Art review: Still kicking

In its first exhibit since the controversial resignation of its 31-year director, Stewart Turnquist, the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP) is inviting a bit more controversy. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts program is showing the politically charged prints of Ruthann Godollei and Mike Elko, along with an adjoining room teeming with the dark gloom and chaos of the Twin Cities art collaboration Hardland/Heartland.

Godollei and Elko are masterful printmakers, and both are scorchingly anti-administration and antiwar. Godollei creates her monoprints with forceful, decisive strokes that briskly capture even such a complex object as a wheelchair with such deftness that it pops out from across a room. Her mostly white images emerge from their murky, dark backgrounds with a fine, ghostly aura. Above lines of gravestones is the phrase: TROOP REDUCTION. Below the words EXTENDED TOUR we see the empty wheelchair. Above a freshly dug grave and a shovel, we read: RE-DEPLOYED.

Elko uses Photoshop to transform vintage, highly graphic print advertisements into his own updated social and political commentary. Mostly digital prints, they are visually convincing and full of cleverly done additions and funny new wording.

An ad illustrates crazy gear for wearing an actual American flag on top of your head, "for those times when a lapel pin just isn't enough." On the cover of Depressing Confessions magazine, we see a blonde holding her head in anguish: "He told me he was compassionate and conservative, but he alienated all my friends and spent all my money. I chose the wrong man!"

Elko's "My Presidents" is a visually striking series of 10 panels, each 11 feet tall, with mostly unflattering depictions of the past 10 presidents adrift in an intense blue sea.

Those in political agreement will like the messages and laugh at the sarcasm. Those who disagree might not be charmed. But what's at issue isn't the politics, but the artistic form of the message. Individually, each of these would constitute a very sharp political cartoon. Lined up on a museum wall, the accumulated effect is overkill, especially with two separate artists addressing the same target in similar tones.

United States of 'We'

Some pretty odd objects are strewn about: a painted wall from someone's house; a speaker topped with strange brass bottles and candles, and what resembles a giant, heavily decayed buffalo head. In piles here and there, one finds plastic flowers spray-painted black and a deer skull coated in melted black plastic bags. Two black axes hang on one wall. A poem by a friend describes a shipwreck.

Despite the gloom and an occasional aura of arcane ceremony, this is more than a playpen for Goths. One long wall is packed high and low with collages, many set in cheap drugstore frames, and they highly reward careful viewing. In these surreal juxtapositions, one finds an overall elegance of line, together with the use of large expanses of blank space within many images. Both traits recall art deco English artist Aubrey Beardsley, as does the exhibit's general feeling of delicacy and decay. In their basic design, many collages display symmetrical forms remindful of ornate candelabra; in fact, there's a minutely done, realistic drawing of an actual candelabra in the mix.

The group has a music and performance-art dimension, and symmetrical forms reappear in low-tech videos that have a mirrored split image of the sort found in kaleidoscopes.