FAR AFIELD

Like a scarecrow

with its missing eye

up to a telescope

in the wee hours

of another starless night

I fooled myself

into believing I’d seen

all I needed

of life — as if lightning

isn’t always about to

flash/strike

somewhere along

the horizon.

***

Brian Beatty’s writing has appeared in numerous print and online publications. His column of one-liners, “Jokes by Brian Beatty,” originated at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and wound up in the gutters of the front spreads of METRO Magazine, which also once rated him among the funniest people in the Twin Cities.

Alec Soth is a photographer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota and proprietor of Little Brown Mushroom. He has received fellowships from the McKnight, Bush, and Jerome Foundations and was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographs are represented in major public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Walker Art Center. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial and a career survey at the Jeu de Paume in 2008. His first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004 to critical acclaim.  Since then Soth has published NIAGARA (Steidl, 2006),  Dog Days, Bogotá (Steidl, 2007) Fashion Magazine: Paris/Minnesota (2007), Last Days of W. (2008), Broken Manual (2010) and Siren (2012), and several limited-edition installments in his LBM Dispatch series created with writer Brad Zellar. He is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York and the Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis.

A retrospective of his work, Alec Soth: Until Now, is on view at Weinstein Gallery in Minneapolis, March 21 through May 10, 2014.

For mnartists.org’s occasional Broadside, artists are presented with a selection of written works and asked to respond in kind to a text of their choosing, with an image drawn from their own body of work. The text and visual art are presented on equal footing, neither one merely accompaniment or illustration for the other, more like artist-driven, mixed-media call and response.