2021 McKnight Visual Artist Fellows: Dream the Combine

This is the final in a series of articles profiling the seven distinguished artists chosen as 2021 McKnight Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant program for mid-career artists in Minnesota that is administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The 2021 cohort includes David Bowen, Mara Duvra, Ben Moren, Rotem Tamir, Dyani White Hawk, and Dream The Combine (Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers).

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Photo by Rik Sferra

 

In the year of his Lord 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull — an official decree — that would have drastic, bloody consequences for five centuries to come. Titled “Inter Caetera,” which translates from the Latin to the surprisingly casual “Among Other Things,” Alexander’s bull was the last of three 15th century papal declarations that cemented what came to be known as the Doctrine of Discovery: a theological endorsement of imperial European expansion, establishing, in short, that wherever Christians explore, Christians lay claim. 

The transcontinental landgrab was of course already underway — Christopher Columbus having “discovered” the Bahamas the year prior — but this Doctrine of Discovery would guarantee more of the same for years to come, laying the groundwork for conquest, genocide, and, by design, a boom in global trade and local industry. Not far away in the Republic of Venice, a massive shipyard known as the Arsenal was working to meet the demands of its own fleets. The facility hit peak production in the early 1500s, employing some 16,000 people to crank out military and merchant seacraft at the startling rate of one ship per day. True to its name, the Arsenal did not stop at boats; the massive factory also produced and perfected a whole range of artillery, from cannons to handguns, for use in the endless struggles over territory and resources between nations and empires. 

Five centuries later, the grand halls of the old Arsenal still stand, finding somewhat calmer use as a naval base, a maritime history museum, and an exhibition space for the Venice Architecture Biennale, where the artist-architect duo Dream the Combine — Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers — have just finished installing a new piece.

Their contribution is an intricately simple installation occupying one cavernous nook of the building’s Corderie, where ropes were once manufactured. Now, two long steel tubes cut through the space at oblique angles to each other, each spanning from one brick corner to another, creating an off-center black X within the empty alcove. Suspended by a spiderweb of thin metal cables, one shorter section of tubing hangs frozen in tension above the other two — parallel to one and perpendicular to the other — altogether casting a lattice of long, bold shadows onto the brick and stone, calling to mind Constructivist compositions and abstracted architectural renderings. Linear perspective — another 15th century “discovery,” if you will — leaves this lone line fragment drawn and quartered in limbo, the threaded metal cables stringing back to vanishing points at each edge of the X’ed-out room. 

 

afterimages, 2023. Steel tubes and cables. Image courtesy of the artists.

 

Moving through this installation, titled afterimages, you would be forgiven if you don’t immediately think of 15th century papal edicts or their colonial legacy on the other side of the Atlantic. It’s a lot of history to hang on a mere eleven lines of sculpture, but Newsom and Carruthers, whose work as Dream the Combine exists exclusively in the realm of public art, find that sort of conceptual foundation both essential to the planning of each piece and utterly inconsequential to a viewer’s enjoyment of it. They trust their audience to make whatever connections they will on their own terms. Currently finishing out a yearlong fellowship in Rome, the couple, who are partners in both work and life, spoke to me over Zoom two days after the Biennale opened.

“I love it when an installation is suddenly able to open because then it's actually alive,” says Carruthers. “There's a certain degree of intention that one can bring [to a piece], but it's inherently limited or fragmentary. And it's nothing next to the kinds of authentic authorship that people themselves bring to the piece.”

Newsom agrees. “I think that when the work opens, that's the beginning. … We don't think about it in terms of audience, you know. These are people who are also co-authoring the piece with us.”

The composition of afterimages is so spartan, you can imagine it drawn on a cocktail napkin. A riff on two-point perspective certainly makes sense within an architectural exhibition, but this piece explodes that drawing into three dimensions, inviting you inside the lines as if to critique perspective itself. You find that your movement through the space affects the relationship between these three primary shapes as they recede and foreshorten, flatten and arc, intersect and overlap, all depending on your vantage point. Your own shadows even join the jumbled plaid on the stone floor as you occupy this ancient industrial space and peer up at this array of black beams, perhaps wondering just what exactly you’re in the midst of co-authoring.

