Present Practice: Art in times of collapse

Artist Piotr Szyhalski describes his most recent large-scale drawing as being like a landscape painting. 

It was up for just a few days at Northeast Sculpture | Gallery Factory over the weekend. The piece took up two walls and spanned nearly sixty-feet at six-feet tall. Titled “Model Collapse,” the work unraveled a narrative of war, destruction, violence, and hope. 

The artist took the name of the piece from a term that is used to describe how the process of artificial intelligence training itself inevitably reaches a degenerative spiral when it begins to “learn” from errors propagated by its own process. Szyhalski links the concept to the destructive atrocities taking place in our world, in a time when world leaders have seemingly learned nothing from previous mistakes over the course of the past century. 

Recently diagnosed with cancer — Szyhalski was putting all those things together – including wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and recent political events. “Disinformation is happening, the culture wars are happening, but also my cancer is happening,” he told me. “A lot of it is pretty dark, but there are also some hopeful moments and things that I would hold on to.” 

Szyhalski, who goes by the artist moniker Labor Camp, says he doesn’t think of it as a political work. “I think of politics the way a landscape painter thinks about landscape,” he said. “I just look out and draw what I see,” he told me. 

Szyhalski opened a different exhibition, “War Reports,” a series of large poster-sized ink drawings, at NE Sculpture at the beginning of October. When he was planning for that show, he knew he wanted to put together a closing event, but wasn’t sure what it would be at first. Sometime around the opening, he told me, he realized he wanted to install an entirely different exhibition for the closing event. He completed it just days beforehand. 

Szyhalski has a very bold drawing style — in previous series he used ink, but in this case, he employed an iPad and an Apple pencil. His mark-making lives somewhere between volatility and vulnerability. 

At the far left of the first wall, a woman plays a piano, looking on to heaps of rubble overgrown mess, buildings floating in flooded waters, sculls lying on the ground, and a helmeted soldier looks on nonchalantly at an enormous explosion where the two walls intersect. 

On the second wall, a mother reads to her two children as debris swirls around them, a young person looks on his phone while sitting a landed missile, a white flag rises in a sea of muck, an oversized boot digs a shovel into the dirt. Further on, bison graze as black clouds hover above, another mother holds her child in a bed over oversized flowers, and books burn in engulfing flames. 

I went to see this work — which is now de-installed – on Sunday. The panoramic drawing spoke to many of the things that I’ve been thinking about both before the election and after— particularly the daily horrors we hear about every day taking place across the ocean, but also fears I have about the rise of fascism, increased violence, and environmental crisis. 

The work felt extremely present. Its raw expression was like an improvisational snapshot of the world as it is in a moment. 

In times of crisis, go to practice.  

In an essay called “further notes on shape,” artist and essayist Amy Sillman revealed her idea that you could divide artists into draw-ers versus painters. Painters, she contends in the piece, work from a big idea and then move down into the details. Draw-ers, by contrast, “work from the weeds outward, building up from particulars, inductively, scratching and pawing at their paper with tools the scale of their hands.” 

Sillman then likens draw-ers to moles or beavers building a thatch. In speaking about the essay, artist Jonathan Herrera Soto says a draw-er, in Sillman’s framework, “is someone who is in the mess of things,” he told me. “Nose to the ground, muddy and wet, and trudging things along.” 

Herrera Soto mentioned Sillman’s essay when I was talking to him about a show he curated at Public Functionary, called “Your hands were making artifacts in the corner of my mind.” He used the essay as a prompt in the curation of the show, along with thinking about shape, and the value of sketching and doodling. “The sketch can tell something more true than a reference photo,” Herrera Soto said. 

While there are many forms of art beyond drawing in the show — including painting, sculpture, mixed media work, and textiles, Herrera Soto used drawing as a concept to help guide the artists. 

“Drawing teaches how to be observant,” he said. “how to be present.” 

Herrera Soto, who is a former student of Szyhalski, by chance helped his mentor install the “Model Collapse.” He had meant to simply stop by to say hello because he was in town (Herrera Soto is now based on the East Coast), but ended up helping to wheat-paste the drawings onto Northeast Sculpture’s walls along with another former MCAD student, Nancy Julia Hicks. 

At Public Functionary, Herrera Soto has been working with the artists in the PF Studio Program, where emerging artists are supported with workspace, mentorship, and career development opportunities. The exhibition he curated focuses on artmaking practice, examining the doing of art as worthy of consideration beyond a final product. 

“Artists are always in their messes,” Herrera Soto said. “The metaphorical connection is the big mess we’re in right now. But we’re in good practice of making something connective and beautiful from that mess.”

An example of this “mess-making” is León Valencia Currie’s work, “push/through” (2024). There’s a lot going on in the piece. The artist has hung from the ceiling gun-range targets covered in bullet holes alongside photographs of the artist, and drawings that juxtapose geometric shapes with furiously detailed patterns inspired from natural forms. On the floor there’s a crate filled with medicine bottles. Exploring notions of health and safety, the piece searches for answers through process.

In “You Can’t Go Home Again,” (2024) Arnée Martin investigated their family archive and memories. Hung on a pillar, one part of the piece uses cross stitching to re-create a family portrait. On the other, Martin layers mylar, perforated plastic, and the original photo. Blurry and muted, the process portion of the work points to Martin’s thoughts and steps in creating the “final” piece.

Many of the pieces explicitly take a point of view, though often on peripheries. Whitney Terrill’s two prints, “Abstracted Emotions” #1 and #2 (2024), grapples with the emotional experiences of living in this world with abstract lines and expressive use of a paintbrush. Nafyar’s painting juxtaposes childhood photos with archival images to meditate on a disconnected feeling of home, with ghostly figures and objects populating an outdoor scene. Grover Hogan, meanwhile, working with paint and multimedia, explores a relationship to labor, complete with decorative tassels on the top and bottom of the piece.

In a way, the whole exhibition acts as a kind of resistance to permanence in favor of motion and mutability. It’s a celebration of making, of materials, and of how art isn’t just something that becomes completed, but  is something to attend to, to return to, to evolve.

In a time when there’s lots to be worried about around the planet and here at home, it’s a reminder that even when we don’t have answers, we have the work to do that reveals itself in the doing of it. To practice is to be present. 

“Our Hands Were Making Artifacts in the Corner of My Mind” runs through Nov. 30 at Public Functionary (free). More information here.

Sheila Regan

Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.

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