JEALOUSY/SWAY

Across bodies and masses and disciplines there could be conversation and translation. How do things share a space? What is it to be responsive vs. competitive vs. appropriative? How is dance sculpture?  What is real? What is plastic? What is mediated? What will last forever? 

Jealousy|Sway is a collision of artistic impulses between two visual artists (Ryan Fontaine and Rachel Youn) and two choreographers (the choreographic collaboration or Kristin Van Loon & Arwen Wilder known as HIJACK).

Jealousy (2019, Fontaine, Van Loon, Wilder) was first a dance performance in a multi-room installation with the dancers barely visible, penned into a room within a room. The audience was given the choice to squint through tiny holes in the walls or to meander into other rooms to spy via security camera footage nestled in rich, verdant art objects: kinetic sculptures, pink donuts and twining pathos vines.

Sway started with the celebrated 2020 installation of dancing fake flowers affixed to decommissioned massage machines by Rachel Youn called “Gather”. Later Youn’s 25 kinetic sculptures moved to the Minneapolis basement gallery at HAIR+NAILS and became a pandemic-era proxy gay disco called “Underparty”. In 2022, HIJACK plugged in the dancing sculptures on a big theater stage, danced among them and called it Sway.

At Rochester Art Center, Jealousy and Sway are warped, squished, and extended into galleries and a long crossfading corridor. These installations are always moving, dancing, and, three times during the exhibition they hold HIJACK dance performances. The installations and performances are enhanced with contributions by dancer Jules Bither and artists Emma Beatrez, Rachel Collier, and Julia Garcia.

Artist Bios:

Ryan Fontaine (b. 1971, Austin, TX) is a self-taught artist and musician based in Minneapolis, MN. Recent exhibitions include Truman State University (Kirksville, MO) and Night Club Gallery (Minneapolis, MN). He has received commissions for public sculptures from Franconia Sculpture Park (Shafer, MN) and Rochester Art Center (Rochester, MN). He is a recipient of a 2023 VAF grant from Midway Contemporary Art with funding from the Warhol Foundation for TEMP/reviews, an online platform for reviews of Twin Cities based art exhibitions. Fontaine co-founded HAIR+NAILS Contemporary Art with his partner Kristin Van Loon.

HIJACK is the Minneapolis-based choreographic collaboration of Kristin Van Loon (b. 1971, Washington, DC) and Arwen Wilder (b. 1971, Boulder, CO). HIJACK is the confluence and clash of two independent compositional/kinesthetic impulses. Their dances embrace juxtaposition. Their dances house unlikely intimates forcing the question to both audience and performer -- how can these things co-exist?

Over the last 30 years they have created over 100 dances and performed in venues ranging from proscenium to barely-legal. HIJACK has performed in New York (at DTW, PS122, HERE ArtCenter, Catch/Movement Research Festival, La Mama, Dixon Place, Chocolate Factory), Japan, Russia, Central America, Ottawa, Chicago, Colorado, New Orleans, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Francisco, at Fuse Box Festival in Austin Texas, Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation (SFDI), and Bates Dance Festival in Maine. Walker Art Center commissioned “redundant, ready, reading, radish, Red Eye” to celebrate twenty years of HIJACK and Contact Quarterly published the chapbook “Passing for Dance: A HIJACK Reader”. 

HIJACK dances have received support from McKnight, Jerome, Bush foundations, MRAC, MN State Arts Board, NPN Creation Funds and residencies at MANCC in Tallahassee Florida and the National Center for Choreography in Akron Ohio.

HIJACK teaches Improvisation and Composition at the University of MN, Carleton College and Zenon Dance School and hosts/curates FUTURE INTERSTATES—the sporadic series for dance improvisation performance. 

Rachel Youn (b. 1994, Abington, PA) is an artist living and working in New Haven, CT, working across sculpture and installation.

Youn has recently exhibited at Night Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Rome, Italy), Laumeier Sculpture Park (St. Louis, MO), Soy Capitán (Berlin, Germany), Truman State University Art Gallery (Kirksville, MO), Linseed Gallery (London, UK), VSOP Projects (Greenport, NY), McClain Gallery (Houston, TX), Contemporary Arts Center (Columbus, OH), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin, Italy), The Naughton Gallery at Queen’s (Belfast, UK), Brutus (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), La Clinica (Oaxaca, México) HAIR + NAILS (Minneapolis, MN), and the Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis, MO).

