(Header image credit: "Conversation with Death" by Gabriel Combs)

In an effort to seek out and engage multiple voices and viewpoints from the local arts community, I will present in my space on The Thousandth Word occasional postings by “Vicious Guests” — that is, writings by various artists, curators, guest critics, journalists, art experts, art lovers, and other essential members of the arts community who have a story to tell. The first such story, by 36-year-old local artist Gabriel Combs, is presented here. If you would like to propose a future “Vicious Guest” post, please contact me (Michael Fallon) at: thousandthword(at)gmail(dot)com.

 

Dried Blood and Dandelion Wine

By Gabriel Combs, a "Vicious Guest" (edited by Michael Fallon)


I GOT THIS IDEA THE OTHER DAY to do dandelion paintings.

I was waiting for the 21 bus to go from the K-Mart on Lake Street to Selby and Dale in Saint Paul, where I was supposed to pick up a check for a recently completed mural for a bike shop. Before leaving the studio, and probably because I'd been overly stressed of late about having no actual living space, I'd smoked a couple of onies of low-grade pot I'd found on the street (stuffed in the celophane of a cigarette pack). It had been raining while the sun was shining when I found the pot, and I witnessed a rainbow that day that no one else seemed to notice. The pot helps push back most things - other than art ideas, that is. It's better medicine than most prescriptions.

On the 21 bus, freshly high and scrubbed clean (as clean as one can get from a bucket; I hadn't had a shower or bath in two months), I felt I was trapped in a video game, grabbing the subconscious shade of green through plastic. I pushed the bar on the back door of the bus and heard a Nintendo sound effect of achievement. The dandelion is a common wildflower that goes through an easily recognized metamorphosis. It's often called a weed, though not by the National Audubon Society. It came to mind that I could do a mural-sized aerosol painting of a dandelion after it had turned white and was about to blow away in the wind so it could start its cycle over again. I'd find a decaying area of our lofted city and do several aerosol paintings on the big vertical walls of some urban squat or another. It would be a good job for me and would add something to the landscape.

 

("Canada Violets" by Gabriel Combs)

 

In early June, I was sitting in the downtown Minneapolis jail for getting drunk and making a fool out of myself. I was being a little too honest and a little too much of an ass - probably from all of my recent despair and loneliness - so I ended up in a cell upstairs at the jail. I'd chosen isolation away from the general population of the jail, a choice that gave me only an hour of cell-free time a day. The cell hadn't been cleaned, and some other man's "possessions" were still there on the eating table, caked with his dried blood. I started sporadically reading a book of Sherlock Holmes stories and taking in my surroundings. In one spot there were some clumps of human hair. In another, there were some letters and jail papers. The last man appeared to have been reading and writing in Spanish, but he was listed as African-American on the papers. He was a couple years younger than I.

I was wearing orange jail clothes. Since I didn't know how long I'd be stuck in jail, I stashed two stub pencils in the only place they weren't likely to look for them - in a space between a bar and the round seat at the table. This was the only design flaw in the cell, from a security standpoint. Everything else was simple geometrical shapes with no lips, overhangs, or ledges that could conceal as much as a cigarette. Nothing could conceal my mind and ideas, however. I had been analyzing the psychology of the cops - which was the good one, which was the bad - just from their passing words of weather small talk. Saving the pencils meant I could draw if I ended up in jail very long. I was interested in reading though, and I wished they'd switch the library cart. I must've seen three or four other carts on the handcuffed walk to this room. Last time, they had To Kill A Mockingbird, and I would've liked to read that.

 

(Photo of Gabriel Combs taken on the night of one of his recent arrests.)

 

Two baloney sandwiches and an apple came in a brown paper sack, but I couldn't eat them because my jaw was fucked up from the night I mouthed back to three guys. They beat me up and then called the cops on me, probably because I got back on my feet and produced a pair of bolt cutters to chase them off. They left out the fact that they'd beaten me up to the cops. On my first day out of jail, I didn't get my studio keys or wallet back for four days. They blamed a computer problem for this. The internal affairs forms were useless when they had a faulty machine. I also had a sketchbook that was in police custody from when I got arrested in May. They were throwing the book at me, I guess, ignoring their profit margin on crack dealers, because the sketchbook was supposedly a graffiti book. It isn't graffiti, of course, but there was no arguing.

