Undertow

Rosalux Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Undertow was an exhibition at Rosalux Gallery in Minneapolis featuring work by Rebecca Krinke and Elaine Rutherford, artists who both address memory and personal experience to engage larger cultural issues within their work. Rebecca’s sculpture use the body, and aspects of domestic objects and architecture to investigate and embody trauma. Elaine’s paintings and video in the exhibition is rooted in personal experience of nostalgia and displacement, and reflects on parallels between cultural connections to the land and forced migrations of native peoples in both Scotland and Minnesota. who both address memory and personal experience to engage larger cultural issues. As a whole, Undertow alludes to what is beneath the surface and to what is seen and unseen.  

Undertow artist talk at Rosalux Gallery

Rutherford’s work depicts geographies of reality and nostalgia and the spaces where they intersect or collide. Working in various media, she explores the liminal space of the in-between, as experienced by those who have left their homeland. Her paintings and mixed media installations explore the relationship between the still (painting) and the moving (film) and how these act as metaphors for time and memory. She employs visual metaphors such as bridges, roads, and bodies of water as reference to transitory and transitional spaces throughout her work. 

Krinke’s work embodies memory as secrets and fragments, and a source of intrusion and obsession. Her work in the exhibition features some of her hundreds of black bound notebooks: visible but trapped in a cabinet, closet, and drawers. Her sculptural installation includes a human-animal hybrid that alludes to anxiety and adaptation. The writing desk invites visitors to sit and read a notebook where the work on display is drawn and discussed. Krinke’s work can be seen in multiple ways - struggle, growth, beauty, stress, trauma, coping, transcending - and references issues felt both individually and collectively. 

About the artists:

Rebecca Krinke is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installations, public art, site works, and social practice. In broad terms, all of her work deals with issues related to trauma and recovery. Krinke’s sculpture uses the body, and aspects of domestic objects and architecture, to investigate and embody trauma. Her practice has increasingly engaged ideas of trauma and recovery in the same works, including her recent participatory projects, What Needs To Be Said? (2012), Minneapolis-St. Paul, Flood Stories (2011), Fargo, ND, and Unseen/Seen: The Mapping of Joy and Pain (2010), Minneapolis-St. Paul. All of these projects created temporary social spaces for emotional engagement and catharsis. 

Elaine Rutherford is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice involves exploring the visual and conceptual relationships between various media such as painting, video and sculpture, and mixed media installation. Working from her personal experiences of displacement, Rutherford’s work explores the physiological space inhabited by the immigrant, which is a permanent space of both belonging and non-belonging, of passage and boundary, a place of both exile and agency. While the work in the exhibition is rooted in personal experience of nostalgia and displacement, Rutherford’s art is moving toward reflecting on parallels between cultural connections to the land and forced migrations of native peoples in both Scotland and Minnesota. Rutherford has exhibited nationally and internationally. 

Gallery Talk at Rosalux with Rebecca Krinke, Elaine Rutherford, Cynthia Malone, and Stuart McLean:

Rosalux welcomed Stuart McLean, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota and Cynthia Malone, Professor of English at St. John’s University/College of St. Benedict to lead a gallery talk on Rebecca Krinke and Elaine Rutherford’s Undertow exhibition.

The gallery talk was an interactive discussion walk and talk facilitated by Stuart and Cynthia that began with the first pieces one would encounter in the gallery: paintings and a multimedia piece (video, sculpture) by Elaine. Stuart noted that none of the paintings included any human figures, but rather human infrastructure such as roads and bridges.

They walked into the gallery to encounter and discuss Rebecca’s installation called Undertow (The Clues) which featured some of her hundreds of black bound notebooks: visible but trapped in a cabinet, closet, and drawers. A human-animal hybrid that she called “The Tadpole Woman” was draped over the massive, old wood cabinet. The writing desk invited visitors to sit and read a notebook. This notebook contained journal entries, many of them partially redacted (blacked out so as to be unreadable), drawings, including some of the work on display, and articles and photos from the web touching on memory, secrets, psychoanalysis, and issues of virtual space and physical space.

The discussion of Rebecca’s work began by Stuart telling an Inuit story about a woman in a boat with a man; her fingers were being cut off in punishment, however, her hands became flippers and her fingers as they fell into the water transformed into animals. Rebecca’s “Tadpole Woman” has a female torso, but no arms, and a tadpole tail. A member of the gallery audience observed that she was no mermaid. Many found her beautiful, some found her to evoke sadness - as she seemed struggling to live, while some saw a mixture of the repellant and beautiful. It was observed that she could be seen in both Freudian and Jungian ways.

In closing the discussion moved onto the second grouping of Elaine’s work that included two cabinets and her three video cabinets. Here Cynthia led a discussion about maps and memory in an age of Google Earth.