ISSUE #8

Katelyn Farstad’s Untitled Mauve Lattice 

By Leia Wambach

I have felt confused lately about how I act in public. There are things that I haven’t figured out how to explain to others, so I habitually ward off inquiry. I used to lie and sometimes still do. More recently I have been trying out tactical honesty, my vulnerability cased in control.

I suspect Untitled Mauve Lattice would have sussed me out regardless of its maker, but I do know Kate. We met and became friends while working customer service jobs at the Walker. I was good at that job, I think. The pretext for interacting with others without risking my privacy felt like a freedom. Kate was good too – mesmerizing, funny, quick – but also a flustered mess sometimes. Miraculously, she usually pulled off her panic.

Don’t we paint that over? Have you learned a better way of hiding?

Her visual works have typically kept me at an arm’s length. They confuse me, or maybe they make me nervous. Untitled Mauve Lattice is different: disconcertingly recognizable. A minimal and delicate sculpture, it appears unexpectedly cornered. Its pharmaceutical pink skin has gone rigid mid breath, dragged to the back of a mouth or blown into sticky summer crevices. I think of my rib cage fictionalized in the mirror, satisfyingly visible only when sucking in. How I try to be sucking in a little all the time.

This work is from 2012 to 13. She never made another one like it, as far as I know. I wonder about that, and about what it’s like for her to see it now. Like seeing an unexpected candid photo of yourself?

Strange, I look beautiful in this one.

Leia Wambach is a Minneapolis-based museum educator and occasional visual artist. Current interests include craft scholarship, intergenerational arts programming, and poetry by Louise Glück.


Collecting Art: HAIR+NAILS Group Show 

By Sean Smuda

Tom Sachs passport piece! Psyche, un-psych, re-psych! What would it be, a replica of an NRA gun collector’s cabinet, a meat freezer, a cockpit? Whirling around, draining toward the basement, its humble plinth and crowd of opening-nighters prevented examination. Rolling eyeballs continued instead to K. Farstad’s similarly colored torso cage drain catch as a passport to the body’s retention and deflation. Disparate memories connected only by sheetrock and track lights fold all architecture into revelation that stops or fixes a certain sequence of time. So the hands were turned back; here then is Tom Sachs’ Swiss Passport and back-story. Because it is nothing new but has a set of contexts that puts the viewer between Earth and space colony, present and past, affection and commerce, and deus ex-machina Rachel Harrison. Pride and innovation trump guidelines and grace to have Mr. Sachs expand its title to multi-verses. Time, in collector R. Fontaine’s narrative becomes form. This parallel’s the experience of Huffy Howler’s “sympathy for the Road Warrior”, including the recall by Huffy of about 4,000 of them in 2007. Failure and falling flat and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, to imagine Iggy as part of the continuum. A flag in reverse, a castration, Total Recall obliviating the Present. But, Yerba vulnerable as Sachs moves from worst to great artist, again, sitting on a planet size throne of Styrofoam mirroring all hubris to exit it. A collection is reproductions of its acquisitive inspirations. Do not relate it except on top of the throne, on the other hand, its is as viral as pride and love spread over the land, a mound of fake purple bricks Prince jumped. The flag in back exited the bag up front because all art is hindsight, a Chris Marker, so thankfully un-business like, so hopefully tribal. A 4,000 strong Huffy Parade at half-time followed by mom’s casserole and battle air, crawling out of the sheep skin. The Huffy Howler passport Americanizes the EU while opening the former into eternal Euro reverie full of self-reflexive Marxian crane shots, Sinsemilla, LSD, extreme sublime violent matriarchal transformation, psychological equivalencies, and oceanic engineering, an ideal pinnacle for the shroud of Gibson. So goes this moon shot.

Sean Smuda is an artist in Mpls. He runs Pirsig Projects and was recently included in Emergency Index Vol. 6, an international survey of performance work (Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, NY). www.seansmuda.com


On KHFN (Jeff Fontaine) 

by way of Untitled Mauve Lattice (Katelyn Farstad)

and Here and Mails (Casey Van Loon)

By Arwen Wilder

I love the KHFN.

I know it is by Ryan’s brother, Jeff Fontaine.

I come back to this one over and over in the show.

A group show, so I find myself doing the reflexive math

how many women how many queers,

how many anything but cis white people

how many artists with children

And a new calculation, how many artists dead young?

Jeff Fontaine, I know, died last year.

And Jaime, the year before that.