On the outside, pressed to figure out how to get back to making art, I thought fast and remembered the owners were remodeling an apartment in the building where I rented my basement studio, so I could ask them for a key to copy. I then went to the hardware store to get keys remade. The guy looked pretty sideways at me, and I couldn't blame him. I was unshaven and full of anxiety about the repercussions of going to jail twice within a few weeks. I was fortunate to find this place and rent it for just $190 a month, considering I had an eviction on my record. I'd found the space on Craigslist, and the owners seemed OK with the idea of my using it as a painting studio. I sometimes slept in the studio when I couldn't find a friend's couch to sleep on. It was pretty clean for a basement, though there were plenty of spiders, silverfish, and common house centipedes.

I had a $30.25 check that the jail gave me, which their bank wouldn't cash because I didn't have an ID (it was in the wallet they couldn't give back to me). Luckily, my regular bank is downtown, and they know me, so, despite my embarrassment, I went there to get my money. All was well now, because I had enough paint and art supplies for the time being - plus, some food, my phone, a toilet, and time to think.

I stayed sober through most of June just because I couldn't deal with the panic attacks. On the Internet at the library, with new keys in my pocket but still no identity, I saw a friend who was driving by, and I had a coke with him and talked about my situation. As an artist, he'd been close to the same situation on occasion. I told him I was feeling scarred and rejected by society, especially since I'd spent my entire life trying to make things better in the world by making art.

A week later, I was back drinking, fighting the sense of impending doom because of the upcoming court date. I was probably facing further incarceration for long enough that I'd lose my studio, humble as it was. The studio isn't a home, but it's a place to make art and to keep my art stuff and slight private personal possessions safe. I'm burning the candle at both ends now - at least until I say to hell with it and throw the every damned thing in the fire.

I sometimes can't take the worrying about it all. So what, I think, if I lose two drawing tables, an easel, and various stashes of oil and latex paint? So what if I lose some sentimental objects I've kept safe from harm for thirty years? I've always lived just as chaotic a life as this, but it's been securely enveloped in a series of locked doors. I've always had an official address, and I've embraced the trappings of society - a job, a social life, and a bank account that was refreshed every two weeks but always remained a few dollars short at month's end. There were no frills, just a one-room efficiency, a bike for transport (until it got totaled), no cell phone but a stripped down landline, a little net access, and a bit of liquor every now and then.

It wasn't much, but it was more than I have now. Still, I make more art now.

When I lost my last job two-and-a-half years ago and I was facing financial desolation despite a frugal lifestyle, to make ends meet I copied an idea from printmaking. I would make a complete series of paintings - each similar to, but different from, each other - whenever I had squeezed some paint and the colors and ideas were out and fresh. I've sold over 400 pieces of art since - for prices ranging from 99 cents up to, recently, just over four hundred dollars (my all-time record). I take endless dumpster-diving missions, and I pick up any scraps of real wood I can find, along with scrap-metal from discarded appliances. The tools for getting this metal - including the bolt cutters that maybe saved my life - resulted in a charge of "intent to commit a crime." One of my favorite things to find is dresser drawers, the dove-tailed kind especially -- although they usually need to be sanded first. I make my paintings ready-to-hang by stringing them with copper wire from dead appliance motors and screws from everything I find. Masonite scraps, familiar to many artists, are another valuble find.

Two-and-a-half years ago I simply decided to make a run at this artist thing, and I've been inventing it - rather than just talking about it - ever since. My old friends see me coming and treat me like I'm homeless, which I am, but at least I am fulfilling my dream. They've got the same old complaints, and I have as much apprehension about coming into contact with them as they do me. I also have callouses turned to blisters and back again from the struggle to make art, which they don't.