 

afterimages, 2023. Steel tubes and cables. Image courtesy of the artists.

 

“We're interested in the fact that you bring your own horizon with you,” says Newsom. “Some of our past work has been kinetic, which is for specific reasons. Here it is still about this kind of roving body, but it's you who is doing the work of roving and moving around and through it.”

At the opening, she recalls, a very young viewer caught her eye, a three- or four-year-old “twirling around and touching the piece, moving into and out of the shadows. That kid doesn't know anything about art or architectural theory, you know; he was just very present.”

Measuring the success of an installation for Newsom and Carruthers seems to hinge not on the communication of ideas but on an audience’s willingness to engage with a piece. It’s an approach the pair have taken across multiple works: creating site-specific installations that attempt to, as Carruthers puts it, “deprivilege the space.” Front-loaded with theory and research, Dream the Combine’s artworks critically interrogate each one of their sites, be they a Venetian shipyard, a kitschy steam clock in Vancouver, an abandoned section of skyway in Minneapolis, or the town of Columbus, Indiana, itself. And then they leave the rest up to the public. The works are site-specific in terms of both space and history, using as few elements as possible — lines, mirrors, flagpoles, and corridors — to encourage a collective investigation and infiltration of each particular place.

 

Hide and Seek, 2018. Glass mirror, steel, graphite, shade fabric, netting, mist, lights, 18,000 sf. Long Island City, New York. Commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 for the 2018 Young Architects Program. Image courtesy MoMA PS1 & The Museum of Modern Art.

 

Perhaps their most successfully public work to date was a 2018 take-over of MoMA PS1’s courtyard, a spare, gray space with gravel floors and high concrete walls. Tasked with creating the architectural apparatus for a summer performance series, the two devised another simple, complicated schematic consisting of just a few specific elements: a stage, a bench, a runway, and a hammock, with a misting feature to keep folks cool and a series of large mirrored panels to break up, augment, and add new sightlines. One set of mirrors loomed above, allowing visitors from one vantage point to peer up and over the prison-yard wall to those outside on the sidewalk (and vice versa, of course). Another wall of mirrors floated in their frame, able to be shifted by the wind or manipulated by participants, again undermining linear perspective and reflecting it back as this kind of stationary rollercoaster, rolling the room around like the eyes in your head. The concept was, quite simply, to democratize a space that has atmospherically and institutionally felt exclusionary. To make what was inaccessible more open and what could be quite stuffy a bit more fun.

This is the essence of Dream the Combine’s approach to public art: setting up the parameters for an experience but leaving enough room for each of us to make that experience our own. It could take the form of a selfie in their mirrors, a furtive smoke in a hidden corner, a nap in the hammock, an aesthetic engagement with their compositions, or a history lesson about colonial white supremacy and its relationship to methods of visualization like linear perspective. Choose your own adventure.

“It's sort of humbling in a way, when a piece opens, to get to see it anew through other people’s embodied experiences,” says Carruthers.

Newsom boils it down even further: “We think of experience as a material.” The public then is not just the audience or the author but the animating factor in the work itself — certainly in the documentation of the work. The photos from the PS1 project, titled Hide and Seek, bring the whole Brutalist affair to life, showing an assembly of young New Yorkers lounging in the hammocks between mirrored walls. The camera captures them sharing private moments inside this very public context, individuals within a crowd touching feet and sharing space, staring back at us and at each other as the images of their bodies multiply and distort further and further into the depths of the reflection.

 

Crowds enjoying Hide and Seek at MoMA PS1, 2018. Image courtesy MoMA PS1 & The Museum of Modern Art.

 

Dream the Combine’s interest in mirrors stretches back years, across multiple installations, as a means of breaking space and recalibrating our approach to perspective. The abandoned skyway piece, Longing, is as simple as they come: two mirrored panels sit at opposite ends of the hollowed-out hallway, a section of downtown Minneapolis’s elevated corridor that had been removed and resited for several years to a patch of dirt next to a railroad. The mirrors create an infinity effect through which the skyway’s steel bones retreat endlessly backwards. Each of the mirrors was able to pivot, again by either wind or human touch, spiraling that vanishing point around to vertiginous, unsettling effect. "The result is a double movement that allows infinity to author new forms," says Carruthers, " that allows infinity to be embodied as a character in the room with you."

