A Beautiful Lie: The 52nd Midwestern

By Millie Hanson
Visual Arts Editor

In Dante’s epic poem The Divine Comedy, he describes his imaginary travels through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. On a more profound level, it represents the soul’s journey towards God.

This is no trivial matter. Neither was the charge of making art for, nor jurying, the Rourke Museum’s annual Midwestern exhibition, now in its 52nd year. This year’s theme is What Would Dante Do, a play on WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?), and an apt one as the museum is without its founder and visionary for the first time in its history and is undergoing its own truth-seeking journey.

Every year’s show has a classical theme. Last year’s was Birthright and Legacy, and Jonathan Twingley may pick next year’s theme as he will be judging it. He was a young artist when he first showed at the Rourke and has since achieved a national audience.

Ashley Dedin,now curator at the Rourke, explained this year’s theme.

“James R. Dean, a Minnesota photographer said it (“What would Dante do”) in passing while picking up some of his art at the Museum and Jim heard him and liked the sound of it. The meaning behind (each year’s) theme is up to the artists, that’s the fun part of the Midwestern. Artists have to literally interpret the theme, no guidelines are given, they can do with it what they will.”

The Midwestern, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is the Rourke Museum’s yearly invitational exhibition. Artists like Phillip J, Joy Thompson, and Yvonne Butzol have taken part in it since the show’s inception. Notable emerging artists such as Dave $auvageau and Cody Bartz were invited take part. Bartz is having a one man show in August. This is typical of how O’Rourke liked to give lesser known artists an opportunity to become more widely recognized in the local and regional art world.

Expect to encounter saints, demons and landscapes where they may reside. Also expect to see things to hold the soul and places and spaces with which to inhabit it, be it an autumnal countryside, a skewed room shown at a cubist perspective, or a wintry space under the stair where the snow has come in. Taking these works of art only at face value and failing to look deeper, though, would be a mistake, as it would deny the artist his sometimes purposefully yet pointedly obscured Dante-inspired connection.

Paintings, ceramics, bronzes, glass canning jars, books, a Scrabble board with tiles, and work with tree branches and stone abound at this exhibition. The following are a few examples of the quality and scope of work to be seen at the Midwestern.

Dante’s Demon, by Duane Mickelson, is a mixed media sculpture. The base is an organically shaped bag, the kind trees are sold in at a plant nursery. It creases and bulges at the bottom, but instead of holding a tree, the bag holds a demon that has been captured in a sewn bag of leather filled with black volcanic sand. The demon seems only idly curious at his circumstance of ending up in a bag tied with rope, as if sitting on a charred, barren landscape was completely normal to it.

The demon has a suitably sinister appearance and looks gnarled, like an oak, with a varied patina which mimics something forgotten outdoors for a long time and acted upon by the wrath of the heavens. The demon is caught turning to one side, as if in avoidance of something distasteful. The overall movement of the piece is circular and it spirals upward, walking the viewer around the piece again and again and stubbornly refusing to let them go. The tendons and muscles of the demon flow seamlessly into branchlike forms, perhaps communicating the idea of the devil acting upon something (a metaphorical tree, the viewer) and also being acted upon by a force greater than itself.

Dwight Mickelson, Duane’s brother, offers Italian Trebuchet: Hurling Poems. The sculpture is darkly playful, with white plaster mushroom heads that have been married by a common stem. One form is suspended on a piece of steel bar that has been striped in alternating light and dark shades of gray. These lightly rusted steel bars are welded together and give an unyielding, strong framework to the piece.

Another cream mushroom, top/head only, is suspended by a rope that has been tied with another rope around a juncture where two of the steel pieces meet. The third other part of the sculpture has been placed against a wall, seeming to escape from the rigid confines of the steel structure. All the cream heads have small iron balls implanted in them that play nicely off of the painted circles on the mushroom heads, which are light, muted shades of avocado, mustard, and rose, intersecting the black lines that connect groups of circles to one another.

Could this stand for the sins and good deeds that act upon other kinds of living beings, perhaps the allegorical human race that mushroom references? Perhaps the intent of this work is to show the initial good feelings that the cute and comfortable induce, lulling the viewer into forgetting that these soft, harmless forms are chained to an unyielding, hard framework, and only by struggle and courage to stand alone can one (mushroom, person?) escape that fate. And of course, there are certain kinds of mushrooms that are by their nature poisonous to others.

