ESSAYS

Essay: Doomed To Repeat: Art, Memory & Historical Reenactment

Catalogue: Pay Attention: GM08

By Christopher Atkins, Coordinator, Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program

Doomed To Repeat: Art, Memory & Historical Reenactment

“In other words, we rely upon the overly simple circle which has as its content the passing present and as its shape the part of reminiscence. However, the order of time, time as a pure and empty form, has precisely undone that circle. It has undone it in favour of a less simple and much more secret, much more torturous, more nebulous circle…” – Gilles Deleuze

 

To some, there’s comfort in the notion that ‘history repeats itself’. If historical events can be thought of as a set of similarly recurring episodes, then history is a resource that can be drawn from for the experience and knowledge necessary to stem imminent wars, natural disasters, and cultural upheaval. Instead of being unprepared by the future, we’re able to predict it. This way of thinking about history does a few things. In terms of how history is written or visualized, it creates a series of events that succeed each other while creating affinities to what has already happened. More problematically, the trouble with ‘history repeats itself’ is that it creates, through repetition, too tidy an equivalence across events that are actually very different. We’re more interested in creating a likeness rather than appreciating the nuances of what has happened that make every event unique.

When it comes to recalling personal histories, there is just as much, if not more, at stake. The internalized memories and external events we experience and contribute so much to who we perceive ourselves to be are always on the verge of being lost. We might even say that in order to keep from losing our memories, and with them our identity, we remember events as we’d prefer them to be rather than as they really were, if that is even possible. In repeating the events related to the first day of school, the funeral for a loved one, and a failed relationship over and over in our mind, each of these is narrated and re-narrated by affects as well as the events as we remember them. So, while there is a very distinct fear of forgetting, there is also something added to and created when we attempt to recall a succession of events as they occurred.

To the artists in this section, all of whom are interested in past events, works by writers and film directors, and news media, history is a resource but it is also full of inaccuracies. Through their use of high-tech reenactment, images culled from the internet, and staged events, they critique history and documents in such a way that asks us to reconsider them as imperfect records and critique our assumptions of how the past is narrated.

One of Jan Estep’s pieces for Pay Attention: GM08 is discussed in another section of this catalog but her project for 2007’s McKnight Fellowship, Trail Map to Wittgenstein’s Hut, takes up her interest in history and visual documentation. Estep’s map is a record of her trip to the woods of western Norway in search of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writing refuge. While the project pays particular attention to his philosophy of language in relation to her larger body of work, the resulting take-away trail guide, part pilgrimage and part recorded performance, is a personal cartography that makes a claim to provide you with directions to a specific location. Yet Estep’s project is not just an adventurer’s log about arriving at a specific location in the wilderness.

Rather, instead of leading you towards a preserved landmark, the map ends at the site where the hut once stood. All that is left are the remains of the foundation and, as her accompanying photos show, the ruin is overrun with fecund moss and trees, and is slowly disappearing into the landscape. The hut isn’t a protected monument and as time goes by, it will become more and more entwined with the natural surroundings then disappear. Before it slips further and further from view and from memory, Estep’s documentation of the site have captured how both nature and building are discernible but inseparable, and that any project about memory must also make room for loss.

Eric Carroll’s photograms, large scale lo-fi photographs printed on blueprint paper without developing chemicals, a lens, or shutter, are mono-chromatic contraries to the monumental over-produced color images that many photographers are printing these days. Carroll’s work is more interested in subtracting the camera machinery and photographic fussiness to see the limits of what photography can accomplish as an imaging-making device and its ability to record events. For a recent project at Augsburg College, All Buildings Dream in Blueprints (Student Art Show) (2008), Carroll covered the gallery wall with photosensitive blueprint paper and quickly rehung the immediately preceding exhibition. Then, exposing the gallery to light, the framed paintings and drawings slowly burned their imprints into the paper. What’s left is a strange remnant that only records the spectral outline of each work in the exhibition that isn’t overly concerned with the details of how each painting or drawing actually looked; Carroll’s photogram records the work in the Student Art Show at the level of lingering presences as they were (re)installed, without the specific details that would make it easier for us to recognize them.

