Livin' off the fat of the land

WHAT: The New Land of Milk and Honey
WHEN: Opening night performance 8 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
WHERE: The Soap Factory, 518. 2nd St. S.E.

In our all-talk-no-walk society, people are always willing to devise and praise utopias, but when confronted with the actuality they fear living in a universe that might not drench everything in high-fructose corn syrup. Soap Factory’s new exhibit, The New Land of Milk and Honey, aims to take that next step as its focus, exploring the idea of a utopian society through communal living.
“This entire project is presenting our ideal situation to the public. Not everything has been fully realized yet, but this is our plan; how we eventually would like things to turn out,” said former Target designer and current New Land of Milk and Honey artist Annie Larson.
The back-to-the-‘60s cabaret is the brainchild of three Minneapolis-based but Wisconsin commune-affiliated artists that include Larson and siblings Brett Smith and Erin Smith. Staying true to its cause, the exhibit will be manifold, featuring a plethora of hippie art by hippie folk.
The radical exposition will promote craft communes and community-supported agriculture, as well as such communal capers as music, art, herbal balms, prenatal learning, bread baking, solar wave exchange and “electronic sleep.”
Although the different branches of the project have a common root in the countercultural movement of the ‘60s, the artists are aware of their 40-year departure from the decade of love.
“The way most [modern communes] formed was from knowing people that grew up on back-to-the-land communes of the ‘60s. The children of those hippies went to the city and went to art school, went to college, and now they are deciding they want to go back to the farm,” Brett Smith explained.
Although it would seem logical that their simplistic ideals might yield distaste for the convolution of high technology and the World Wide Web, these communers are not intimidated by progress.
“Technology is always beneficial,” Larson said. “Our ideal community involves the use of Segways and gyroscopic technology. We don’t have any aversion to modern technology at all.”
Brett Smith added, “[With the Internet] we can now gather together, access and sell items to the larger world. There is a resurgence of community-supported agriculture with people buying from someone who’s growing or someone who’s crafting, and I think that has a lot to do with the Internet.”