Art: Not so nice at the Minnesota State Fair
When you need a respite from the corn dogs, milkshakes, cotton candy and Belgian-waffles-on-a-stick, the State Fair art show is usually a reliable tonic. The show typically offers top-quality art in conventional modes but seasoned with enough aesthetic zingers to surprise the high-minded and (gently) startle the unsuspecting.
Not this year. The 98th-annual fine-arts exhibition oozes the cultural equivalent of Minnesota Nice. It's flabby, with 382 tasteful portraits, sensitively observed flowers, urban vistas, fish pictures, boating scenes, moonlit landscapes, cute sheep, chaste nudes and winsome kids. Chosen from 2,105 entries, it comes across as a paean to Midwestern sincerity. Which serves to remind the cynic that sincerity is overrated.
Encountering Alison M. Regan's "Minnesota Nice" pillow midway through the show was a relief. Made of blue cotton printed with perky red strawberries, the pillow sports seven words crudely stitched in yellow: smiling, stubbornness, forced, politeness, passive, aggressive, hostility. She's obviously after bigger psychological game, but her peeved-message-on-too-cute-fabric inadvertently struck a State Fair nerve.
While there isn't much sizzle this year, there are strong skills on view. To wit: amazing portrait drawings by Nicholas Bly Pope of Minneapolis and Tanya M. Thurnau of Hugo, whose deft pencils subtly differentiate gleaming skin, bristling chin stubble and soft fabric. Lynn Emiko Tanaka of Edina channels the quiet desperation of "The First 200 Days of Non-Smoking" into an elegant collage-diary complete with cigarette-butt evidence of backsliding (on Christmas, no less). Seizing a thematic opportunity, the installation crew cleverly paired Tanaka's piece with David Ellis' photo of sweet "Emily," a teenaged ballerina incongruously smoking in an alley.
Photography comes on strong in a handsome lineup of silvery images including luminous Greek mountains by Jay Anderson of Cambridge; gritty Pillsbury mill shadows by Robert Meier from St. Paul; a magnificent cloud bank "West of Delano" that was either touched by the hand of God or by photographer Douglas Clement working with Photoshop. The arc of dry grass in Neil Reiter's all white "Snow Study" is a refreshing exercise in minimalism, as is the dead swallow that Keith Taylor shows sprawled on a white background. Some of the best images depend on the photographer's sharp eye: the rotting ferry named "Hiroshima" that Vance Gellert spied on a polluted Bolivian riverbank, and the calculating wariness that Alec Soth saw in the eyes of "Marina" in the Republic of Georgia.
Among the few textiles included are two choice pieces: Christine Marie Pradel-Lien of Roseville has woven a stunning tapestry depicting a fountain in a French village, her subtly shaded yarns suggesting frothy water, clouds, trees and surrounding buildings. Nedra Nicholls of Bloomington cleverly uses batik to portray the head of a moose. Picking up on an antler theme, there's an impressive big dreamcatcher hanging nearby made of caribou antlers by Meg Hamann of Minnetonka.
Among paintings, Donald A. Bajus of Minneapolis gets the chutzpah award for "Time Travel 1510 Rome, Michelangelo & Me," in which he depicts himself climbing onto the master's Sistine Chapel scaffolding to shake hands just as God reaches out to stir Adam to life. Veteran Minneapolis painter Richard Brewer gets a shout-out for his silvery abstraction painted on the underside of sculptured Plexiglas, and Anna Morton of Braham did an astonishing job on "Johnny Jumpups," painting the tiny violet-like flowers with such verisimilitude they almost quiver.
