Art Hounds: Endangered flora in handmade paper, an absurdist play and a multimedia symphony

From MPR News, Art Hounds are members of the Minnesota arts community who look beyond their own work to highlight what’s exciting in local art. Their recommendations are lightly edited from the audio heard in the player above. 

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Vanishing flora, captured on handmade Paper

Minneapolis-based visual and teaching artist Ilene Krug Mojsilov recommends “Vanishing Flora: Fiber Art,” an exhibition by Amanda Degener at the Northside Artspace Lofts Gallery in Minneapolis.

The show runs through May 25. Visitors can enter the gallery by calling or buzzing the office, open Thursdays 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Fridays 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. A poetry and potluck event will be held May 18.

Mojsilov explains that Degener’s work highlights endangered plant species. The exhibition includes 18 framed handmade paper works, with pulp manipulated to form plant imagery. Eight handmade planters, constructed from up-cycled wood, spell out “in danger.”

Suspended discs depicting endangered plants, made from frozen paper, gradually melt into the planters, which are seeded with native flowers that will grow over the exhibit’s duration.

Krug said: I could go on and on about Amanda’s artwork, because she’s part scientist. She’s a chemist. She researches all her subjects to the T. She’s a specialist in handmade paper and the history of handmade paper, she collects fibers from all over the world.

— Ilene Krug Mojsilov

A 21st Century Take on Theater of the Absurd

Theater maker Harry Waters, Jr. attended the opening night of Pangea World Theater’s staging of “Rhinoceros,” directed by Dipankar Mukherjee. The absurdist play by French playwright Eugène Ionesco was written in 1958 and follows the transformation of a town’s residents into rhinoceroses — all except one, the least heroic character.

The show runs through April 19 at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis.

Waters praised the production’s creativity: inventive lighting, a soundscape of Indigenous music, strong choreography and a diverse cast of professional and amateur actors.

Harry said: The gift, I would have to say, of what Dipankar gives to this adaptation [is] that it starts huge, and then, as the story goes, it winnows down to this very simple, important issue of the one human being that’s standing in resistance to all the totalitarianism and the conformity ... how are we also taking our own stands in spite of everything that’s being thrown [at us] that really allows us to know that we’re not crazy, that it is not insane that you’re standing strong.

So that’s a conceptual thing that I was really quite pleased to see without being beaten over the head by it.

— Harry Waters, Jr.

A Multimedia Symphony in the South Metro

Retired attorney and former St. Olaf Choir singer Maren Swanson of Burnsville is excited for a joint choral performance at Shepherd of the Lake Lutheran Church in Prior Lake this Saturday at 4 p.m.

South Metro Chorale will perform alongside Singers in Accord and Kantorei, with the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kathy Saltzman Romey.

The concert features “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,” a multimedia symphony by Minnesota composer Jocelyn Hagen.

Maren said: I heard Jocelyn speak once about having grown up in a musical family in a small town in North Dakota, and about singing and playing piano from the age of three, she said that she lay in bed as a as an older child, hearing orchestral music in her head and wishing she knew how to write the music down.

Well now we get to hear the enchanting music in her head.

The work has been performed all across the country and internationally. I actually heard it in Croatia in 2023. The libretto features an English translation of select texts from the notebooks of Da Vinci. The score is soaring, sometimes lyrical, sometimes percussive, always gorgeous.

The video uses a new technology that allows it to be synced to the nuances of the music as conducted in a live event. In effect, the video is played like an instrument of the orchestra responding to the conductor, and so every performance is spontaneous and unique. The video features an unfolding of text and images from the notebooks and other animated images that bring the music to life.

— Maren Swanson