Art review: Social studies

It reads like a lame ethnic joke: How many people does it take to analyze the housing crisis? Answer: 7 architects, 2 landscape architects, 9 designers, 5 artists, 4 scientists, 1 writer, 1 illustrator, 2 graphic designers, 3 futurists, 5 community advocates, 2 photographers, 3 capitalists, 2 filmmakers, 6 educators and 1 gallery to show the stuff they made.

Just imagine trying to corral that crowd and to focus their collective attention on anything, let alone a problem as sprawling and ill-defined as the economic crisis that has left blocks of Minneapolis pockmarked with foreclosed homes. Behind those shabby facades and neglected yards is a tangled story of displaced families, strained social safety nets, economic exploitation, vandalism, drug dealing, prostitution and other crimes.

So what's a chic art gallery like Form + Content doing messing about in such turbulent social waters? It's using the shrewd analytical skills of more than 50 professionals to untangle the causal relationships behind the mess, to humanize mind-numbing statistics, and to suggest relevant design and housing solutions. By presenting vast tracts of information in vivid formats including audios, videos and a clever Rube Goldberg-style marble game, the show "Unbundling the Housing Crisis" puts an accessible and human face on pressing issues.

"Crisis," which runs through Sept. 5, was organized by Minneapolis architect Jay Isenberg and his wife, Lynda Monick-Isenberg, a department chair at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul. Troubled by the disintegration of Minneapolis' North Side as the recent mortgage and housing crisis unfolded, the Isenbergs decided to tap the expertise of people who are not usually invited to scrutinize such problems.

"The question is, 'Who is at the table?'" Jay Isenberg said during a recent exhibition tour. "Real estate and financial markets often control the social agenda" by asking architects to design housing projects for specific demographic groups or targeted price points. The Isenbergs hoped that more nuanced ideas would emerge if a more diverse group of professionals was on board. Modest grants totaling $3,000 from Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corporation and the Family Housing Fund helped pay for the exhibition; it was money well spent.

The show consists of eight displays fabricated by teams ranging in size from two to 17 people. One compelling 3-D display, "Money on the Block," attempts to track the flow of money in and around a foreclosed house in Minneapolis' Hawthorne neighborhood that was a site of drug sales and prostitution. A surreptitiously recorded video component shows drug transfers among individuals whose identities are concealed. But the money also circulates through city offices, a demolition contractor and as far off as Deutsche Bank. Like the sociopolitical exposés of the German-born conceptual artist Hans Haacke, the "Money" diagram is a fascinating graphic of systemic corruption.

The pièce de résistance is "Table of Contents," an elaborate Monopoly-style board game in which opening-night participants bought properties for $1, built "houses" out of bread and placed them in glass jars on the "lots" they'd purchased. Periodic payments -- in the form of green marbles -- were shunted through copper pipes either to the bank or to a pair of hands (surgical gloves) under the table. Some payments triggered house explosions. Some of the bread houses were made from batter that molded.

A team led by the Isenbergs created a wall-sized map of a 25-block section of north Minneapolis in which 270 homes are vacant or condemned; a smaller wooden model of the city uses burn marks to show three years of foreclosures, some of which are so concentrated that whole chunks of the model landscape have burned out. In another project a landscape team found beauty in the desolation of a now-vacant lot, bringing to the gallery two long planters filled with weeds from the property along with elegant botanical illustrations of native flora found there. Other installations include an innovative model house that can expand and contract as families age, designs for individuals with differing lifestyles and interests, a painting in memory of a now-homeless boy, and a graphic illustration of human and animal adaptation spanning 3.7 billion years.

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431