It is traditional or scholarly

to write about dead white men.

But why for Hair + Nails,

Why would I write here

about the art of someone who is dead,

What could he get from it?

and why write about a man when Kate’s

beautiful spiky pink blob

is there right there on the floor

like a pair of discarded panties

so imperfect and uterine?

Its skin tucked into the lattice

the extra spilling onto the floor

I had a ball, brought here from Thailand

woven bamboo web

Improbably it lasted through two toddlers,

bounced down the stairs

chased by the cats

When I was pregnant, you could feel a little bump,

the baby’s foot  they said, but then the lump

was still there when the baby was out with two feet

Kate’s sculpture doesn’t have to be a uterus,

perfect walnut that stretches to the

imperfect

pluperfect

fills with fibroids and vines

lets a child slip through the tracery.

This sculpture could be a strawberry or something useless

the pure enjoyment of covering something completely

Choosing is so political. So I take a another walk around.

Upstairs I am seduced

by a simple line drawing and more pink,

who did it? The other sibling in the show, of course.

Kristin’s sister Casey Van Loon

this one so simple and realistic

If dilapidating her sister’s house too soon.

Do the shingles of the house meet the frame line, do

the window sills lie flat and meet the walls or do they waver

like that? I lived in houses like this drawing,

in West Virginia, in Ossining, in Colorado Springs

Small irresolute houses where the corners pull away

and mold and humidity swell and change,

the floors growing boles and layers sagging away,

the words flush and plumb and square no longer relevant

or waterproof, little tumors with sketchy margins

In this drawing the pink pole of the mailbox

is a hopeful pink button-slit.

But what clouds or dreams make a sky like this?

like a lot of flapping birds or falling sheets of paper,

geometries of fabric,

Ominous or Luminous

My aunt at 19 was a single mother of 3 kids

under age 4, driving home one hot airconditionless afternoon

from the laundromat, she thought

she was being followed through south Denver by seagulls

Some strange white bird

that flapped near her car like an omen

Some secret to tell and just when she could almost

make it out, it would flap away

When she got home

she realized the kids had been throwing

their laundered diapers

out the window, one by one

I go back downstairs to KHFN.

KHFN? — Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis —

the band of 300 indigenous people

living on a reservation near British Columbia?

This seems more probable than KHFN the Christian Radio Station

in Nazareth, Texas. Kentucky Highway Freight Network?

KraftHerr Fight Night — the Austrian night of punching competition?

Something in Icelandic? Something in Russian? Some secret

explanation or rotting inside joke.

The Indigenous people KHFN state online that they never

ceded the land, that they are working on healing

and clean water, from their tiny poisoned reserve.

I don’t have any idea how this piece KHFN

was made. Which is part of why I like it so much.

I want to look closer and closer. I am glad I am alone

down here, you would think I was licking it.

If I get close there are little sparkles. I don’t have any idea

what the scale is, there is some kind of biological

or chemical decomposition here. Could this be cellular respiration,

could it be rust, or imaging of oil spills in wetlands.

What internal or external entropy is this beautiful?

It is so succinct. A filmstrip has frames which translate time.

These frames are also time.

So shiny a build up of breakdown.

A splash, a spill, a spread, a fade, a

redwood cardinal bronze eucalyptus mica azurite

and patina of copper oxide

the word pluperfect again, past time implied

future breakdown insured.

Arwen Wilder makes dances with Kristin Van Loon as HIJACK and raises children with Heidi Eckwall at 3140.


Luke Holden’s animated short film coming soon.


 

COVER: AMTK “Untitled (Yellow #1)”, 2012, various paints on canvas, 36” x 30”

1: JEFF FONTAINE (1974-2017, r.i.p.) “KHFN”, 2012, mixed media on steel, 12” x 48”

2: KATELYN FARSTAD “Untitled Mauve Lattice”, 2012-13, wicker and fabric, 8” x 28” x 42”

3: JIM HITTINGER “Graveyard Shift”, 2017, oil.     on canvas, 24” x 36”

4: CASEY VAN LOON “Here and Mails”, 2017, graphite, watercolor pencil on paper, 6” x 8.5”

5: TOM SACHS “Swiss Passport (Huffy Howler)” 2016/2017, Swiss passport, photo, 5” x 3.5”

6: JAIME CARRERA (1973-2 016, r.i.p.)w/ NICK WIRTZ “Untitled (Coqueta)”, 2010, color photograph, 6” x 4”

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