Next up in Mn Artists’s publishing series, each of which highlight a unique cross-section of the local arts scene, is a suite of pieces from guest editor Kristin Van Loon. Van Loon is a dance artist, half of the duo HIJACK, and co-founder of HAIR+NAILS Contemporary Art Gallery, who has long experimented with process-based arts writing in the form of zines and printed matter. At the outset of her series, she proposed a Venn diagram including three overlapping circles: dance, analog/digital, and real-time-ness. At the conclusion, she mapped each of the resulting pieces onto the original diagram, revealing the connection points between the contributors’ responses. The full set of articles is collected below: though created before the era of social distancing, the collection offers strategies for how bodies might react with and against the omnipresence of screens—in real, unfolding time.
Writings Commissioned by Kristin Van Loon for Mn Artists
Independent curator and dance producer Michèle Steinwald shares a photo essay and retrospective on her lecture/discussion series, MN Dance & the Ecstasies of Influences, featuring maps by guest editor Kristin Van Loon that illuminate the grassroots web of connections that make up parts of the Twin Cities dance communities.
Transdisciplinary artist Christopher Corey Allen offers a slippery exegesis of the punk∞body: drawing on iconic punk moments, queer theory, and their own artistic research, they excavate punk as a practice of generative refusal, anti-containment as a gesture towards fluidity, and messiness as a language of dissent.
From traditional theaters to non-traditional venues to electronic spaces, Ellie Lynch considers the liminality and the life span of performance spaces, physical and digital.
Flow, Response, Disruption: On Dance and Finance
Colin Rusch, a former Mn Artists staffer and Minneapolis-based choreographer, demonstrates how the artist skills of listening, sensing, and predicting outcomes transferred directly into his second career as a Wall Street analyst.
Choreographer, performer, designer, and photographer Valerie Oliveiro constructs a text by using the guest editor’s images as a score, or improvisational prompt. The writing is also itself a dance—a choreography that chews on vernaculars, bends the light, and traverses the vastness of bodies and time.
Choreographer, writer, and handymam artist Karen Sherman takes us to the East Village in the summer of 1994 in a diptych of essays that contemplate a moment in queer culture, the early days of the internet, aesthetic fixations, and the transience of desire.
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