Harriet Bart: "Reckoning"
Harriet Bart's solo exhibition in the basement-level NewStudio Gallery brings together many of her familiar divination materials like the pendulum (plumb bob). Bart was born to Jewish parents in Duluth during the Holocaust, she has seen times of war (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq), and her work often deals with memory, sometimes commemorating the lives of the forgotten. She explored similar themes in her retrospective at the Weisman Art Museum and Minneapolis Institute of Art exhibit that opened in February 2020, before the continuing world war that is the COVID-19 pandemic began.
The exhibition's centerpiece is a mysterious table setting. There's a metal plate filled with thinly sliced papers covered in text, a single plumb bob and a vial filled with scraps of golden material, among others. The table looks out onto the gallery floor, where there's an arrangement of 12 bowls, each filled with significant material including a mini model of a barn, a pile of film negatives and a bronze cast of a soapstone owl. On the other side of the room, a series of poems titled "Poetry of Chance Encounters" — all in different languages and without translations — hangs on the wall. An evocative soundscape by Nathan Beverage plays as people wander through the space.
Part Harry Potter film and part unfinished theatrical play, Bart's show mystically enchants visitors, leaving them with more questions than answers about the state of our world today. (Ends Dec. 3. Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Free. 2303 Wycliff St., St. Paul. 651-285-2287 or newstudiogallery.com)
Tetsuya Yamada, "Shallow River" at Midway Contemporary Art
Tokyo-born, Minneapolis-based artist Tetsuya Yamada's solo show evokes the body and landscape through ceramic, wood, fired clay, rope, branches, newspaper and other materials. As visitors walk through the space, they'll encounter many carefully arranged objects. A series of six flat, round, shallow bowl-like discs arranged on the floor look like checkerboard pieces without a checkerboard. Large ceramic vases tower around like lone trees. Clay molded into tiny balls hangs like icicles. A series of twisted branches held together with string and ceramic beads feels like otherworldly chandeliers. The show's title, "Shallow River," makes one think of drought.
"Yamada's work is equally attuned to the air and its breath-like qualities," writes Alan Longino in the catalog essay. Because people are invited to sit on the ceramic "cushions," there's a "breathable lightness to the work, which in turn expresses an aspiration for pottery and ceramics to achieve the spatial qualities of sculpture."
In other words, Yamada's show feels like walking through a strange forest, a tactile experience that is unusual within the often sterile white walls of a gallery. The same is true of his solo exhibition at Hair + Nails Gallery last fall, where he built many smooth, small-scale ceramic skateparks, an ode to his adolescence — but also made ceramics feel that much more sculptural, malleable, transcendent and accessible. (Ends Dec. 1. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sat. Free. 1509 NE. Marshall St., Mpls. 612-605-4504 or midwayart.org)
Luis Fitch, "Dead Serious" at Viewpoint Gallery
Tijuana-born, Minnesota-based artist Luis Fitch's solo exhibition is made up of various limited-edition screenprints that offer darkly comical messages about climate change.
In his artistic practice Fitch, who founded Latino-focused creative agency UNO Branding, plays with designs that emerge through papel picado, the traditional Mexican craft created by cutting intricate designs into tissue paper. He also uses skulls and skeletons most associated with Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead), which happens Nov. 1-2, celebrating the ancestors who have passed on.
The titular piece, "Dead Serious," shows a skeleton inside a table, with flowers and two mourners atop it against a bright mustard yellow background. "Disrupting Weather Patterns" has a greenish-aqua background and shows a black bird, with a tiny tear dripping from its eye, atop a vase with the skull emblem. In the middle of the gallery, there is a Target shopping cart filled with items that Fitch designed for the corporation.
Fitch masterfully uses design to bring a dark comedic edge to the difficult topic of climate change, but the work itself isn't particularly nuanced or subtle, making it feel at times dry. Still, the deadpan visual joke of each piece lands well, making up for the overt nature of the work. (Ends Nov. 26. Hours: 1-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 1-6 p.m. Sat. Free. 591 N. Hamline Av., St. Paul. 612-449-6189 or vp.gallery)