They'll go back to their homes, partners, and steady incomes. They'll drive to a nice vacation spot this summer, while either I sit in jail or I toil away at my art, working toward selling my one thousandth piece.

(Bike shop mural by Gabriel Combs)

At the bike shop on Selby and Dale in Saint Paul, the shop owner paid me more than the price we agreed upon, saying "I can't possibly pay you enough for your time." The bike shop folk loved the mural, and so did the area residents, which is a confidence builder for someone who, despite the shit he talks, basically feels like everything he paints is shit.

If I lose the last few items I own and my studio, I'll remain as vital as before - if not more so - as that's what this thing is. Being an artist is not a fashion statement that passes with the season; it's not something that hinges on gas prices. Art is something that combines with the culture to establish roots that intertwine with and break up the cement of society so the wildflowers can grow.

Art breaks up a false foundation and replaces it with dirt. I wonder if it's really possible to make dandelion wine...

Travel back with me, if you will for just a moment, to those happy, halcyon days of the year 2001. Oh, what a time to be a young American artist it was!

The world waited breathlessly for the final bombshell in Matthew Barney's Cremaster film cycle to drop (spoiler: Gary Gilmore did it!), and your hipper, richer, better-looking friends were cashing in their trust funds and moving en masse to some sort of Italian-speaking suburb of Manhattan called Williamsburg. Fashionable young men were rapidly perfecting the art of ironic facial hair, and their female counterparts had finally harnessed the unstoppable power of the knee-high boots/vintage skirt/wrinkled Mogwai t-shirt combination.

Oh, what a time to be a young American artist it was!

Amidst all of this excitement and bustle, your humble correspondent was an apple-cheeked 21-year old BFA candidate in Louisville, Kentucky, learning the twins arts of oil painting and quoting Foucault in the course of casual conversation (the latter being a skill set I still have yet to master). Like the rest of my newly-legal art school peers, I typically spent one or two Friday nights a month out viewing challenging video installations and half-baked performance art in the upstairs loft of a decrepit Clay Street warehouse or a little Frankfort Avenue storefront (the former being a favorite target of the Louisville Metro Police Department for repeatedly violating local noise ordinances).

What was it that brought me out to those openings, weekend after weekend? Was it the thrill of newness? The excitement of being part of a community? The chance to hobnob with successful young emerging artists? The opportunity to meet prominent local gallery owners eager to display my crappy paintings of cigarette butts?

Well, sort of. But not entirely. Truthfully, I was there mostly because these spaces usually served free Falls City Beer at their openings. I expect many of my peers were also there for the same reason.

Now of course this isn't the only reason I went to art openings in college. I was there to see some art, too. But if you've been involved in the art world in any capacity, you know this scenario well. It's not Louisville, but maybe it's Northeast Minneapolis, maybe it's Lowertown St. Paul, maybe it's Chelsea, maybe it's whatever the arts quarter of your college town was called; but wherever it is, you know it.

This is one of the first magical lessons of college: dude, they totally have free beer at art openings.

If it's not free beer, it's free wine. And if you're lucky, it's free liquor. If it's not free, it's cheap. And if it's not cheap, your friend working the bar will slip you a cup anyway. The point is, if you have an artsy bent and like to have a few drinks in you, there's no better place to be than an opening on a Friday night. Openings and alcohol go hand-in-hand, like Gilbert and George, like Andy and Edie, like Jeff Koons and the feeling of wanting to punch Jeff Koons in the face.

I began thinking about this after some rumblings in a few art blogs last month following the arrest of New York gallery owner Ruth Kalb during an opening at her gallery in the East Hamptons. The charge was violating liquor laws and entertaining without a license. Normally the goings-on of the Long Island art world have little interest to me personally, but this is really a universal theme. How many art openings have I been to that have been shut down by the cops for this very reason? Not a lot, but certainly a notable handful.

