MCAD houses diverse exhibit

McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship Exhibition
WHO: Michael Kareken, Aldo Moroni, Carolyn Swiszcz and Piotr Szyhalski
WHERE: Minneapolis College of Art and Design
WHEN: July 9 - August 13; Opening reception July 9, 6 p.m. - 8 p.m.
COST: Free

When you hear that an art college is going to put on a show displaying what four distinguished artists have done with a year-long grant, it wouldn’t be remiss to anticipate an indulgent room of mirrors in which old art professors unabashedly toot their own esoteric horns.
The McKnight Artist Fellowships program, hosted by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, on the other hand, will not be the aforementioned ego-fest for a couple reasons. One, because the prestigious grant drives one of the most grueling selection processes of its kind, plowing through nearly 240 applicants and arriving at four. Two, because the four selected artists are good … really good.
Aldo Moroni , an artistic veteran of the Minneapolis scene and a 1976 MCAD graduate, does not abide by the age-old adage that Rome wasn’t built in a day. In his piece, he will be working from 10 a.m. to noon throughout the exhibit’s tenure, building a fantastically detailed mini-empire comprised of Styrofoam mountains, moss grasslands and detailed clay landscapes à la traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Then, at the end of the day, a hard rain a-falls (by way of a scantily hidden hose) and destroys Moroni’s hard day’s work.
“It’s has to do with our vanity and our nonchalant attitude toward this restricted, limited planet,” Moroni said.
“[The piece] is my struggle against the material. It’s my struggle against my own ego and it’s my way of imposing myself on a landscape,” he added.
Michael Kareken teaches full-time at MCAD, but took a year-long sabbatical to focus on junk. That’s artistic junk. Kareken’s drawings and paintings feature intriguing masses of broken glass, scrap metal and cardboard from various recycling plants in the Twin Cities area.
“[The waste] on one level is obviously incredibly disgusting, but I also find a lot of beauty in it on many different levels. So the paintings are trying to find that balance between the disgusting nature of it, the decay of it, the chaos of it and the beauty that I find in it too,” Kareken said.
Piotr Szyhalski’s multimedia exhibition is the newest installment of his Labor Camp project, a complex and ongoing look at history, sound and time and how the three are related. Carolyn Swiszcz’s piece is a hodgepodge of paintings and videos in which urban landscapes and melancholy themes take the forefront.
Even though the exhibit is a collection of work by older, established artists, Kareken said that its timeless subject matter and the quality therein should interest college students.
“The work is, in every case, engaged in the dialogue of contemporary issues in society,” he said. “I think students will find the ideas in the work really interesting and exciting.”