For GM 08, Carroll continued with a similar technique where he created a photogram of his band’s rehearsal studio. While the work is not a record of another artwork in the same way that All Buildings…is, it is analogous to other records produced in studios like cds, vinyl lps, and mix tapes. Each of these compresses time-lapsed information into a physical object. Carroll’s photogram, as it is installed on the wall, compresses the three dimensions of the studio and the delayed photogram exposure time into the flatness of the blueprint paper. This compression of time, space, and information into one location means that something must be omitted and that whatever record is left behind, photogram or otherwise, it represents only a portion of the studio space. The key is to not compare the representation to the actual place but look at the gap between the two as the creative additions/subtractions of information that are made in each and every artistic representation.

tectonic industries’ video installation The possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately three thousand, seven hundred and twenty to one (2008) focuses on the tenuousness of memory and recollection. On each of the 12 monitors, we watch as a volunteer walks in front of the camera, makes their best attempt to recall the entirety of the original Star Wars Trilogy in the space of an hour, then walks away. Because the project is focused on each participant’s recollections we don’t see the special effects, characters, and the individual scenes that have come to mythologize the film. The longer we watch, we become keenly aware of the tenuousness of words to recreate, in this case, the details and nuances of the Star Wars Trilogy. While our memory is one of our most precious resources, something we’re both willing to share and keep completely private, it’s also an inaccurate record of events and experiences. Memory is full of embellishments and imperfections, and when asked to recall a piece of it, we do what we see here: perform a recollection rather than the event itself. After all, the act of memory occurs in the present instead of recreating the past.

In a previous project, The longer I sit, the less inclined I am to stand up (2006-7), tectonic industries filmed another set of volunteers as they followed recipes dictated by the television chef Rachel Ray. Her show can be heard in the background as we watch these women hurriedly prepare and struggle to keep pace with the televised instructions. These attempts at matching Ray or struggling to follow her recipes uncover underlying anxieties about self-improvement and idealized gender-types. And there’s a certain kind of melancholy as we watch; while the camera follows them around the kitchen as they move from stove to table to cabinet, it keeps a lock on their best attempts to finish the recipe. Yet, try as they might, it’s clear they just can’t keep up.

Pete McLarnan’s Death Wish suite of videos are spare yet cinematographically accurate recreations from the 1974 film directed by Michael Winner. Filmed alone against a white curtained sound stage, we watch McLarnan as Charles Bronson as Peter Kersey repeat short scenes from the film. Without the mise en scene that contributes to Death Wish’s urban anxiety and climate of fear, McLarnan focuses on scenes where Kersey finds himself in kill-or-be-killed showdowns, and how these become moments of transformation. After his wife and daughter are murdered, he goes from family-man pacifist to vengeful vigilante. But when he goes out in the evenings packing a pistol, he seems surprised by the trouble that always finds him.

Many reenactments, whether in film, fine art, or live action, are as invested in mythologizing the past as they are with accurately recreating events. And just as often, homages and memorials to previous artists or artworks show us just how heavy a burden history and ‘influence’ can be for an artist, that you should make sure to account for your precedents. In McLarnan’s videos, there doesn’t seem to be either, or perhaps it is equally both; they don’t fall back on elegiac tributes to answer our collective ‘Why Death Wish’? By obscuring whether there is an artistic or cinematic debt McLarnan owes to Bronson or Winner, we can ask broader questions on how our Kersey achieves ‘self actualization by way of the gun’ and his vigilante justice.

In his most recent project Moorehead Rumble (2008) McLarnan continues to elaborate on the theme of reenactment, this time on the events surrounding a street fight as they occurred in his hometown of Moorehead, Minneosta. Ramping up the production value and scale of the project, and including a cast of volunteers, McLarnan restaged a street fight that occurred in 19___. Moorehead Rumble pulls double-duty as both a documentary of what happened and as a sort of memorial. Most public monuments take the form of bronze marbleized erections plopped onto a green space. And with war memorials especially, publically mandated memory relies on inscribed names of the dead and dates of an event to carry and contain all that there is to remember. Everyone and everything is accounted for. Looked at another way, we’re just as likely to forget what happened as we are to remember. Like Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave (2001) McLarnan’s Moorehead Rumble looks at what happens when historical events aren’t remembered with physical event-markers and are, instead, reenacted through body-to-body interaction. Both projects deal with, among many other issues, the premise that violence is a social phenomena and that, through performance, it can be better understood through living history rather than a monument.