Moreover, how many openings have I been to where someone got a little too drunk on the house wine and wanted to start a fight outside about the relative merits of shooting digital vs. Super-8? Or where the gallery owners had to kick someone out for sloshing their drinks a little too close to the artwork? Or where the aftermath of the night's festivities was a catastrophic scene of discarded beer bottles, crumpled plastic cups and sticky spots on the floor? More than a few.

Then again, there have been the many times when I've thanked the booze-soaked ghost of Jackson Pollock that I had a little cup of wine to look at the art with. Openings can be awkward, stifling affairs. People go to openings to see art, sure, but they also go for a multitude of non-art related reasons.

People go to openings to see who else will be there. People are there to impress their friends and confound their rivals.

People are clustered in unnatural little conversational groups - you're spending a half-hour talking to that sculptor whose name you never remember, an adjunct professor you once had, your younger brother's fiancée and that girl that works at the co-op, all at the same time. None of them have met each other. They all expect introductions.

People are nervous. People want to look good because they may be photographed by The Minneapoline and get their pictures on the Internet. People want to look good because their ex-girlfriends will be there with their new, hotter boyfriends.

Galleries can be stuffy and overheated in the summer and drafty in the winter, and a lot of the time it's impossible to even see the art, much less form a coherent opinion about it because people are so crowded around it. If there is music, the music is loud and you have to shout over it. Even worse, the music may quite possibly be "experimental" in nature.

You often have to seem smarter and/or cleverer than you may actually be.

Needless to say, a little beer or wine in this context can be a godsend.

It gives you something to look busy with if you're by yourself, and gives you a little bit of impetus to talk to people with whom you might not otherwise think of much to talk about. It's a scientifically-established principle that alcohol makes you smarter, or barring that, at least more confident about seeming smarter. Standing in front of a canvas with a little cup of wine in your hand feels right. It feels natural.

From the gallery's perspective, it can be helpful, too. It draws people in, for one. Healthy attendance numbers look good on those grant applications. If it's a commercial gallery, a little libation gets people in the mood to buy. If the alcohol is donated, the gallery can even cover some additional costs in the process. No huge profit margins, obviously, but enough to make it worthwhile.

I talked to the directors of a few Minneapolis galleries to get their take on the subject. Was serving alcohol at openings worth it? The general consensus, of course, was a qualified "yes." But within that consensus, there were a range of opinions. Everyone I spoke to wished to stay anonymous, for obvious reasons, so you'll have to use your imaginations.

There are some legal issues involved in serving alcohol, of course. Obviously, you can't sell it without a license. Actually, legally, you can't really even serve it without an entertainment license (you can read all the statutes yourself to your heart's delight here on the city's website). What you can do, though, is suggest a donation, and so this is the way most of the gallery owners I spoke to went about things. A lot of it really seems to be semantics - most galleries you'll go to will have a posted sign asking for donations, and that covers some of the liability, anyway. Everyone was careful to stress that they run a clean house as far as underage boozing, outdoor drinking and slopped-out jerkiness are concerned. Young-looking types get carded, people aren't permitted to wander around the street outside waving their beer bottles, and troublemakers get the boot. This generally keeps police and city inspectors away. As one owner pointed out, the cost of a license is a piddling little amount compared to attorney's fees. Another even went so far as to regular hire off-duty cops to keep everything nice and legit for larger, more heavily-attended openings.

Legal issues aside, there are also the behavioral and trash disposal issues. Most owners here, as well, had specific strategies for making sure people have fun without landing everyone in the drunk tank or the Broken Bottle Fight Injuries Ward at HCMC. Openings occur for a specific and set amount of time, end before the neighbors start complaining, and filter out collectively to neighborhood bars afterwards so people have somewhere to go and finish the conversations they started. Everyone I spoke to recycles bottles and plastic.

Basically, all gallery heads reported back to me that their crowds, though they do love the beer and wine, are pretty reasonable, intelligent people that aren't there to bankrupt the gallery, start fistfights or urinate Phillips vodka on the video art set-ups. Mostly they come to see art, meet up with friends, and generally have a good experience. The setbacks are far outweighed by the benefits. An art opening is, in the end, about the art - if it was just about boozing, all of our local gallery runners would be nightclub entrepreneurs instead. This is as it should be. Because let's face it: Minneapolis, to her eternal credit, has much better galleries than it does nightclubs.

