FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 9, 2015

Contact: Erin Lauderman, 612.625.9685, elauderm@umn.edu

Opening the night of Northern Spark, five Twin-Cities-based artists tackle the manifestation of time in Local Time.

MINNEAPOLIS The Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota presents Local Time (June 13, 2015 September 13, 2015), featuring five Twin-Cities-based artists whose work addresses time as both subject and practice. Through reference, metaphor, and in time-based practice, the invited artists take up the subject in physical, aesthetic, and philosophical terms. The works in Local Time further distinguish themselves by also addressing the idea of place. Opening on the evening of Minneapoliss dusk-to-dawn art festival Northern Spark, one inspiration for the exhibitions central theme, Local Time will use that unique nine-hour format to further highlight its subject.

Connecting the Weisman to its location, Alexandros Lindsay introduces both Mississippi River water and video images of the MSP airport into the gallery. The flickering images foreground the centrality of timeas marker, transition, and structurein the experience of the space we know as the airport. Using a slowly and carefully timed dripping from a vintage water tank into a shallow pool on the gallery floor, this work plays with the ubiquitous connection of time to the idea and reality of rivers. The first drop will fall from the tank at the start of the exhibition at 9:00 p.m. on June 13, 2015. The last drop will fall at the exhibitions end at 5:00 p.m. on September 13, 2015. Lindsays installation asks viewers to contemplate for themselves the experience of time in and beyond a specific place.

Memorials are inherently about time as they recall events and people of the past. In Pritika Chowdhrys mobile and temporary memorial, Silent Waters, a field of slightly larger-than-lifesized ceramic feet, glazed black inside and out and filled with always evaporating salt water, spread over the gallery floor. Addressing the ferocity of ethnic violence, this site-specific installation uses the basically androgynous body fragment of feet as surrogate for the absent defiled bodies of victims.

In The Radical Domestic, Sam Gould, founder and principal participant of the collective, Red76, establishes the WAM gallery as one site in a network of sites where Gould and invited collaborators will engage the question of where the home and the street merge, overlap, collide, and flow into one another. Centered around a national forum on this question being pulled together at the site of the artists home, the WAM gallery will function as a meeting and planning space. Using a table collectively and publicly built at WAM, the artist will engage members of the public in informal discussion on the projects question. The Radical Domestic not only accepts but embraces the notion of time taken for planning, discussion, creating, and evaluating as not just ancillary aspects of production but as a key aspect of all meaningful work.

Behavioral artist Marcus Young presents a contemplation on perpetuity with nonessential objects from the Weisman collection placed in and beyond the oft-overlooked gaps of museum space. Keep This Forever Forgetting Here is an experiment connecting time, space, object, and awareness. Exploring traditional museum practice, Young chooses objects that have never or are rarely shown and situates them purposefully in unexpected locations to seek what is, deep down, the path of insignificance.

Choreographer Morgan Thorsons Still Life is a new dance work comprised of three ensembles performing endurance-based sequences that are programmed to occur at scheduled intervals in the WAM gallery throughout the run of the exhibition. Debuting on the night of Northern Spark (June 13-14, 2015), Still Life will highlight the endurance of both action and stillness with three long-form performances, each lasting three hours, and will continue to traverse the season with performances through the summer (from near solstice to almost equinox). Still Life not only makes time transparent, but takes it as its motivating subject. As a key aspect of the dance, time is expressed in measured, synchronized movements as interval, duration, action, and decay. Still Life will also feature a newly commissioned score by New York-based composer, Dana Wachs.

In collaboration with the Cowles Center for Dance & the Performing Arts, two open rehearsals of Still Life will be held April 24 and 26 from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. in the Target Education Studio on the second floor of The Cowles Center. This will be the first opportunity for the audience to become entwined with the performance and influence the arch of the presentation, based on the response of the viewers. This open format allows the public to give feedback and allows Thorson to provide direction in real time to the dancers.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Local Time is organized by the Weisman Art Museum. Still Life is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by PS122 in partnership with the Weisman Art Museum, The Cowles Center for Dance & the Performing Arts, and NPN. The Creation Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). The Forth Fund is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information: www.npnweb.org.

Still Life residency support provided by The Cowles Center for Dance & the Performing Arts. After the exhibitions closes, The Cowles Center will present a final stage version of Still Life for the Goodale Theater in their 2016-2017 season. For more information on how to attend the open rehearsals visit thecowlescenter.org/calendar-tickets

ABOUT WAM

Since its origin in 1934, the Weisman Art Museum has been a teaching museum for the University of Minnesota. Today, education remains central to the museums mission to create art experiences that spark discovery, critical thinking, and transformation, linking the University and the community. The Weisman Art Museum is located at 333 East River Road, Minneapolis, on the University of Minnesota campus. Admission to exhibition galleries is always free.