The Stolen Identity Project (2006-7), a photo essay and publication by Andrew Schroeder, is a fascinating reenactment. After his PIN was stolen and bank accounts emptied, Schroeder used the subsequent trail of ATM and restaurant receipts to trace the steps of the identity thieves as they traveled through Bulgaria and Macedonia. With a curious sense of fascination, Schroeder traced their steps and sought ‘to reunite my conceptual, digital self with my actual, physical identity.’

It’s one thing to reenact scenes from a movie or an historical event. It’s something quite different to return to and document an event from your own past, especially where something was taken from you. Once he was informed by his bank that his account information was stolen, Schroeder became acutely aware of the unique cultural phenomena that each of us has a vulnerable virtual identity separate from our physical selves. While the damage to this ‘virtual self’ was mitigated by the bank, Schroeder’s project makes something out of what happened.

By taking the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of those who wanted to remain hidden, photographing their steps with featureless captions during his travels, he has turned the theft of his identity into a productive event in the form of a photo essay and publication. Yet, with the absence of people in each shot, Schroeder is always too late to catch up to his conceptual self. We see, as he follows the trail further and further, how identity isn’t always formed through a set of personal and internalized memories and experiences, but is also constructed by banks and phone companies using external technologies and virtual identities that can be cleaved and appropriated from our physical selves.

Kirsten Peterson is an artist who works with photo reproductions screen printed onto matte Duralar sheets. Culled from internet news coverage and video sites, her project is, in part, to aestheticize documentary coverage of natural and ecological disasters. With an infinite range of images at her disposal, Peterson’s interest in this material began shortly after the tsunami disaster that struck southeast Asia and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While there are many more, these are only the most recent and most widely covered events where she has focused on the images of urban destruction and architecture falling into ruin.

The works in Peterson’s Infrastructure series aren’t reproductions from the mediated scenes of natural disasters and the environments where so much was lost. Not wanting to further narrate events that have already been saturated with media coverage, she begins with videos of building models assembled for shaking table tests. In each there is an uneasy and quiet remove from the scientific study of earthquakes by hard-hat clipboard toting engineers creating carefully controlled disaster re-enactments. Peterson works to describe the need for empirical knowledge about earthquakes but also shows the attendant indifference towards what actually happens during disastrous events. In other words, we see a simulated disaster not ‘a disaster’. Where are the remains of buildings, people, and communities that have been destroyed, swept away, and are no longer there? Retaining the pixilation of the images, she reminds us that her screen-prints are based on found/appropriated footage and, importantly, that the grain of the image is like our own ability to remember disastrous events; video is a high-definition record yet is actually a constructed image and not an infallible memory technology.

To some extent, all artists deal with history. Some do so through a direct conversation with Art History while others creatively cite their influences. The artists that I’ve discussed here have gone deeper in asking questions about the narration and recollection of historical events (i.e., how are they written and by whom). While ‘history repeats itself’ may not be as comforting as we previously thought, there are those who will always find it easier to register similarities instead of admitting to the difficulties of and blockages to recalling an event. Even though we often fall back on an instinct to record events so they can be archived and replayed, dupicated and shared, we have to remember that while they may be captured with exacting detail, in their new presentation, fine art, video and sound recordings can capture events only as long as we agree that they do so ‘differently’.


Essay: The desire to stay versus the inevitability of change

Catalogue: Franklin Art Works

By Ben Heywood, Executive Director, The Soap Factory

The Desire to Stay Versus the Inevitability of Change (2008)

If you provide an explanation for the phenomenon then the film becomes science fiction; we’re not making science fiction.

“Birds” is a thriller, hence we leave out any explanation – Alfred Hitchcock on The Birds (1964) [1]

 

The gallery space is in darkness, and on either side of the room runs a single rank of monitors, each on its own white plinth. On each monitor plays a video image of a single individual, waiting silently and watching, out of shot, what must be another monitor (or maybe just a TV set?). They sit patiently, and attentively, but resigned. These are ordinary people: one must assume, by dress and racial make-up, the artist’s friends? They seem to be a pretty representative middle-class lot, young, old, male, female, parents and singles.

The settings in which they are placed are aggressively, uncompromisingly domestic: a son goes to the fridge behind his father, settled on the comfy sofa, to get a soda. On another screen a doorbell rings, someone goes to answer: dogs enters the room, are petted, then shoo-ed away. A woman hugs her comforter closer for warmth, her eyes never leaving the screen (the screen we can’t see) in front of her. A young man with a spiked haircut takes a swig of beer from a can. A boy stares intently, prostrate, arms crossed under his chin in his darkened bedroom, lit only by the blue glow of the screen (that we still can’t see!) in front of him. Who are these people? What are they doing? What are they waiting for? Their body language is all wrong for people at home quietly watching TV. And then they speak.