So enjoy your beer and/or art this weekend, and just make sure the empty bottle makes its way to the recycling bin.

There are certain works of art the body wholly understands before the mind kicks in with its distancing powers of disembodied detachment and analysis. In the Twin Cities, there is very little art in the public realm -- in what we now call "the commons"-- that does this. Most public art, strained through the cheesecloth of three or four bureaucracies, is earnestly mediocre, almost by necessity. Much of what wins competitions is "plop art," dutifully commissioned to meet the tithing requirement for one-percent-for-art public building projects.

I can think of a few exceptions --not many-- where viscerally beautiful works have come to see the light of day as public art despite the pitfalls of the commissioning process. One of them is the Heilmaier Memorial Bandstand, by the artist and architect James Carpenter, the bandshell with the saddle-shaped roof of glass on Raspberry Island in the river off downtown St. Paul. Another (right nearby, actually) is the powerful "Floodwaters," the roiling torrents of cast bronze flanking the southern gateway to Harriet Island Park, by Jeffrey Kalstrom and Ann Klefstad. Yet another, a work beautiful against all odds, is one that was never primarily intended as sculpture but turned out to be more compelling to the senses than many things currently called that. It is the new Martin Olav Sabo Bike and Pedestrian Bridge that spans Hiawatha Avenue and the light rail tracks adjacent to it, just north of 26th Street in south Minneapolis.

The Sabo Bridge, named in honor of the congressman who secured federal funding for the project, is of a type known as a "cable-stayed bridge." Although they employ cables, the mechanics of cable-stayed designs are different from those of suspension bridges like the Brooklyn or the Golden Gate. A display panel on the bike path's western approach to the bridge explains the design principle. From an engineering standpoint, a cable-stayed design presented the most elegant solution to the problem of spanning six lanes of traffic and two sets of light rail tracks without having to resort to intermediate support pillars in the middle of the road. The design wasn't imposed on the site; it was inspired by the site's constraints.

The first time I saw the bridge was when I drove under it one evening at dusk a few months before it was completed. Its structural logic made itself understood on first sight. I felt it right away in my bones, sensing the forces working through and upon it the way people sense the rightness of the lines of a boat. Every one of the elements, the incredible back-bent mast, the deck, the fanned-out cables, the backstays converging onto bulwarks rooted deep in the ground, gave expression to the insight of the biologist D'Arcy Thompson that "structure is a diagram of forces." The bridge's structure correlates with something internal, with one's felt understanding of the structural mechanics of one's own body. The sensation of it being in some way analogous to the way you yourself are put together tempts me to call the bridge a work of figurative sculpture-abstract, but nonetheless a human-figural representation of the forces and counterforces; metaphorically, of a tug-of-war; a stevedore hoisting a pallet aloft with a block and tackle, a puppeteer, a fisherman casting a fly. It is what it is --a bridge-- but it triggers a chain of associations. It arouses the imagination in ways that few works of public art seem able to do, inert with virtue as most of them are.

Call it a bridge or call it a sculpture, the new Sabo bridge is an inspired work, a piece of lyric engineering in the tradition of such masters of structural music as Santiago Calatrava, Pier Luigi Nervi, Eero Saarinen, and Frei Otto. Its elegantly tapered steel mast, backbent at an angle almost equal and opposite to the angle of its massive, similarly tapered concrete footing below the bridge deck, is a form sprung from the soul of Brancusi. The bridge is a stirring sight as you approach and go under the deck by car or light rail, and it doesn’t disappoint up close, when you walk or ride a bike over it. It is lovingly detailed: the workmanship in the steel and concrete is rigorous and clean, the care of the contractors readable in the panoply of the hardware, in the tensioning turnbuckles, tie rods, and railing cables, in the dramatizing spotlights mounted alongside the protective rubber boots on the ends of the bridge cables where they connect to the deck, in the backstay cables as their sinews converge in massive connectors to the concrete footings on the ground below.

