Intersections Exhibition Catalog (PDF) - Minneapolis College of Art ...

ESSAY (CONTINUED)
TEMPORAL CROSSINGS | Painters love to look back in time. Patricia Olson and Roxi Swanson
used Intersections to deepen their engagement with art of the past. These figurative
painters switched places with models featured in famous portraits from art history as
a way of metaphorically getting inside the skin of inspirational masters, as when Olson
represented herself as Max Beckmann in his 1907 Self-Portrait in Tuxedo.
This dialogue with the past becomes denser
yet when Swanson represented Olson in Egon
Schiele’s Portrait of the Artist’s Wife Standing,
and Olson placed Swanson—tattooed arms and
all—in Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’s 1851
portrait of Madame Moitessier. Paying homage
to tradition in such a literal way, without irony,
is risky in an art world that values individuality
and singularity above most things. Intersections
offered Olson and Swanson the perfect opportunity
to challenge these unwritten assumptions with
a game of art historical time travel.
A number of the teams address, either directly
or indirectly, the issue of temporality in their
projects for Intersections. For example, Elaine
Rutherford, Steven Lemke, Nate Burbeck, and
Chloe Briggs developed an installation about
their shared interest in remembering, which
explores the relationship of memory to souvenirs
and mementos. Projecting images of their own
vacation snapshots onto a wall dotted with
blank wax tiles and gilded frames ready
to “receive” memories, this group presents a
network of object-containers meant to trigger
viewers’ memories. Any object, it seems, can
serve as a container for an entirely different set of
memories or associations. But why do this? This
group surmises that the past is forever gone,
yet human consciousness projects its experiences
of the past, its memories, onto objects in the
world, and thereby these things become “home.”
Similar insights about temporality and experience
are illuminated by the project of printmakers
Sara Downing, Stephanie Hunder, and Elizabeth
Sunita Jacobson. This group devised a method of
working independently to coauthor a set of large
prints that are palimpsests. Each artist worked
alone printing images, then left the prints for the
next artist to pick up, consider, and respond to.
Each session of printing yielded a visual message
of sorts sent forward to the future.
By turning the creative process into a series
of relays played out across time, this team’s
process reveals one of our most repressed
phenomenological senses, consciousness of the
temporal axis. So caught up are we in the present
moment, we forget the uncanny truth that every
image we make, every text we write, functions as a
message from the past sent to the future.
Time is not linear. The installation by Linda Rossi
and Alec Soth maps points of intersection in the
paths of these artists’ lives over the course of
twenty years—first as teacher and student, then
as professionals working in their field. We tend to
conceptualize history as an arrow; our individual
trajectories progress along its line forward in time.
By calling attention to the illusive intersections
of time, space, and human consciousness, Rossi
and Soth’s installation about Carleton College’s
Goodsell Observatory charts points of convergence
that reveal wildly eccentric trajectories that
crisscross in uncanny ways and make it
impossible to conceptualize time as a forward
linear movement. In this installation, we see
that time is not a line, but rather a cluster
of fragmentary events that mingle and flow in
innumerable directions.
INTERSECTIONS