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    And the People’s Choice award goes to …


    2012 - 01.20

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    Posted in visual art | No Comments »

    Artist Stephen Menart’s steel piece “Hard Top” won the People’s Choice Award for the Membership Exhibition Wednesday at the Duluth Art Institute’s Gallery Celebration.


    (“Hard Top” won the People’s Choice Award and curator Annie Dugan chats with artist Stephan Menart below. Photos courtesy of the DAI. )

    Menart, who has his own blacksmith shop at his home in Biwabik Township, made each part of the turtle separately and special for the show: Forging steel into legs and a tail, using an anvil and hammer to create a shell, the mouth cut with a chisel and all welded together.

    The turtle was colored with a bronze patina, which Menart applied with a brush.

    Menart has had pieces in the Membership Exhibition for years, favoring animals. His pieces feature walleye, dragonflies, chameleons, sea turtles, a blue heron. He’s showed his work at the Minnesota State Fair and at summer festivals where he sets up his blacksmith shop and creates pieces in front of an audience.

    “It was really an honor,” he said of winning the award. “I was really surprised.”

    Menart said he spent part of the exhibition hanging out near his piece.

    “I kind of like to stand in the shadows and watch how many people are attracted to it,” he said. “It sat in a cluster of two or three pieces and it drew a lot of attention. People were looking at it. One guy picked it up. I’m not sure you’re supposed to do that.”

    “Hard Top” didn’t have a price tag at the show, but he said it is — and all of the art he makes — is for sale.

    Menart got his start in welding while working at Erie Mining Co. and LTV Steel. He jokes that this was his art school, though he had to learn to deviate from the way he did things on the job.

    “I was brought up on straight lines,” he said. “I went to work as a welder and it was all straight lines. I had to allow myself to do curves before I could do artwork. That’s what freed me to do what I do today.”

    Menart already has a rough plan for what he’s entering in next year’s Membership Exhibition.

    “I’m plotting,” he said. “I would say I’m leaning toward a reptile, and I’m not going to tell you what it is.”

     

     

    Dylan’s art exhibition raises questions


    2011 - 09.28

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    Posted in music, visual art | No Comments »

    The authenticity of Bob Dylan’s depictions of scenes seen in his travels around the world, part of his exhibition of paintings and artwork “The Asia Series” now at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City, are up for debate according to the New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog.

    … Since the exhibition opened on Sept. 20, some fans and Dylanologists have raised questions about whether some of these paintings are based on Mr. Dylan’s own experiences and observations, or on photographs that are widely available and that he did not take.

    Possible non-Dylan sources include images by photographers Henri Cartier Bresson, Dmitri Gessel and Leon Busy.

    The post includes a blurb from the Duluth-born folk star from the exhibition catalog.

    “I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work. What I’m trying to bring out in complex scenes, landscapes, or personality clashes, I do it in a lot of different ways. I have the cause and effect in mind from the beginning to the end. But it has to start with something tangible.”

    This is like that time a a poem by a young Robert Zimmerman about a dead dog was unearthed by a former summer camp mate and was set to be auctioned off by Christie’s. Then everyone found out the poem  wasn’t an early sign of literary genius, it was actually an early sign that he knew the lyrics to an old country song by Hank Snow.

    Evan Taylor gets spacey with his art


    2011 - 02.25

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    Posted in video, visual art | No Comments »

    When Evan Taylor tells people that he is a Studio Art and a Biology major at Gustavus Adolphus, the response is usually along the lines of: What’re you gonna do? Illustrate textbooks?

    In early February he demonstrated  a place where art and science collide when he sent a weather balloon outfitted with a Styrofoam cooler holding a video camera and a GPS system about 125,000 feet into the air to capture footage.

    For comparison sake, this is about three times as high as an airplane flies — and incidentally required conversations with the FAA. He is not the only person to have done this experiment.

    “I watched $800 fly into the air,” said Taylor, who is from the Mankato area and worked here at the Great Lakes Aquarium this past summer. “Once it went into thin air I just thought ‘Oh crap. It’s gone.’”

    The GPS was programmed to send back location information every 10 minutes, but Taylor lost contact with the balloon for about three hours. He and a friend headed toward Faribault, and when they finally reconnected with with the navigation system they found they were less than 10 miles from where the gear landed in the snow, making just a 6-inch divot.

    He was able to watch the footage on his laptop as they traveled back to Mankato. The video from the less than 3-hour space tour (above) includes the ascent, the weather balloon bursting, and the fall back to earth — slowed by a parachute.This is compressed into a video that lasts just more than 2 minutes and is set to music.

    He says on his Vimeo site: “The idea sparked when I climbed to the highest point of Oahu, Hawaii to take photographs, and realized that I wanted to go higher…into Space.”

    Taylor doesn’t have big plans to top this feat.

    “I told all of my friends, I need help getting my bucket list together,” he said. “Not that I’d be trying to top that. For me, I think so many people have nothing but good ideas. Just go do it.”