Cyclists in colorful gear flash across the bridge like shuttles of a loom. The balusters of the bridge railings are shaped with a bend like the mast’s. The railings themselves—the thin tension cables that pass through the balusters--are like the lines of a musical staff. They make the balusters read like the bars on a musical score, and a little like the frets on a stringed instrument, which in a way this whole construct is. The bridge is a lyre, a harp strummed by the wind. Reach over the railing and touch one of the cables that hold up the span. You can feel it thrum.

The melancholy in the eyes of the gorilla imprisoned in the zoo, I think it is real. He is confounded by the loss of his freedom. He sorrows at what his captors have evolved into.

Minneapolis has two life-size bronze sculptures of gorillas by the late British artist Angus Fairhurst, who this past March committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree in a forest in England at the age of 41. One of them is in the courtyard of the Chambers Hotel at Ninth and Hennepin; the other is sited on the green outside the west window of the Walker Art Center.

Fairhurst had a gift for imparting a brusque and powerful animality to clay, pressing life into it with his palms and his thumbs, building the figures in a way that I think gorillas themselves might do it if only they could. The bronzes are empathic. They make me feel what it is to be a gorilla, thickly stupid in some ways, surprisingly intelligent in others--not that different, in other words, from the condition of being a man. Now they are husks, all that's left of Fairhurst's struggle to inhabit his own body, a beast that in the end he could only subdue by choosing to kill it. No one can presume to say why.

 

The gorilla in the Chambers courtyard is cordoned off and hemmed in by chairs and tables on all four sides. Fairhurst titled it, "A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling." The figure stands gorilla-style, the weight of its massive torso supported on the knuckles of its right hand as it gazes down upon its left arm, which--it is a shock to see--lies severed on the ground before him, lopped off like the limb of a tree. Looking at the gorilla's face, it's impossible to plumb what he's thinking or feeling as he contemplates this part of himself that is no longer part of himself: Unspeakable pain? Detachment? Perplexity? Incomprehension? It's hard to say, and, unable to cross the threshold of speech, he can't tell us either. He isn't even a faithful replication of a gorilla. The way the clay was worked, kneaded and pressed, formed into lumps and concavities, the surface doesn't look anything like the hirsute coat of a gorilla. It's closer to something like scar tissue or wads of putty, melted wax or clumps of tar. Every passage in the sculpting of it is evidence of an impassioned and playful hand, but the piece, in tragic retrospect, speaks of a man amputated from his own hope of connecting, the discounted instrument of his grasp lying inert on the ground.

Crouched low on the lawn outside the Walker is Fairhurst's other gorilla, this one rapt by the reflection of its face in a pool. His monumental hands grip the edges of the simulated pool of mirror-polished stainless steel as if to prevent the image from escaping his grasp. Every vector of his body says that his eyes cannot drink enough of what they see. Avid for the image, his body is tensed and alert-parallel to the ground but hovering over it like its lover, his whole force straining towards the object of its fascination, one leg advancing as though thinking of entering the pool.

What does he see? His head is so close to the mirror that unless you get down on the grass to look up into his face you cannot see his eyes, only their reflection in the mirror facing the sky. The gorilla in the Chambers courtyard has no eyes to speak of; just sockets, almost as though he is too dim to have a pair to see out of. But this one, titled "The Birth of Consistency," sees, and is transfixed-it could be with horror, it could be he's seeing the birth of Comedy, we cannot be sure. He is in the throes of the revelation of what is to follow, the next stage, the stage that will lead to us. Narcissus puts his lips to the pool; the image trembles, dissolves. Before he left this life, Angus Fairhurst cast in bronze all his longing to be one with it. It is a pity he is dead; until he stared into one too long, he was a mirror to the world.

