Arlene Birt, Visualizing Grocery Footprints; Kyle Phillips, Indexical Architecture; Tyler Stefanich, Re-Presented Narratives; and tectonic industries, Perhaps this is the only way of knowing if anything was ever important to you.

Former AOV grantee and current Northern Spark producer, Andrea Steudel documented each of the Art(ists) On the Verge projects at the recent Spark Festival at the University of Minnesota’s Regis Art Center.

Ann Klefstad visited the installations and wrote an essay “The Inside and the Outside” about the projects. Some excerpts.

“The house of visual art’s only restrictiveness is its institutionality, and choice of media has little effect on this. The house of art is already more like a ruin: open to the sky, a site where almost anything did happen and can continue to happen. It is the site that defines what occurs on it.”

“Where Stefanich’s and Philips’ pieces are inward-turning, looking at the relations of human beings to each other, to memory, to the past, the works of Arlene Birt and tectonic industries (Lars Jerlach and Helen Stringfellow) turn outward, to the social and commercial spaces that constitute the public matrix in which we all swim.”

“Electronica and virtuality bring us, again, to the root questions of humanness: Can we create our selves? Can we create our own world? Are we at the mercy of our creations? Are they, rather, under our control? What do we want from what we make?”

Read on…

N.B. AVO2 grantee Janaki Ranpura was participating in the Gwacheon Hanmadang Festival in South Korea during Spark. She will present Egg and Sperm Ride at Northern Spark in June, and she also presented it at the 01SJ Biennial in September.