This is the tenth year that this program has supported installation projects which have been proposed by artists in Minnesota. We are grateful to the Jerome Foundation for its continued support of artists creating work in this ever-changing medium. Project awards from the Art in Space program provide the funding, support and guidance for artists who are interested in Òinstallation art.Ó For ten years the program has allowed Intermedia Arts to support many emerging visions which continue to stretch the boundaries of space and art, contributing much to our community.

As the very nature of installation art means continual change and reinterpretation, Intermedia Arts will follow. We are now offering more workshops for artists who are in the early stages of idea development and two rounds of project selections, to provide artists flexibility in the application process, as well as the opportunity to reapply the same year if they choose.

Just as our community requires opportunities for presentation in order to be energized and stimulating, it also requires dialogue to maintain, develop and communicate what is being created. To this end, I am pleased that art historian Diane Mullin has contributed an essay about this exhibition. Diane, a current Art in Space selection committee member, has written about and curated in our community, including the recent successful exhibitions Room and Through the Body. I am pleased that she is helping to choose whose projects are awarded and is also sharing her critical voice with us.

Jason, Laura and Michael will present an artist talk on January 23, which we hope you will attend. ItÕs a great chance to meet these talented artists and join in on our dialogue about the exhibition. I welcome any suggestions or ideas about how to continue to make this program visible and challenging and about how we may contribute to being a catalyst that builds understanding among people through art.

Suzanne Kosmalski Exhibition Coordinator

Essay by Diane Mullin

Jason Brown: Cerebrospinal Television Meat
In her book The War of Desire of Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age Allucquere Roseanne Stone describes witnessing physicist Stephen Hawking presenting a paper. Watching the man in the wheelchair, motionless except for his finger on a laptop joystick, and listening to the computer generated voice delivering the chosen words, Stone asked in a moment of heightened self-consciousness, ÒWhere is Hawking?Ó In the ÒpresenceÓ of the man, Stone realized that Hawking did Ònot stop being Hawking at the edges of his visible body.Ó Instead, Hawking extends into the box on his lap, and importantly, that piece of technology also becomes part of his body, his identity. In addition, Hawking, Òdisplaced in time and space,Ó permeates the discourses of medical technology in more invisible ways. Stone argues that technology extends and disseminates HawkingÕs Òwill and instrumentality,Ó becoming a prosthesis. Finally, Stone tells us that on that day she fell in love with HawkingÕs prosthesis.

Like Stone, Jason Brown examines the ways people create technology Òto appease our human desiresÓ as much as, if not more than, our needs. BrownÕs installation Cerebrospinal Television Meat takes up the questions of the body, technology, desire, and the Òdissemination of human will.Ó The artist describes the relationships between these realms:

As an extension of our mind, technology is easily adapted to be interfaced and implanted into the body. We accept this (without much question) as good, natural and exciting. Perhaps such an evolution is inevitable as the organic submits to the will of the mechanical and electronic. Digital desires become especially manifest in our television addictions.

BrownÕs installation, based on the human spine and rib cage, intersects with television monitors suggesting the merging of the organic and the electronic. Here, the recycled technological materials literally exist as both the bones and the innards of the strangely oriented and huge body.

Positioning the structure at the window, Brown lures viewers on the street into Intermedia Arts and ultimately into the body cavity itself. The glowing images on the television monitors, some readable and some indecipherable, speak to our desire for images and for the technology itself, blurring the distinction between the two domains. The body in the recognizable video images is BrownÕs, now enmeshed and coexisting in the material (bodily) and immaterial (digital). As Brown suggests, it is precisely this merging that entices us, drawing us to technologyÕs seemingly infinite possibilities for extending ourselves Ñ making us strange and huge, allowing us to surpass our bodily boundaries.