If an exhibition inspires imaginary conversations with William Blake, William Gibson, and Terry Tempest Williams in the same breath, it seems safe to assume that there's something going on: something that just might live up to art's potential to intrigue, confound, and, ever so slightly, alter the way you perceive the work at hand – and, ambitiously, the world at large. Most importantly, though, the two artists that curator and Franklin Art Works director Tim Peterson has brought together here entice us to let our imaginations run loose: Richard Galpin invites us to get lost in the compelling geometry of Tetratopia's visionary cities, while Margaret Pezalla-Granlund's Fallen over the Horizon; or, Crash at the Putney Velodrome eclectically pits sci-fi allusions – complete with portals and wormholes, against the mundanely ordinary; think Dairy Queens, swimming pools, airstrips, and racetracks. Both artists investigate the possibilities of re-imagining familiar architecture, and challenge us to immerse ourselves in this geometric imaginarium. The only entry requirement, Terry Tempest Williams might add, is a mind ready to go wild in the presence of artistic creation.

Richard Galpin's imaginary cities result from a process that renders the putatively two-dimensional photographs of cityscapes into quasi-sculptural pieces. Galpin carves and peels the photographs' colored surface layer with mathematical, surgical precision. What remains are geometric clusters of visual information on white paper that bears the marks of this concentrated stripping. (A video on view at the gallery and online documents Galpin's process.) His titles both number the cluster and reference an imaginary city: Cluster XXII (Rhizopolis) (2007), shown above, intrigues with its promise of rhizomatic subterranean growth in the emerging geometric pattern, while other clusters – evocatively titled Pteropolis, Sporopolis, or Cirrhosopolis – reference feathers, wings, spores, seeds, or clouds.

This bridging of the natural and the architectural, this imagining of cities that organically grow out of naturally occurring patterns, may sound like science fiction. The visual reference points the video provides help set Galpin's geometric abstractions into a fascinating context: Galpin starts with Russian Kasimir Malevich's influential Suprematism, a style reliant on severe geometric abstraction, and Liubov Popova, another Russian painter and designer of the late 19th and early 20th century, before turning to a slew of German influences, such as biologist, philosopher, and artist Ernst Haeckel (the father of phylogeny), Hermann Finsterlin, visionary architect, painter, and poet, Wenzel Hablik, whose plans for crystalline architecture are as fantastic as they are obscure, and Kurt Schwitters, whose famous Merzbau sought to translate Dadaist ideas into the realm of sculptural architecture. Most of what these visionaries planned, driven by the urge to imagine a dazzling range of future possibilities, may very well have been considered science fiction in their day and age.

Historically speaking, what all of these influences share is their debt to modernity's narratives of progress. Yet while we know today that this unfettered belief in progress was tragically and irrevocably shattered by two world wars, in the work that Galpin references, this belief still seems innocently intact. All of these artists and architects and thinkers and poets and painters shared the belief that their architectural and artistic dreams could indeed serve as a means of altering the way we, as humans, are in and experience the world.

Lebbeus Woods, the only North American and contemporary architect Galpin includes and mentions by name in the video, articulates his view of architecture like this: "I am an architect, a constructor of worlds." This architect does not bother with mere buildings or with creating environments; this architect constructs worlds. Taken literally, this is the stuff of science fiction.

A few more words on Woods, who seems to be a prolific and provocative character: Architecture, to him, means being at war "with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms." Here, architecture means resistance to what is and demands the creation of new, adventurous forms that do not abide by established authorities, whether political or aesthetic. (As an expatriate Austrian, I cannot help but mention that on Woods' Web site, a short video shows the imperial architecture of Vienna's inner city being sneakily invaded by the lines of architectural drawings. Like alien intruders, these lines stealthily move and creep, assemble and dissemble fluidly, as if organically, brushing past Rachel Whitehead's formidable Holocaust Monument, a.k.a. Nameless Library (2000), on the Judenplatz. Architecture becomes a tool for remembering and breaking with the crimes of the past, critically interacting with the legacies of the past while envisioning a drastically different future.)