LeRoy Aasland’s large acrylic painting Gaze At The Rose directs the viewer’s eye to enter the canvas from the top left where a person’s head is shown in front of a window looking out over a blue sky. The figure, shown wearing deep blue robes, is patiently sitting on a white bench in a white room at dawn or twilight with a pair of ochre-colored wooden bellows on his lap. This fey figure has his hands placed over them, the left holding them in place and the right hand holding a white rose like a pencil, tracing something onto the bellows. An incantation to counter lost love, the notes to a new song? His expression is that of peaceful resolution to a problem, whether it be romantic, logical, or something other, it matters not to the viewer as the figure is content inhabiting his own self-contained world in this moment in time.

The Journey Begins is a woodcut by Kathleen Ristinen. For the medium, it is unexpectedly large, and finely crafted, grabbing attention with its solely black and white palette. Part of a wooden building is shown, along with trees. These are rendered in a very satisfying way (as is the rest of the piece), but the focal point of the picture is the six people sitting in and standing around a Model T car with the top down. The traveling party has pulled in to park at the building and are posing for an unforeseen photographer that is standing where the viewer is. But instead of turning his body to the camera as the others have, the driver has turned only his face, not the rest of himself. Something about him looks faintly menacing. Almost as if he were taking these passengers on a trip without them fully knowing the destination. Maybe they shouldn’t be smiling with such evident enjoyment of the ride and instead concentrate on where they might end up.

Through The Valley Of Darkness is an acrylic painting by Punchgut, widely known for some of the most memorable live band posters in the F-M area and in Minneapolis. This painting is superbly dynamic with its extremely long, vertical shape. The picture plane has been trisected further vertically in equal parts black, red, and black again. There are circular blotches on the red section of the painting, like spots or rain on a window pane or a piece of stained film from an old fashioned movie (back when actual film was used as a medium instead of digital).

As the eye travels down from the top of the piece, the red lightens a little and at the very bottom of the picture, the silhouette of a figure is seen. A shadow is being projected more than cast to the left, though the right side of the figure has a crisp, yet slightly blurry line. The overall feeling is one of the journey of anyman, isolated by choice and circumstance, with only one way to go – forward and upward since he’s starting at the very bottom.

Mark Strand’s entry into the show is a photograph titled “Hell On Earth With John Ford, John Wayne, and Dante Alighieri”. Strand uses strips of film tell his story - ten in all. The manipulated photographs of a television screen include many immediately recognizable as images of The Duke, as John Wayne was called. Also shown are photos of John Ford with his glasses and eyepatch. Some frames are in black and white, some in color. The viewer is not sure if there is significance in the colored imagery and if so, what is it?

The task of bestowing awards for the 52nd show fell to Don Myhre, a longtime friend of O’Rourke and past Midwestern artist. O’Rourke liked themes and, according to Myhre, believed it gave artists a jumping off point and guided their work, a chance to push them beyond their comfort zone and give them a different approach to their practice.

Don Myhre, when asked about how he came to judge this year’s show, explained that he juried it not knowing who created the work he was looking at – his job was to select first, second, and third prizes as well as any honorable mentions by evaluating only what he saw, not taking the artist or their reputation into account. Myhre was also asked to plant a tree (an annual tradition for the juror) and design the awards.

This year’s awards are medallions of bronze with the front showing the Rourke Museum’s logo – designed by James O’Rourke himself. The back pays tribute to O’Rourke with a portrait that Myhre created many years ago, and shows the connection of the man who founded the museum to his decades of vision and commitment to the creative community.

When I asked Myhre for any closing thoughts about James O’Rourke, he paused for a moment and then gave a wistful reply.

“Jim was a really fierce advocate for artists in this area and I’ll really miss him.”

For more information on the 52nd Midwestern show at The Rourke Art Gallery Museum, check out the website at http://www.rourkeart.org. Remember, the only way to find out who was awarded prizes is to go the show.

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IF YOU GO:
What: 52nd Annual Midwestern at the Rourke Museum.
When: Member Opening: June 18, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. Public Opening: June 20, 1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. The Midwestern runs through September 4, 2011.
Where: The Rourke Art Museum, 521 Main Ave., Moorhead, MN 56560.
Cost: Admission rates are adults ($5), students ($2), and children, 4 & under (free).
The Rourke Art Gallery hours:1 to 5 p.m. Friday, Saturday & Sunday with Wednesday & Thursday by appointment. Please call 218.236.8861.