Technology overload? Join the club. But should one have even a casual interest in the intersection of art, technology and digital culture, the Soap Factory's exhibit "Art(ists) on the Verge" is a must.
A collective effort now in its third year, "AOV" is the brainchild of the media-oriented arts agency Northern.Lights.mn. This year's edition is a shadowy, compelling experience that features interactive installations by five emerging artists from the Twin Cities who took part in a yearlong program funded by the Jerome Foundation.
Drew Anderson, Michael Hoyt, Caly McMorrow, Anthony Tran and Aaron Westre delve variously into ideas of public and private space, community activism and personal memory in works that challenge the visitor to participate.
Anderson's "Near the Ghosts of Sugarloaf" is rooted in his memory of hunting in Minnesota's North Woods. A large suspended open globe is filled with a landscape of miniature trees and brush. A miniature hunter, sporting a tiny camera as a head, moves slowly along a circular track capturing whatever is in its path.
The viewer enters Anderson's deliberately simplistic tableau by picking up a pulse-sensitive portable projector that suggests a gun. Wherever the viewer moves, the "gun" projects onto the floors or walls what the automaton hunter sees at that moment -- including the viewer. "Sugarloaf" ironically turns the participant into a hunter (or the hunted).
Scale is a critical element in Anderson's charade. The expansive North Woods have been shrunk to a miniature, while the viewer/hunter roams around the cavernous Soap Factory spaces creating individual narratives with the projector. The installation's material and formal clumsiness is Anderson's intended foil to its technology.
Hoyt's "Poho Posit" shoots the viewer back to the real-life terrain of Minneapolis' Powderhorn Park. Through video and a sculptural Google map of the neighborhood installed on the gallery floor, "Poho" gives visual form to the activities -- crime, events, lost cats, items for sale -- posted online on a neighborhood forum. Trained as a painter, Hoyt visited the listed sites, re-created the incidents as hand-painted, stop-motion videos and posted them online.
Using a mouse, the viewer clicks on the map to activate Hoyt's videos. His painterly expressions dress a stolen garbage can or a burglary with poetic reality.