Youn is a recipient of the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and the 2020 Great Rivers Biennial Award. They received their BFA from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Youn received their MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art in New Haven, CT in 2024. Youn’s work has been reviewed in the LA Review of Books, Artillery Magazine, Elephant, amongst others. They are represented by Sargent’s Daughters. 

Emma Beatrez (b. 1995, New Prague, MN) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis. They graduated from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2020 with an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art and received their BFA with an emphasis in painting at North Dakota State University in 2018. Beatrez is the co-founder/curator at Night Club gallery in St. Paul alongside artist Lee Noble.

Solo shows include “Device of Love” at Nemeth Art Center (Park Rapids, MN, 2024), “TECHNOLUST 3000” (HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis, 2022), “Quarter Turn” (Fierman Gallery, NYC, 2022).  Other recent shows include a two-person show at LVL3 (Chicago), and group shows at Nathalie Karg Gallery (NYC), Swivel Gallery (Brooklyn), Guts Gallery (London), Anthony Gallery (Chicago), Hair + Nails (Minneapolis), and in collaboration with Lee Noble at the Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis). Emma Beatrez is represented by HAIR+NAILS Gallery.

Jules Bither (they/them) (b. 1990, Burlington, VT) is a trans/non-binary dance artist living and working in southside Minneapolis. Jules was born in Vermont, raised in Minneapolis and studied "Performance and Place" at the Gallatin School at NYU. Jules has deeply enjoyed collaborating with and dancing for Claire King, HIJACK, Laurie Van Wieren, Anna Marie Shogren, Galia Eibenschutz, Chris Schlicting, and GENDER TENDER. They co-founded Good Job, a quarterly Twin Cities dance zine with Eben Kowler and currently create textile art under the name "Dbbl Stndrd." Jules works as the Office and Event Coordinator at Young Dance in St. Paul, MN. They are a punk-adjacent anarchist, DIY purist, yolo-enthusiast and guerrilla archivist.

Rachel Collier (b. 1981, born and based in Minneapolis, MN) has her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recent solo shows include HAIR+NAILS Gallery (Minneapolis, MN), the Nemeth Art Center (Park Rapids, MN), Saint Kate’s Arts Hotel (Milwaukee, WI). Recent group shows and publications include: Felix Fair (LA, CA), NADA Miami (Miami, FL), Artsy FOUNDATIONS Fair, Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation (Ojai,CA), New American Paintings. Residencies: The Wassaic Project, Wassaic NY (2021, 2022); Anderson Center Jerome Emerging Artist Residency and Fellowship, Red Wing MN (2022); Nido invitational residency and exhibition, Monte Castello di Vibio, Umbria, Italy (2022); and Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village CO (2022).

Cuban American artist Julia Garcia (b. 1992 Pompano Beach, FL; based in Minneapolis, MN) uses a collage-like application of acrylic and ink into wet raw canvas while painting. The relation to material flow, time, and permeability, is underpinned by the dominance of water’s role in her process. Water is an essential partner, disrupting and carrying pigment, blurring the discernable edges of forms and allowing them an interminable quality. Time is present as well, an actor carrying both urgency and inevitability, the race against evaporation and solidity, but also holding a record of marks on a surface which is at times sheerly painted. 

Source images are collected from stock photo sites, magazines, and catalogs. The effect is one of subjects that seem to be lodged in time, a nostalgic set of moments that feel universal and familiar, if not personally experienced than implanted in the subconscious through entertainment media. Many images feel like the type of ubiquitous stock photography of advertisements meant to underpin idyllic traditional interactions and values. There is something sinister underlying these however, as questions of power and authority emerge from the dynamics between figures, the motivation of these constructed fantasies. Whose ideals are being presented? 

Julia received her BFA from School of Visual Art in 2014 and her MFA in 2016 from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art. School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art. Garcia had her first institutional solo exhibition in 2023 at NW9 in Cologne, Germany. Other solo exhibitions have been held at Night Club Gallery, St.Paul, MN; Galerie Fran Reus, Palma de Mallorca, Spain; Gaa Gallery, New York, NY; and at KDF Gallery, Miami, FL.

PICTURED: Sway (2022/2024), installation and performance, dimensions variable
PHOTO BY: Dale Dong