The Gunnar Collective

I was invited just last night to check out an art opening this evening in Northeast Minneapolis. I was especially excited to go, because it's the inaugural show by the Gunnar Collective.
What is that, you may ask? Well, I went to Northwestern College in Roseville, MN, graduating in December 2008. The artists who showed their work tonight were a few years behind me. The name of the group comes from something that is scrawled high up on one of the walls in the main studio: "A. Gunnar." Apparently, a student from about 10 years back wanted to leave a lasting mark on the art department before he graduated. Now he's got an artists' collective named after him!
These students started getting together and doing critiques on Wednesdays last year, and wanted to push themselves out of the college "bubble." One thing led to another, and someone's basement has now been transformed into a gallery space! Tonight was great, because, if there's one thing you learn in the art department at Northwestern, it's how to present your art really well and throw a great opening (meaning, have good food and fun conversations).

The art on display ranged in subject matter and media but felt very cohesive overall when viewed as a whole. My favorite pieces were a series of four photos of parking spaces by Jason Wynia. Sounds kind of boring to describe them, but they were quite ephemeral and haunting. Snow outlines the empty black space where the car was, tire tracks cutting through the emptiness, footprints the only human presence. I've seen my share of urban photography (decayed buildings, smoke stacks, city skylines, etc, etc ad nauseam), but this is something I haven't seen before. It felt very fresh to me and wasn't trying to be too precocious. I wouldn't mind having one of those on my wall.

I also liked the performance pieces, which can be quite tricky to pull off. You have to find that delicate balance between accessibility, getting your idea across but not so heavy handed that viewers feel like the artist is talking down to them or being so esoteric that the audience gets turned off.
The first piece was birds made from snow by Hannah Lagoon. They were scattered around the gallery and slowly melting. As the basement is fairly old, the floor sloped at interesting angles, so the water was pooling in bunches here and there. I don't think some people even realized that it was a piece, as I saw a few visitors standing in the puddles.
The other performance was far more jarring and discomforting. Ever seen the movie Donnie Darko? Remember Frank?

This freaked the crap out of me when I saw that movie

Take the creepy down just a couple notches, subtract some clothing, add mud, and you get the monster rocking in the corner. I was too chicken to poke him or interact at all, but I think that was the point. It definitely lived up to its title: "Unsettled." I don't know where Rachel Moretto came up with the idea for that, but it totally made the show in my opinion. You're walking along, like, "Oh, some minimalist watercolor paintings....black and white photos....sculpture on the floor.....Gah! What is that and why is it looking at me? Wow, this basement suddenly feels a lot smaller....Okay, it can go away now."
It added a nice note of discord, that without it the show would have been good but not so memorable. Everything else then took on a bit of that off-ness, and I looked at the rest of the work again, made aware of what might lie beneath the surface, focusing on the meanings more than I did on my first look through.

Overall, I was really impressed with the Gunnar Collective's first outing. There were a few pieces I was pretty ambivalent about, but when I consider that some of the artists are still in college, I at least could see the beginnings of their artistic explorations. I'm interested to see what these artists will be making five years down the road. They're making a good start.

(And don't think I'm some sort of art savant--they had cards with a map of the space with all the titles and artists listed)