The sentences are a semblance, a simulacrum, of dialogue, the words making no sense. Their words are intoned and passionless. Worse still, for the viewer, it is clear that they make no sense to speakers either. It is as if they are speaking nonsense, reading random words from their heads. What’s going on? Why are they behaving like this? What’s wrong with these people?

The Desire to Stay versus the Inevitability of Change (2008) morphs the familiar settings of home, hearth and TV into the utterly obscure. This is a world that looks the same, sounds the same, but is seemingly operating on very different rules from our own.  These individuals on each of the monitors appear to be nothing less than inexplicable versions of science fiction pod people [2]. What we appear to be witnessing is nothing less than a domestic apocalypse, as people wait patiently in front of their TV sets, the blank signal washing over them as they await their inevitable end [3].

The work of Lars Jerlach and Helen Stringfellow (tectonic industries) has as a theme, a concern with storytelling and the construction of memory. As immigrants to the USA (from Denmark and the UK) that concern is directed as the particular, peculiar construction of American memory and how American stories are told. For My Wife Is So Proud Of Me…(2002-05), the artists excavated a suburban yard in Wisconsin, and presented the pseudo-archeological artifacts as a narrative of human occupation that was, essentially, that of nothing at all. The Desire to Stay versus the Inevitability of Change (2008) is a similar thought experiment on American story-telling and memory, an experiment conducted with the single-minded rigorous and accurate discipline of the film director and auteur. [4]

The experiment is one of meaning and authenticity in contemporary culture. The action is to take an existing cultural artifact (in this case, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film of The Birds [5]), and purge it of all meaning, save for bare narrative itself; the text as written [6]. By stripping the film bare of all clues to its narrative, the experiment intends to examine how we, as passive consumers of popular culture, recognize and re-tell the stories of our culture. In an age were we can know every detail [7] of every aspect of every artifact, where does the true experience of culture lie?

Thus the choice of The Birds as the vector for this thought experiment is inspired; a film with no soundtrack, a limited set of well defined characters, and a movie rooted in genre convention and at the same time off-the-wall bizarre. It is a film that we have all heard of, and that, in the simple of act of reading its title, tells us its plot. Yet it’s clear, as we engage with The Desire to Stay versus the Inevitability of Change (2008), that while we have the ability to ‘know’ everything about a film, what we lack is the authentic experience of the film itself. Thus the narratives that we construct for these artifacts are ones that we perform ourselves. These are narratives of hearsay, gossip and conjecture, or autistic tangles of interlocking facts, nuggets of information paraded as a substitute for knowledge. In their reductive experiment, the artists have made a passionate plea for authenticity in cultural experience.

The irony of The Desire to Stay versus the Inevitability of Change (2008), however, is that while the piece ostensively exists to interrogate our own passivity when confronted with our own culture, and makes a case for an authenticity of experience, the experience of the work itself, in the darkened gallery, eerily cycles The Birds back round to an original, unintended authenticity. Divorcing the narrative from Hitchcock’s admittedly bizarre and disturbing neo-surrealist images of a sunny northern Californian town mysteriously besieged by birds, replete with the usual Hitchcock tropes of feisty blonde, spurned brunette, straight-edge hero and creepy mother, The Desire to Stay versus the Inevitability of Change (2008), creates an intimate and domestic disquiet much closer to the original novella. [8] Stripped of all that we know of it, The Birds, mutated into The Desire to Stay versus the Inevitability of Change (2008), becomes a set of forever isolated individuals, staring at the TV screen, smoking their last cigarette, waiting passively for the end of the movie, accepting that in the absence of knowledge we can only experience, and when experience is ended, all we are given to do is to wait patiently for our next line.

