in pictures. When I was a kid my dad would make little flip-books with drawings that might show a boy kicking a ball, or some other little fun sequence. Bridget Riversmith is a teaching artist and animator who works with children with disabilities, and just so happens to fascinate them by having them not only creates flip books, but through a scanner and software converts them into short animations.

At Adeline's in April

Riversmith's fascination with animation led her to research the early development of motion picture techniques, which led her to the Steampunk era when the fervent spirit of invention was everywhere. When I spoke with her recently she took me on a little tour of these early developments. The first of these was the zoetrope,  "a device that produces the illusion of motion from a rapid succession of static pictures." (1)

According to Wikipedia, the zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures across. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion.

Earthworks and Skyscrapers, by Riversmith

Riversmith explained how in 1877 Charles-Émile Reynaud, a French inventor, designed a machine called a Praxinoscope and later the Theater Optique as an improvement on the zoetrope, turning it into a suitcase-sized theater to make it a three dimensional experience. In 1892 he projected the first animated film in public, but was later trumped by other forms of moving pictures. 

EN: What influenced you to make your Recycl-O-Scope?

BR: Biggest influence… My grandparents were farmers, the best mixed media artists in the universe, finding out what can be done with materials on hand. I’m a creature of necessity. Building zoetropes solved a problem.

I found something in Hungarian, but essentially did some elementary geometry and math. I used almost all bits of a (broken) dryer. I learned welding to accomplish this. I created handle for the drive wheel from a drill and other parts. I've been inspired by Dick Rosvall as well and I'm a big fan of Terry Gilliam’s films.

EN: Why are people so atracted to Steampunk?

BR: People are attracted to what the Victorians were trying to do. They were self-made inventors, fearless. People didn’t draw an arbitrary line between the arts and sciences. It was all the same thing, resulting in amazing discoveries. Creating an arbitrary line between the two results in stagnation. People enjoy the projects. Isaac Asimov once said, “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.”

People were rising above a society steeped in superstition. They weren’t exclusive. It was a period with an incredible range of creativity, a real inspiring time. It’s interesting to see, too, how a lot of visions of the future had rails and airships....

EdNote: I share all this today because if nothing else, when you get over to the Steampunk Spectacular this Thursday and/or Friday, I want to make sure you don't miss Bridget Riversmith's upgraded Recycl-O-Scope. Her husband won't have to spend the evening cranking it with manpower this year.


(1) Wikipedia