Michael Rathbun: N44⁰.053' W93⁰17.308
In his book The Poetics of Space philosopher Gaston Bachelard meditates on Òinfinite immensity.Ó Immensity, he says, is the philosophical category of the daydream. The contemplation of grandeur, a natural inclination of the daydream according to Bachelard, produces an inner state that transports the dreamer away from his or her immediate world and into a space that Òbears the mark of infinity.Ó Bachelard argues that the imagination alone can indefinitely expand on the image of immensity. He further contends that the daydream Òflees the objectÓ and is from its start in Òthe space of elsewhere.Ó Quoting the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Bachelard compares this intimate, personal immensity to that of the sea: ÒThe world is large, but in us/ it is as deep as the sea.Ó

Michael Rathbuns installation draws on and calls up the immensity of the sea, the horizon, and our imaginations. One of a long series of such structures, this latest installation is built specifically for the Intermedia Arts space. This installation is an image of both the sea and the sky made from an unlikely material Ñ solid wood. The ÒseaÓ fills a sunken area in the floor while the ÒskyÓ appears as a dome above our heads as we traverse the shallow waves. Connected by universal joints running from the lower ÒsurfaceÓ through the hemisphere above, these two massive forms both pull toward and push away from one another, calling attention to the immensity of both as well as our cultural imaginations and histories.

The works poetic suggestion of immensity transports the viewer beyond the installation itself and into the elsewhere of the daydream. It is in this daydreamÑ the immensity of our imaginations Ñ that the wood becomes both liquid and ephemeral. It is also in this space Ñ IntermediaÕs exhibition area transformed into the elsewhere Ñ that we become light enough to walk across the surface of the sea.

Laura Migliorino: Privilege/Denial/Public/Private-Passion
In her essay Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity Griselda Pollock contends that the spaces pictured and canonized by early modernist artists as representations of modernity were spaces of male privilege in the 19th century. This is evident in the very images made by modernist artists who followed in the footsteps of Manet, whose major works depicted brothels, dance halls, and bars. Pollock questions the centrality of the masculine vision of Òmodern lifeÓ and the invisibility or denial of feminine visions in these early modern works and in the history of art that has since been written. She asks: if our most salient images of modernity imply, in fact depend on, a male spectator, how might we see modernity with different eyes?

Laura Migliorinos Privilege/Denial/Public/Private-Passion also asks questions of the privilege of vision. In this work, however, the artist directs her attention not to the gender of the privileged image, but to its sexuality. Furthermore, MigliorinoÕs work also considers the privilege and denial of display in our culture. Part of a ten-year investigation of privilege and denial in our culture, the Intermedia installation focuses on the issues of sexuality and privilege through the institution of marriage. In this work Migliorino asks how and why homosexual and heterosexual displays of passion and affection might differ. The work considers both how social forces affect the limits of privilege and the effects of these limits on notions of self-worth and identity.

An unfolding series of Òpairs,Ó the work consists of both film and video images. Divisions in the work include Òprivilege and denial,Ó Òheterosexual and gay/lesbian,Ó and Òpublic and private.Ó The heterosexual images are in color and marked privileged. Wedding videos and scenes from popular movies make up the moving images of the heterosexual zones. Still photographs shot by the artist of private, heterosexual eroticism tend towards the abstract. In contrast, the part of the installation marked homosexual features black and white media. The moving images here are of private moments Ñ sensual and erotic film short shot by the artist. Photo-portraits of couples (also taken by the artist) emphasize the very private (even sequestered) nature of ÒpublicÓ images of homosexual affection and desire.

Major support for these exhibitions was provided by the Jerome Foundation with additional funds from the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature.

The programs and services of Intermedia Arts are made possible in part by general operating support grants from: Target Stores, MervynÕs and DaytonÕs by the Dayton Hudson Foundation; the General Mills, Honeywell, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, MAHADH and McKnight Foundations; and from Fisher-Rosemount, Inc.; Land OÕLakes; The Saint Paul Companies and Walgreens. Support is also provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, and by the partners and contributors of Intermedia Arts.

Exhibition Coordinator Suzanne Kosmalski

Installation Coordinators Rodney Swanstrom Glenn Herbert Davis

Technical Services and Lighting Design Stephen Rueff

Publication Design Holly Wright

Photography Warwick Green

Past recipients of the Jerome Installation Art Commissions: 1995
Erin Cosgrove
Glenn Davis
Jeanne Francis
Keith Holmes
Bill Klaila
Renato Lombardi
Marcie and Rachel Rendon
Lily Tsong

1994
Lourdes CuŽ and Walter Pitt
Suzanne Kosmalski
Chris Larson

1993
Annie Curtiss and Karen Kysar
Denny Sponsler
Russell M. Hamilton