 

 

 

[1]  The Birds was originally a novella by the English writer Dame Daphne du Maurier (Du Maurier’s most famous novel is Rebecca, filmed by Hitchcock in 1940 with Lawrence Olivier. She was married to Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick “Boy” Browning, disasterous British airborne commander at Arnham, played by Dirk Bogarde in A Bridge Too Far 1977). The Birds was first published in 1952 in the short story collection The Apple Tree. Hitchcock made The Birds in 1963, with newcomer Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, Rod Taylor (the star of George Pal’s The Time Machine and, in 1970, Michelangelo Antonini’s Zabriskie Point), and Veronica Cartwright (Cartwright’s tearful whining stood her in good stead for Ridley Scott’s Alien in 1979). This was the first film that Hitchcock worked with Albert Whitlock, a fellow expatriate and Oscar-winning matt painting expert who created the vistas of the seaside town and the birds. The film has no musical score, but all the bird sounds are electronic, created by Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane 1941, Jason and the Argonauts 1963, Taxi Driver 1976). The film is to be remade by producer Michael Bay with Naomi Watts and Directed by Martin Campbell (Edge of Darkness BBC TV 1985, Golden Eye 1995, Casino Royale 2007).

[2] Invasion of The Body Snatchers (1956), based on a short story by Jack Finney (The Body Snatchers 1954), and directed by Don Siegel (Dirty Harry 1971, Charlie Varrick 1973) Remade in 1978 with Donald Sutherland, it was remade again 1993 by Abel Ferrara (Driller Killer 1979, Bad Lieutenant 1992) as The Body Snatchers, and finally in 2007 became The Invasion, with Nicole Kidman.

[3] I am Legend, a novella by Richard Matheson (who wrote Duel, Steven Spielberg’s first feature), filmed as The Last Man On Earth (1964), with Vincent Price, and as The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston (part of his trilogy of survivalist desperation including Soylent Green 1973 and Planet of the Apes 1968), and most recently with Will Smith as I am Legend 2008.

[4] Before filming the final attack scene when Melanie goes upstairs to her doom, Tippi Hedren asked Alfred Hitchcock, “Hitch, why would I do this?” Hitchcock’s response was, “Because I tell you to”.

[5] Op cit

[6] The script for The Birds is by Evan Hunter, who as Ed McBain wrote the 87th Precinct hard-boiled police procedurals, 56 books from 1956 to 2005.

[7] Tippi Hedren’s silver roadster is a 1954 Aston Martin DB2/4 Mk1 (very appropriate for a feckless heiress), and that when persued by the birds from the schoolhouse, she and Veronica Cartwright take refuge in a 1960 Dodge Polera, while Jessica Tandy, rather mysteriously, favours a 1956 Ford F250 pick-up. I can also tell you that it was Albert Whitlock who created matt paintings that allowed Paul Newman to roam through East Berlin in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966), and that Whitlock’s last film was the Antarctic vistas for John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).

[8] Du Maurier was writing in the British tradition of the domestic apocalypse, perhaps best exemplified by the work of John Wyndham (The Day of The Triffids 1951 The Kraken Wakes 1953, The Midwich Cuckoos 1957), John Christopher (Death of Grass 1955, A Wrinkle in the Skin 1965, Empty World 1977), where the war-time ethos of “keep calm and carry on” and the disappointment a poverty of the late 1940’s was synthesized with the squalor and hopelessness of a nation defeated by an implacable and inexplicable enemy in a stoic existentialism. This theme in British fantastic literature reaches its apotheosis in the work of J G Ballard (The Drowned World 1962, The Crystal World 1966, The Atrocity Exhibition 1969, Crash 1973)


Essay: The longer I sit, the less inclined I am to stand up

Catalogue: Third Floor Emerging Artist Series, Rochester Art Center, Rochester, MN

By Kris Douglas, Chief Curator

tectonic industries
The longer I sit, the less inclined I am to stand up.
March 28 – May 28, 2006

“ For the millions of us who live glued to computer keyboards at work and TV monitors at home, food may be more than entertainment. It may be the only sensual experience left.”1

To comment both directly and indirectly on contemporary societal conditions, artists often utilize material collected from popular media and turn it against itself. The use of familiar images and concepts, combined with a mode of presenting back to the viewer new forms that mimic or question the original, invites a critique of the broader processes involved in understanding aspects of our culture and ourselves. In the eight-monitor video installation The longer I sit, the less inclined I am to stand up, tectonic industries (Lars Jerlach and Helen Stringfellow) focus attention upon the television cooking program, the cult of the celebrity chef, a cultural obsession with food, and our seemingly endless search for self improvement. Their subject matter has the capacity for numerous societal and cultural comparisons, and their work becomes an appraisal of contemporary Western society in general, its motivations or lack thereof, and the inherent artifice involved in creating entertainment out of an everyday act of necessity.

