ART ON ICE

top 3 moments from the last 20 years?

It’s so hard to pick just three! From this year, I especially loved interacting with little kids with NatureGrafter. The point of the project was that we’d built a machine that could infuse people with the essense of two Minnesota natural phenomena of their choice. We had a duration meter that people could use to set how long they wanted the effect to last, from one hour to permanent. I remember on several occasions getting down on my knees with kids who had picked, say, a wolf and a loon to be “grafted” with, and explaining the duration choice before them: “would you like to be a loon wolf for an hour, a day, a year, or for the rest of your life?” And more than one kid looked at me very seriously and said “for the rest of my life.” I think I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.

My first experience with Snow Blind was pretty amazing. Standing in there and hearing people ooh and aah about something that I’d known, in my heart, was an amazing visual experience, but that I had been unable to really share with others in any other context, was just incredible.

The reaction to our project last year, Self Reflection Shanty, also made a pretty big impression on me. We had etched phrases onto mirrors, and installed tubes to block the light so that folks would be looking at them backlit. Folks had some pretty strong positive reactions, including some people being visibly moved, at some of the phrases, especially “be kind to this person.”

What drew you to Shanty PRojects?

I was first drawn to the Art Shanties back in the years when they were on Medicine Lake. I [joined] Art Shanties as an artist in 2016-17. I’d just completed an installation project for Northern Spark (called Wishing Well), and wanted to continue making that sort of work.

Specifically, what drew me to making my first art shanty was that I had a project that I knew I liked a lot, but that had never been as successful as I’d hoped, which I called Blind. It was a small, closet-sized installation that immersed participants in the moire visual distortion effect, which I achieved by layering five sheets of standard window screen material. The problem with the piece was that I could not entice Minnesotans to go inside it, and it only worked from the inside. I tried in several different settings: Walker’s Open Field, a gallery show at the Northrup King building, several times outside of my studio (at the old Shasta building in Longfellow) as part of various art crawls (the League of Longfellow Artists and Seward Art Crawl), and as part of an installation art class at the University of MN. It was frustrating, because I had a piece that I thought was really enjoyable, but it just didn’t ‘work’ in any of those settings. I realized that the Art Shanty Projects could be a solution. Having been to a few of the events, I knew a couple of things: first, the whole idea is that they’re like artistic ice shanties, and folks show up ready to go inside the space.

Second, and more importantly, folks show up to ASP in a different frame of mind than any other art event I’ve seen, other than maybe Northern Spark. In other settings, I sensed a certain wariness from audience members: is this guy trying to sell me something? It’s such a major part of the interaction at an art crawl, folks looking at art as something to buy rather than as something to experience. (And, to be fair, artists like me hoping to make sales!) There’s also a sort of learned propriety in gallery and art crawl spaces. Folks have been trained not to touch the art - rightly so, most of the time - and that leads to a certain distancing from the art. At ASP, people show up differently. They’re there to be surprised, to interact more directly, to play. As I said to the reporter from the New York Times, they sort of leave their sense of propriety at the lake’s edge. I thought that sort of mindset would make this project, which I loved, actually work for the first time. So I made a new version of the project, called it Snow Blind, and waited to see if it would work.

As it turns out, that was correct. Folks went inside! They felt free to touch the windowscreens, which changed the moire patterns and gave them a whole new experience. Everywhere else, folks had had a hard time experiencing the piece as I intended. At ASP, it worked beautifully. It was one of the most successful and rewarding artistic experiences of my life to that point, and I was hooked.

How did artists respond to the event being cut short?

First, I think it’s important to say that all of the staff did a tremendous job working with us to respond to this year’s bizarre weather. We installed a week later than we had hoped, because there wasn’t ice on the lake until later in January than is normal. They were very communicative and collaborative, and I think all of the artists also did a good job collaborating with them to make the most of this strange year.

One other big response that I had, and I think others had, is that this is just one more negative impact from the climate chaos we have created by burning fossil fuels. Twenty years ago - or 10, even! - I don’t think people would have believed that we would be facing a situation where there isn’t reliable lake ice in January and February in Minnesota. It’s crazy. This is one more thing we love that we have endangered due to our reckless and destructive approach to our environment. We stand to lose so many things that we love, so many things that define our state: loons, lake ice, ice shanties, and these kinds of “only in Minnesota” art events like Art Shanty Projects.