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A tour of the show and an essay:

Segrelicious was designed to be a surprise to everyone involved, Obsidian Arts and the Shoebox Gallery, each about four years old are neighbors in the Roberts Shoes building in south Minneapolis. The former is focused on Afro-American artistic heritage and development and the latter on independent artists. The two got together and with some granting assistance commissioned six artists each to respond to one another’s works. While without specific political agenda the show acknowledges (and in its small way changes) the seemingly self-satisfied segregation (artistic and otherwise) in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Although cross pollination is common in music and graffiti, fine arts are frequently the most reclusive areas; this show brings them out to play a bit and the genuine dialogue from their responses are deliciously refreshing in a number of socio-aesthetic ways.

For her initial submission youth artist (St Kate’s bound) Taharra Patterson’s poem with its refrain of “The world is a big place and I’m just in it” asks the reader to get to know her. The poignancy of the dualities she further invokes is hopeful and fearsome “…it’s the life in us that is the death part of us…the judgment…”

Daniel Kaniess has blown up her words and turned them every which way to let them become a plastic veil over the silhouette of a large painting of an iconic head. His experiment, somewhere between billboard and drawing, evokes the still point of identity beyond its defenses and justifications.

Taharra in turn has responded to his monochromatic painting Voices with the poem Black and White or Nothing at All. She addresses the reader with the line “I can be your heart, your soul I can bring joy to your smile or even sadness to your face”. She once again invites us to get to know her and chastises with “I guess that was your challenge, not believing that the world was colorful and I am something …made up of many things.”

This is exactly what Segrelicious is about: how we can know, not only one another, but the self only through raising and engaging core issues and creating new forms. This is not a stereotypical cross-over alienation rap, but something far less bombastic and more personal, even private. Binary boredom is called out in no uncertain terms.

The dialogue continues with Mica Lee Anders and Juliet Patterson (no relation to Taharra). With a profound meditation on the country Ms. Patterson launches her war influenced poem ECLOGUE as though we had left our bodies and senses for mere words (as in a declaration of war or independence). The consequences play out in a somber landscape where:

“the import and export

of our fathers

half bullies, half tortured

soldiers

consider their barren last vanishing

an epic of unevent—except to find the harbor
rimmed by swallows and canoes—”.

In her response to this unending wasteland vision, Mica Lee Anders has composed a multi-layered light box photogram hearkening to the bleakness of the pre-Civil Rights era. It depicts a hanging in a landscape serenely watched over by the face of a Buddha as big as the sky. Archetype and association reconcile violence with peace.

Juliet in turn has composed the poem Elegy to Mica’s photograph Racial Algebra (an expression of her poly-racial make-up). Elegy honors the quiddity of life, condensing some of ECLOGUE’s themes into a more garden-like landscape: fecund, but fraught with the constant appearance of self-expulsion.

In a sense these two artists are the most complicated and problematic pair in the show because of their addressing the seemingly immutable forces of life’s appearances and humanity’s face-value use of them. They rise up to one another through the imagistic depth of their taxonomies of the discomfit of living.

Examination of a different sort creates a new path between Frank Brown and James Gladman. In the latter’s I Hate Sports, black and white computer animated sports figures swing into view, take a swing at us and swing back out, over and over again. As we tread the clichéd sensitive artist observation of athletics as offensively belligerent, the meta-humor that race is not a contest sets in. By responding bluntly to the show, Mr. Gladman calls into question what aggressions sports may be sublimating.

For his initial submission Frank Brown presented a bas-relief plaque which has been used as an achievement award in the African-American community. Equal rights, family, scholarship, protest, pyramids and other symbols of heritage are depicted. Made of brown clay it is as fundamental as earth and skin and the sense of tradition and pride are palpable.

From such divergent origins, I knew that their response pieces were going to be something formidable and they did not disappoint. James Gladman’s response takes on the facelessness of capitalist “tradition” in We Will Crush You. Printed over a photograph of his skin are appropriated images of every nationality of the Barbie doll. They show how one basic matrix need change only slightly to create another. He has reproduced the kind of mass paranoia that sees us as all too similar and ready for mass production-genetic modification: the loss of identity and tradition for the ideal of pure product and the illusion of perfection.