In Tetratopia, Galpin continues on this trajectory of visionary architecture, though undoubtedly with a less belligerent air than Woods. The clusters of this series result from a reduction of information, a selective erasure that resembles nothing so much as a visual tuning out of white noise. The original photographs of buildings disappear into white space. But the white background is not just negative space but intensely textured space that bears the marks of being peeled and cut and ripped. From this surface, the complex patterns, whose base elements often seem to rely on rectangular shapes (as in Tetratopia), emerge as if stepping out of the chatter of architectural and visual information overload. These patterns, despite their stability, seem ephemeral, poised to kaleidoscopically realign at a moment's notice. They emphatically bring to mind nodal points, sudden aggregates of high-interest data in a given field of information, a term coined by legendary cyberpunk author William Gibson. Galpin's work carves these nodal points out of the photographs and thus reveals the underlying clusters of relevant visual information.

Pezalla-Granlund's installations are equally interested in exploring underlying patterns: meteoric orbits, looping bicycle racetracks (a.k.a. velodromes), and spirals converge in Fallen Over the Horizon; or, Crash at the Putney Velodrome. Using plywood, foam core, wood, glue, and tape, as well as watercolor and collage on paper, Pezalla-Granlund creates installation pieces that sit on high wooden frames (Franklin Art Works provides two stepping stools for a top-down view). These skeletal stilts of sorts are necessary to accommodate all the extensions and protrusions that emerge from the models of velodromes, Dairy Queens, pools, and airstrips. The geometry of the curvilinear shapes – the artist refers to them as "portals" – are pitted against the sheer verticality and sprawling horizontality of other formal elements: ascending mountainous shapes and descending wormhole-like structures expand vertically, while the airstrips in Cheyenne/Enneyehc (2008) stretch horizontally, providing a compelling contrast in a carefully orchestrated collision of shapes.

Margaret Pezalla-Granlund, Pool(s) Portal, 2008, detail. Foam core, ink jet print, acetate, glue, wood. 61 x 49 x 25 1⁄2.

In fact, this body of work, which also includes a number of two-dimensional pieces, engages with the idea of collisions in a number of ways: The meteor's crash into Earth and the collision at the Putney velodrome are, without doubt, the most obvious ones. But there are others. While the portals and wormholes once again evoke the fantasies of science fiction, of travel faster than the speed of light, of instantaneous transportation to different worlds, these space-age illusions collide vehemently with the formal qualities of the material on display: glue strings and blobs, patches of tape, and the visible jabs left by a knife on the foam core distract from the formal impact of the work, obstinately insisting on reminding and drawing attention to its very materiality, which appears so very much at odds with interstellar travel. But who knows – I may be guilty of underestimating plywood, glue, and tape.

Margaret Pezalla-Granlund, Velodrome/Capitol Records Portal, 2008. Foam core, ink jet print, tape, glue, wood. 64 x 44 x 33.

Yet despite such material reminders, the pieces on display invite you to adopt a radically altered perspective, to look at the shapes of this estranged architecture and allow your mind to roam. "What if...?," the work seems to insinuate; what if this racetrack was a portal, this swimming pool much more than its surface reveals? What if we were to look at these structures not as fully determined by their intended, ordinary purposes but as liminal sites, where, as the artist puts it, "we move between before and after, or above and below, or rational and chaotic ... between the expected and the unexpected, between the prosaic and the poetic." What if we were to succeed at suspending all we know for a moment or two and adopt a truly alien perspective in order to see anew?

Perhaps, if all of this work is about the imagination and where it can take us in the blink of an eye, focusing on the material distractions misses the point entirely. Perhaps these pieces should really be considered as portals, as collision sites, between the actual and the possible, the concrete and the imagined. Perhaps it is our imagination that is supposed to pass through these portals – and here, finally, William Blake's impossible nostalgia for passing through the doors of perception enters into this far-ranging, imaginary conversation. A visionary artist and poet himself, Blake understood that art, at its best, transforms the quotidian, the ordinary, into something that, though usually useless in practical terms, holds a paradoxical and complicated value. This alchemical transformation lies at the core of all art and at the very heart of the current show at Franklin Art Works.