Put on a dozen layers and trek out to the quirky ice-house installations that make up the sixth annual Art Shanty Projects on Medicine Lake.
Word Shanty
Equal parts post office, library and poetry retreat. Get your Hemingway on and pen a six-word short story. Cop a dimestore novel at the no-questions-asked book exchange. Or give serendipity a challenge with the shanty's hand-delivered mail project, which involves letters addressed with vague clues instead of physical locations.
Radical Mapping Shanty
Manned by a crew of rogue cartographers, the Radical Mapping Shanty charts borders both imagined and real. Paranoids can study the "routes of least surveillance" in Manhattan's post-9/11 panopticon, where security cameras spy from every street corner. Techies can find their position on the "global map of online communities." A snarl of colored thread tracks real-life commutes though the Twin Cities on a floor-to-ceiling map.
Ped Pex Power Pod
A great place to stop for a cup of Joe, but you'll have to work for it. The Glidden siblings -- Felicia, Colon and Veronica -- have pitched a half-bubble of polyethylene sheets and filled it with stationary bikes. A few minutes of hard pedaling gets the 200-watt coffeemaker going, which provides a bit of caffeine fuel for the next batch of pedalers. Talk about a perpetual motion machine.
Dicehouses
Mike Hague -- whom few will recognize as the mayor of Mount Holly, Minn. (pop. 4) -- has created a giant Yahtzee roll on the frozen lake. Each of five oversized dice houses a picnic table and an impressive battery of old-school games (including "Don't Break the Ice"). Says Hague, "If you get six people playing a game in one of these dice, it will raise the temperature 15 degrees, simply from the warmth of their conversation and camaraderie."
Artcar Taxi Shanty
If you're hungry, you can get a hot dog here. If you're nice, you might get a ride to shore. And if you ask why proprietor Mina Leirwood is wearing a polar bear costume, you might get a primer on global warming and energy consumption. Look for the car with the not-so-ironic XTINCT vanity plate parked outside.
Le Dépanneur de la Front de Libération Québecois
This Canadian Quik-E mart is doing double time, hosting both Art Review Preview's library of zines and alternative press, as well as Art of This Gallery's absurdist tribute to the Québecois separatist movement. Expect ketchup-flavored potato chips, smoked meat sandwiches and a cranky David Petersen yelling, "Fermez la porte, s'il vous plait!"
Nemo Shanty
Hands down the spookiest shanty this year. Half-submerged in the ice, this rickety submarine is unlocked and unmanned, inviting explorers to poke around at the quirky remnants of a disappeared crew.
A Paper Shanty
A shanty made entirely out of paper and paper-related products. Dip inside and make some origami.
The Third Level
The most conceptual of the shan-
ties. Envisioned by Lucas Kaski
and Peter Sowinski, the three-story structure is "an observation tower, in both the literal and figurative sense." Think of something that's haunting your life -- Catholicism, say, or Gatorade -- and then climb the ladder. You'll find enlightenment when you get to the Third Level.
Black Box Theater Shanty
Bedlam Theater's tiny performance space returns, featuring live music, puppetry and other spectacles.
The Imperial Transarctic Exhibition
This year's most well-crafted shanty is also the one with the most heart. Charged with the idea of replicating Ernest Shackleton's marooned Antarctic expedition -- during which trapped explorers camped for two months on a floe of ice -- adventurous souls from the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative set out on a similar mission. Traveling all the way from North Carolina, the artists braved brutal temperatures to construct their shanty on the ice with only hand tools (most shanty folks do their building offsite), camping as they went along. Like Shackleton's crew, everyone survived. But with plans to live on the ice for six weeks, they'll have to keep their wits about them.
Confessional Shanty
A mini-chapel on ice. Kneel at the altar and write your dark secret on a slip of paper. Then step outside and see the secrets of others stapled to the outside walls: "I night eat," "I was drunk when I voted for president," etc. The only unauthorized shanty this year -- hard to believe they were denied a grant -- the Confessional Shanty folks may have some confessing of their own to do.
Bike Race Shanty
The bluntest of ironies: a heated room made out of old refrigerators. Shanty regular Mitch Redepenning warms up here in between his "bi-cicle" races.
K-ICE Shanty
Art Shanty Projects organizer David Pitman is living and sleeping for the entire six weeks in the loft of his shanty, which doubles as the studio of micro-radio station K-ICE (97.7 FM). His strategy for staying warm? "A 30-below-zero sleeping bag and a 90-pound dog." Stop at the cow-spotted box and bring this man some food.