Interestingly, Frank Brown’s response to I Hate Sports seems to fly in the face of its respondent, but actually takes the dialogue further. The Glory of Sports (another bas-relief) shows money-clutching children worshipping pedestalled athletes. All of their skeletons are partially revealed (a trademark of his work) and behind them, a collaged Roman Coliseum full of white spectators. While Gladman questions the teeth baring aspects of the game, Frank Brown critiques its economic paradigm. Shown as being a “way up” for black youth, it pessimistically connotes bread and circuses-like limits, making us wonder what system is going to nurture and care for the slowly revealing skeletons in us all.

What has emerged from Segrelicious so far is art beholden only to the differences and similarities of individuals, but that can challenge our notions of division in intricate and compelling ways. It also points to the possibility of art as totemic reminder of what is wrong with a system that divides us from another culture (such as overall racial declensions on either side of I-94) as much from one another. Autonomic behavior and psychological slavery (both concepts as per Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972) are nothing new, but the will to transcend and synthesize are always new. Sometimes the synthesis leads to greater creativity (e.g. this was the first time Frank Brown has used collage). Critical thinking, unity and recognition of the other are also results for a healthier praxis.

There are two more visual artists in the show: Io Palmer and Aaron Nicholson, but I can’t really tell you how beautiful and harmonious their work is. With tall grass, archeological-type cast sculpture, watercolors and dresses it seems as pastoral an installation as a country wedding. But you’ll have to come down to the Shoebox and Obsidian Arts to see and smell for yourselves.

These are just slightly over half of the artists in the show…. more to come.

Curator (Visual Arts)

Parking Map
Terrorist Attack On Gallery! Feb 10 2004
Michon Weeks Closing Reception
Michon Weeks Closing reception
Spring Fever
Weather
Some PEACE
Longterm Survival
WhoKnows
OngoingOnDay2
OnGoingOn
Matthew Grover Opening
Matthew Grover- Untitled (lens flare), 2006, C-print, 9" x 14"
Wyatt McDill
POHOSHOW!
Life
POHOSHOW in Newly Redesigned Shoebox Gallery
Art of This n' That
Incident Statement, Schuermann Opening July 16th, 2005
5 Squad Opening
Untitled 2005
A Million Bucks A New Beginning
$1,000,000 meets the Astronauts
La Luz de Jesu
Xavier Tavera's "La Pasion"
Alair Wells' opening
blue
Frank III St Fightin' Man
In Here Music
Colin Roses
In Here Flier
HAMMERLICNKINSTALL
IN HERE ARTIST BIOS
Gallery Exterior
IN HERE
Tiffany Bolk Night Window
Each Sunday A Window Is Broken
Tiffany's Window
Trash
Happy Shoebox Halloween Election!
Urban Renewal
Biennial Wraparound
SoneInstall
Biennial Performances
Oeuvres Raisonne d'Exposition de Boite-Chausseur
Shoebox audience watches Mankwe Ndosi perform
Artists Statements for the Biennial
Body Cartography Performance
sociocorpomembraneousrelocation 2.7.04
What the Community Says
Alexa's window
Offering to Walter Mondale
SHOEBOX BIENNIAL JUNE 12TH, 2004!
Pie and coffee were served
Jenny's Window
X-Ray Alley (How it all started)
Imaginary Friends
Imaginary Friends
Imaginary Friends
Clouds
SEGRELICIOUS Opening
SEGRELICIOUS Opening
SEGRELICIOUS Opening
SEGRELICIOUS Opening
SEGRELICIOUS Opening
Minneosta Daily Review of Segrelicious
Shoebox Tour, Performances and Essay
ECLOGUE
Facelift for the Shoebox
Day of The Dead for Mark Loesch
Sachiko Performance at Elise Blue opening
What the Artists say about Segrelicious
Banksy Review
Martha Iserman at her opening
Aziz Osman tells of being in front of a firing squad
Tynan Kerr
Beautiful Deleuzers/Guattari Heroes Bios and Statements
Beautiful Deleuzers/Guattari Heroes Piece Descriptions
Beautiful Deleuzers Opening
Deleuzers... closer
Obamulator
Lite Brite Opening
Lite Brite Opening vid
David Everett
Mary Bergs' Art Matters
Chritopher Hauseman Opening
Shoebox By Night
Shoebox By Night
Ping Wang Window
Josh Ryther Review in ARP!
Vance Gellert Install 3.4.2010
Guns and Ammo
Jenny Installs
Vance Gellert Artist Talk 4.29.10
Shoebox 6.5 year anniversary Opening for Jenny Schmid
Artpolice Install