When Does Something Become Something Else? The Apparent Is the Bridge to the Real
Adjust your perceptions with ROLU, a Minneapolis-based experimental design studio focused on exploring the relationship between life, our surroundings, and the objects and ideas that fill those spaces. For a two-week Open Field residency, ROLU has developed a series of hands-on public activities organized around its members’ wide-ranging interests—landscape and architectural design, urban planning, furniture design, modern and contemporary art history, collaborative public art—and the ideas and people that have influenced them.
Your contribution to the project is not a coincidence or a passing moment of interaction with ROLU; on the contrary, you’re a necessary and important part of the studio’s art exploration on the field.
Join ROLU at Open Field during Walker gallery hours (Tuesday–Saturday, 11 am–5 pm; Thursdays, 11 am–10 pm), or visit the Open Field calendar for the latest details.
Making as Thinking
ROLU invites you to help re-create artworks from the Walker’s collection to be staged on Open Field. The collective believes that by remaking a work, you add to its life and meaning as well as your own life. Pay homage to and learn about pieces by Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and other artists in ways that traditional art-viewing doesn’t allow. Pick up a power tool and join ROLU in these daily explorations of “making as thinking.”
Attention as Place
Imagine that you physically exist wherever you focus your attention. For instance, when you’re Facebooking, aren’t you really with your friends? To demonstrate this notion, ROLU’s favorite thinkers and makers, scattered all over the world, appear at Open Field via Skype and also through works they’ve contributed to the project.
By listening, watching, and participating, you and the contributors—among them, Jo-ey Tang, Mary Manning, Matt Connors, Andreas Angelidakis, Uta Barth, and John Fleischer—create a third space where your collective attention resides. ROLU thinks of your “attention as place.”
Participation as Performance
What’s the difference between being onstage and wearing a brightly colored outfit to work? Maybe we’re all performers more often than we think. Step outside of yourself and into an original garment designed for ROLU by Various Projects, a design collaboration between Elizabeth Beer and Brian Janusiak, and experience what it feels like to be seen as an art object. The garments will let others know of your “participation as performance.”
About ROLU
Established in 2003 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the ROLU design studio consists of Matt Olson, Mike Brady, Sammie Warren, and intern Claudette Gacuti. Its practice was founded on landscape design yet extends to furniture design and collaborative architectural projects as well as urban planning work and public art. ROLU believes in learning something every day and blogs daily about art, design, and visual culture. For more information, visit the ROLU blog.