In this installation, the viewer is confronted with eight television monitors each showing an individual preparing a meal in their own kitchen, following the directions of the Food Network’s 30 Minute Meals host, Rachael Ray. The chief premise of this popular cooking program is that a meal, both delicious and nutritious, can be prepared and presented within the total length of the program. Within the publicized description of the show itself, the notion of either saving or appreciating more leisure time becomes readily apparent—“now you can put great food on the table, and still have time to enjoy your family, friends, or tackle that home improvement project you’ve been waiting to get your hands on.” The videos presented in the installation focus on the individuals attempting to replicate the meal preparation, while the voice and instructions from Rachael Ray echo in the background. The continuous presence of this voice, and the fact that an image associated with this voice is not emphasized, is compelling to the viewer for numerous reasons—Rachael Rays’ voice acts as both a subtle identifier of the topic in question, and provides commonality while accentuating differences across the individual monitors. The voice makes the audience aware of a similar goal between participants, and as we watch the individuals attempting to complete their meals, it becomes difficult to avoid evaluating their progress by judging the speed and quality of their work. Because this activity is based on participation versus passive absorption, we may begin to question the authenticity or believability of the show’s overall principle. Can these people really finish cooking on time? Will their meal be sufficiently similar to that of the professional? Will it taste or look as appetizing as Rachael Ray’s meal? Are we meant to actually record programs such as this, take detailed notes, purchase ingredients, replay the program, and actually follow through?

This work also invites us to consider the current elevated status of the televised cooking program. Once relegated to public television and other education-focused channels, food programming is now big business, with a network of its own allowing for round-the-clock access to programs featuring chefs-turned-personalities to engross the audience. Consequently, these cooking programs ride a fine line between education and entertainment. This video installation allows viewers to consider the important distinction between these increasingly blurred concepts. As television monitors are spreading into schoolrooms, vehicles, restaurants, and other public spaces, we are bombarded with both entertainment and “edu-tainment.” It is also relevant to consider the presentation of this video work within an art center, as cultural institutions are increasingly challenged to recognize, without being completely seduced by, the audience’s desire for passive entertainment. As such, the artists seem to call attention to the context of the physical location of the work— how is the content of a cooking program experienced differently when walking among monitors at an art center versus at home on a couch? As the title of this piece suggests, the more that the viewer remains passive, the more the viewer will struggle to become active, perhaps creating a cycle of unrecognized dependency.

This work also confronts, in an understated way, a cultural obsession with food. Prone to extremes, fad diets, restriction, gimmicks, and labeling foods as “good” or “bad,” we are also a culture, as the quote at the beginning of this text suggests, yearning for sensual perceptual experiences such as those experienced when preparing and consuming food. But can we derive pleasure, purely through observation? Certainly, we experience auditory and visual stimulation, but the cooking program attempts to go beyond this by having the host describe for us how the food smells and tastes, so as to share this experience. If that does not satisfy, then we may find ourselves looking for a convenience food, something much less complicated to enjoy while watching the program. This wanting for pleasant sensory experiences and our attempts to pull them from the television also relates to our sometimes-passive approach to pleasure-seeking and self-improvement, and perhaps our attempts to attain a certain success-by-proxy.


Kris Douglas 
Chief Curator, Rochester Art Center, Rochester, MN

 

1 Barbara Ehrenreich, author and social critic

 

About the Artists:

tectonic industries is a collaborative art partnership founded in Europe in 1999 by Lars Boye Jerlach and Helen Stringfellow. The members met in Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland, where both were pursuing Master of Fine Art degrees in sculpture. Recognizing overlaps in ideals and approach to art, the pair began collaborating on large-scale installations. Lars, a native of Denmark, and Helen, a native of Britain, moved from Europe in 2001 and currently live and work in St. Paul, Minnesota. Their work has been seen in numerous exhibitions including: Tuesday Night, 8pm, Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI; My wife is so proud of me…

, Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis, MN; No Name Exhibitions Project Room, the Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN; Ready, Set Go!, Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Anchorage, AK; Physical similarities do not necessarily indicate close relationships, CSPS, Cedar Rapids, IA; Untitled III, Soo Visual Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Document, TIXE Art Space, New York, NY and YOU ARE HERE, Citywide Art Event, Various Venues, Nottingham, UK.