Groundwork, an exhibition opening in Dreamsong gallery in Minneapolis this week celebrates our human connection to the ground. As one exhibition artist Ana Mendieta puts it when she references her artistic endeavour: ” from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy.” All artists partaking in the exhibition promote ‘terra firma’ both as their subject matter and medium. Groundwork is showcasing in the Twin Cities as part of a Wakpa Triennial Art Festival with opening reception taking place on June 22, 2023.
The artists, who span generations and territories across the United States, include: Sydney Acosta, Teresa Baker, Moira Bateman, Liz Ensz, Hannah Lee Hall, Alexa Horochowski, Kahlil Robert Irving, Seitu Jones, Stephanie Lindquist, Gudrun Lock, SaraNoa Mark, Ana Mendieta, Alva Mooses, Ryan Gerard Nelson, Nikki Praus, Ian Tweedy, and Mathew Zefeldt.
We can state that the exhibition is a call for planetary matters and ecological awareness. A soil is the context and source for enlivening nutrients. It is a semiotic signifier of territory and identity, as well as a land/site of conflict over indigenous rights and environmental protection. There is of course a tradition of the Land Art of the 1960s and 1970s. The artists in Groundwork are not purposefully having dialogues with pioneers like Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer, and with a perhaps romanticized idea of ‘empty’ Western landscapes. The artists, rather, wish to discuss their homage to detail, paying more attention to what it means to connect to locally embedded and lived histories. And as such the exhibition relates to questions of how the past legacies echo into the future.
“Adopting anticolonial, queer, feminist, environmentalist, and other critical lenses, they seek communion with the specificities and spiritual meanings of place, burrow into the legacies and experiences of their ancestors, and express concerns about our collective future.”
Many artists consider the direct consequences of a fast-deteriorating planet, and their art acts as a kind of site-specific artistic research project showing the case of climate change. Forest fires, colonialist over-use of land, mining, resource extraction, droughts, damages from conflict; the list is endless when we start thinking of ancestral time and memory that it evokes in the context of land and soil.
Focusing on land in artwork, in which ground acts both as subject and material, the exhibition wishes to engage in the conversations about the earth’s preservation. What do different local contexts and materialities mean? What are the disputes about, for the people with ancestral rights that bear spiritual and physical connection to the territory, to heritage? How about modern built environments with technical challenges in preserving the soil and environment?
In each of the exhibited artistic projects, metaphorically, the future will be grounded as long as there are innovative strategies that learn from the histories they wish to navigate.
“the indelible connection between our modern built environment and its raw material is made explicit, our vast inscription upon the earth metaphorized by materially innovative strategies that seek to collapse the boundaries between history, place, and representation.”
The exhibition is organized by Public Art Saint Paul. The inaugural edition responds to the theme “Network of Mutuality”, a phrase from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, which speaks to social justice, mutual care, interdependence, and inextricable links among humans.
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Dreamsong is a space for contemporary art comprised of a gallery, a standalone Cinema, and an artist’s residency. Our program is focused on intergenerational emerging and mid-career artists from Minnesota and beyond, with an emphasis on female-identified and under-recognized artists. Founded in June 2021 by Rebecca Heidenberg and Gregory Smith, Dreamsong is located in Northeast Minneapolis.
Featured Image: Stephanie Lindquist, Tasting Tart Cherries, 2021, acrylic, and cyanotype on canvas,
40 x 48 in.
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