Local Art Seen: Students Show Their Stuff at the Tweed

I've always enjoyed seeing the kind of work young art students are doing. I suppose it's in part because I 'm always about how their work compares to what I was producing when in their shoes. I also wonder what these art students are thinking and how the envision their futures. What kinds of expectations do they have? What kinds of paths will they travel?

Here is some of the artwork I saw at Saturday's Art For Earth Day open house at UMD. If you missed it, it's not too late to see this show at the Tweed, though the open studios will no longer be accessible in the same manner as last weekend, and certainly no one will be making waffles for you in the halls. Thank you to everyone involved in making guests feel welcome. You brought back many memories.

And to Nick Kuvach, who won the Best In Show Award in our own Ohio University senior exhibition 1974... Congratulations. I was jealous at the time, but your award was deserved. You epitomized the times.

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REMINDERS

DON'T MISS LEAH YELLOWBIRD'S 

"DIMENSIONS"

at the AICHO's Dr. Powless Community Center on Friday

And the two shows that same evening in Superior.

Click links for Details:

8th Annual Goin' Postal Show

816 Tower Avenue, Superior

and V.I.P. Vintage Pizza hosts the

Goin' Postal Spring Photo Show

 Afterparty for both shows at Vintage Italian Pizza

1201 Tower Avenue, Superior

MEANTIME, ART GOES ON ALL AROUND YOU. 

Engage It.

Civil Faults: Nathan Lyons at the Tweed Student Show

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." ~Shakespeare

Last night I attended the December edition of Tweevenings at the Tweed, in which Rob Leff, a member of the Tweed Board and personal art collector, spoke about the work of print maker and sculptor Dean Meeker. My review of this rich event will be shared sometime later this week.

Beforehand I visited briefly with Nathan Lyons in the corner gallery where the UMD student shows are exhibited. The title of Lyons' show is Civil Faults. The senior art student from Eagan will be graduating this spring,

What struck me is the emergence of a common theme in many of the student art shows that I have seen here and at the Tweed, young people grappling with identity and the meaning of who they are. Lyons' begins his artist statement with these remarks:

In a media saturated culture we are constantly shown how to be a perfect person. We are continually reminded to live our lives to be fictitious ideal individuals, rather than normal. The ceramic series (shown here) shows how we start off innocent, and over time are willing to sacrifice more of our selves in order to achieve this esoteric status. What is left is an unrecognizable person from what we were originally.

In today’s society we are told not to talk about our flaws, to hide our weaknesses and keep them private while glorifying achievements and successes. The stress of reaching such an unattainable status only amplifies our burdens.

The sequence of ceramic raku skulls illustrates the concept, which essentially reveals the psychological damage produced by the real/ideal split in human personality formation, an underlying cause in neurosis.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Engage.

Catherine Caswell's "What Remains" at the Tweed

This past week at the Tweed Museum in Duluth we had the pleasure/privilege of attending the opening for Blood Memoirs, an exhibition I've already written about here this past week, shining light from a new perspective on  aspects of the Tweed collection. On the same evening of this opening there was a student show in the next room featuring work by Katie Caswell. As u entered the space I was immediately captivated by the imagery, as well as the imbalance in some of her work. I had the good fortune of being able to meet her there. I started by asking about a piece which she had titled Life Story. I felt impelled to understand the work more deeply and learned much as she shared.

"Basically, my whole show talks about the emptiness and isolation that results from the internal obsession with having an eating disorder or having any other kind of debilitating mental illness," she explained in a most transparent manner. "I have struggled with eating disorders and still do… something I will be struggling with my whole life. I got the idea of relating it to insects based on the idea of getting too big to fit in your own skin basically and becoming the empty shell. Cicadas were the insect I was drawn to because you find their husks clinging to trees and and stuff all over the place. The life of the cicada I found interesting because they spend the majority of their life underground in the darkness down there and I kind of related to that feeling like you’re kind of curled up in a dark place for a lot of our life and you emerge only to shed your skin and die. It’s really grotesque. I don’t know if if that comes through in the work, but the life of a cicada in my opinion is kind of a depressing thing. I also found it interesting during research to find that cicadas are also a sign of re-birth in Chinese culture. They would put cicadas on the tongue of a deceased person to ensure rebirth in the afterlife. So it’s loaded with symbolism."

Indeed it is.

Wikipedia outlines the life of a cicada in this manner:

Cicadas live underground as nymphs for most of their lives, at depths ranging from about 30 centimetres (0.98 ft) down to 2.5 metres (8.2 ft). The nymphs feed on root juice and have strong front legs for digging. In the final nymphal instar, they construct an exit tunnel to the surface and emerge. They then molt (shed their skins) on a nearby plant for the last time and emerge as adults. The exuvia, or abandoned exoskeleton, remains, still clinging to the bark of trees. After mating, the female cuts slits into the bark of a twig, and into these she deposits her eggs. She may do so repeatedly, until she has laid several hundred eggs. When the eggs hatch, the newly hatched nymphs drop to the ground, where they burrow. Most cicadas go through a life cycle that lasts from two to five years. Some species have much longer life cycles, such as the North American genus, Magicicada, which has a number of distinct "broods" that go through either a 17-year or, in some parts of the world, a 13-year life cycle.   

The natural world is filled with wonders, of which many --like the cicada-- are quite unusual. I remember finding cicada exoskeletons on a number of trees in a forest near my home in Maple Heights when I was a boy. In more recent years we learned that it was another "year of the locust" here in Minnesota. Until this show I was unaware, however, how brief their time in sun actually was.

What impressed me most about Caswell's exhibition was her transparency and vulnerability, her willingness to put herself out there like this. Hopefully we won't have to wait seventeen years till she does it again. It's an impressive body of work.