Oh, you again.

Nice accidentally running into yourself; this from a didactic at the Tweed Museum's "1000 Words" exhibition, which opens formally September 22. "Vance Gellert's body of work, titled Sleeping Giant (from the Ojibwe word "Mesabi"), shows a people struggling with economies of dwindling scale, resource management, and  conservationism coming into conflict with entrenched practices. Though he describes his subjects as “indomitable,” mythically heroic in their efforts to wrestle a meager living from rock, his photographs navigate a terrain caught between the brute scale of mining operations and an imperiled middle-class existence — as in a panoramic image of backyard playgrounds perched atop an open ore pit... Even while heavily focused on matters concerning industry and extraction, Gellert’s attention to ways of life that merit retention — high school hockey, porketta, civic engagement, Finnish heritage — show just how tenuously held such things are." From Well Beyond Lake Wobegon, MNArtists.org. Full article here

Common Threads Uncommonly Seen

"Like ancestry, the arts we sometimes diminish as decorative, or domestic are powerful conduits of inarticulable meaning. Such things sustain us, transmit lore, and retain traditions. They aren’t immutable law, or impenetrable doctrine; they’re matters that sustain, enfold, and nurture us without demanding genuflection- just engagement. We do so unwittingly, at times ungratefully. 4North affords the opportunity to hold offerings we seldom notice in higher regard." Full text here