In the Saint Kate—The Arts Hotel: Stories from ‘Strange Lands’ at MOWA DTN

by

Approaching from the main entrance of the Saint Kate—The Arts Hotel, the current exhibition on view at MOWA DTN appears tidy and contained. In the shadow of Deborah Butterfield’s gnarly driftwood horse in the lobby, the works in the raised gallery, organized in grids of frames, and lines of video screens at 60-inches on center, match our standard expectations of fine art in a contemporary gallery. Even the wall graphic for the show, an angular geometric treatment of a cropped figure with blocky modern text reading “Strange Lands,” instills a sense of order, edge, clarity, and definition. The show with work by artists Tom Antell, Chris T. Cornelius, and Sky Hopinka is curated by Rafael Francisco Salas, whose manicured presentation unpacks stories of its own as the exhibition develops.

A tight grid of 20 pigment prints by Chris T. Cornelius of experimental structures within a digital landscape, recalls a thoroughly modern vocabulary in presentation and subject matter. His arrays of digitally invented architecture seem to reference Le Corbusier if he was designing deer stands. The odd structures haunt empty, forlorn landscapes straight out of de Chirico, Tanguy. Modernism resounds. Almost. The image of a lone red bear interrupts the digital serenity in many of the prints, subverting them, leaving an eerie aftertaste and a feeling something is amiss. Tom Antell’s cartoonish cone-hatted figures occupy the foreground of his works like children forced to perform on stage. Their smiles are tight, their eyes are glazed, and any initial playfulness soon starts to break down. The figures appear sick, alone, and lost at sea. A galleon looms in the background of one of the acrylic, ink, and watercolor pencil works, and as we bob along with the cast, a gathering sense of unease builds.

email newsletter iconStay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.

SIGN UP

Accumulating Uncertainty

Sky Hopink’s three-channel video on the South wall cracks this accumulating uncertainty wide open, as only he can. Perfida, from a Spanish word meaning “lies,” takes the viewer on a fractured and kinetic journey through space, time, and points of view, offering a powerful and hypnotic account of personal and Indigenous experience. The viewer is jostled through an array of blistered mindspaces: a trancey car ride, a walk along a smoldering mountain pass, a serene lake shed. The scenes range emotionally from unsettling to sublime, and the total experience finally feels like a vivid but bruised thousand-year-old imagination, distilled and compressed into video.

Hopinka is in fact a member of the Ho Chunk Nation and his work is rooted in his personal history. He has a knack for bringing the viewer into this private space while making them feel like interlopers at the same time. “Show, don’t tell” is a popular refrain in art schools, yet Hopinka tells us a lot in his work. Superimposed text and implied narratives snake through more abstract passages; however, his language is so particular and descriptive that it functions almost like imagery. And what he shows is so intense and absorbing that one is happy to listen and read while disappearing into his potent dreamscapes.

Hopinka’s video will send one back to the more ambiguous narratives that they may have been missed in Antell’s and Cornelius’s work. Antell’s narrative in particular grows more troubling in tone as we gather more information, and as we learn the identity of the artists. The titles too of his works, such as The Columbian Exchange (aka What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor?) provide further context. All three artists are in fact Indigenous, Antell, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa, and Cornelius a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.

Learning this without reading it directly in supplemental text is desirable. Desirable because when the sense of strangeness and otherness looms and reveals itself gradually, the experience is slow burning and incremental, like time itself. Setting up this metaphorical potential is a credit to Salas, who not only unites work over an unfolding concept, but also presents the show in a way that reminds us of how the clean, familiar geometry of modernism sits atop histories and lands that are to say the least, far stranger.