Another set of mirrors makes up 2017’s Clearing, still on view at Franconia Sculpture Park. The large, rectangular panels sit low on a series of vertical black posts, giving the installation a decidedly municipal vibe, as though a parking lot’s lightpoles and police towers had been plucked up and plunged into the field like pencils in a ceiling panel. (Indeed, Newsom tells me, they are actually repurposed City of Minneapolis lampposts.) The twelve mirrors interrupt your view in every direction, breaking up your sightlines with snippets of trees, sculptures, and even yourself reflected back at odd angles. You have to start playing Pong to make sense of it all, bouncing your eyes from surface to surface to figure out what’s actually where and which other sculptures have been erased or repositioned on the horizon. The installation is playful, sober, and strange all at once — hallmarks of a Dream the Combine experience. Again the movements of your body activate the work, creating subjective experiences out of these static, precisely-calibrated objects. Peering from one mirror into the next creates a mathematical sense of surrealism, encouraging us to scrutinize the truth laid out before our own lyin' eyes... that is, if you're into that sort of thing. On one of the last mirrors I pass, some hooligan has seen fit to scrawl a message in sloppy white letters: “Jamo fucked no hoe.” A hazard of art in the wild: another co-author has had their say.

 

Clearing, 2017. Steel, glass mirror, concrete, enamel paint. 36 x 89 x 32'. Shafer, MN. Commissioned by Franconia Sculpture Park with support from the Jerome Foundation. Photo by Caylon Hackwith, courtesy of the artists.

 

It’s not ideal, but it is a consequence of the generosity at the heart of Newsom’s and Carruthers’ practice. Just like the child dancing in the shadows of their steel beams, the pair leave ample room for the juvenile inside an otherwise serious practice. Their name itself came from the first of their two children, when he was not quite two years old. The day after seeing a combine harvester on a trip in upstate New York, the couple asked their son what he had dreamt about that night. Out came “dream the combine,” a phrase the pair enjoyed for its linguistic elasticity and playfulness. When they decided to start their own practice shortly thereafter, the name felt like a perfect fit. 

“We like that both dream and combine could be nouns or verbs,” says Newsom. “There's a certain sort of slippage there.” All it took, says Carruthers, “was just paying attention to this little word salad machine” — meaning their son — and they both burst out laughing.

As they finish out their residency in Italy, the two are looking ahead to what’s next: three more iterations of the afterimages installation, next in Rome, then Chicago, and finally here in Minneapolis, where Newsom’s mother lives. It is a fittingly westward trajectory, the same direction that the Doctrine of Discovery pushed all those ships so many years ago, inspiring and legitimizing further expansions and erasures of Indigenous peoples and cultures across this hemisphere. The couple's Columbus, Indiana, piece — Columbus Columbia Colombo Colón — references that expansion explicitly with a hillside of empty flagpoles mapped out to represent 58 different locations named after Christopher Columbus, a real butcher of a man who does not deserve such enduring honors. The work looks like a field full of lightning rods, and spiraling around each pole is a different text specific to each location that, as Newsom explains, "inserts counternarratives to those of Columbus as a valiant explorer." The pair sees that sense of responsiveness to a place's context as a big part of their responsibility as architects and artists. That afterimages will end up here in Minneapolis, for example, is no coincidence. 

“Minneapolis is, I would say, the anchor location for some of the initial thinking about the piece,” says Newsom. At its heart, Carruthers explains, "the afterimages cycle is a Thank You to Darnella Frazier," the young woman who witnessed and recorded the terrible murder of George Floyd. Her cell phone video captured the world’s attention, told the truth in the face of the MPD’s lies, and helped secure the conviction of Derek Chauvin. Suddenly those eleven lines have even more weight to bear — almost too much. The black rods stretch more painfully, tethered between brutal structures, public scrutiny, and personal experience all at once. 

"We were interested in exploring the subjectivity of those who witness," says Newsom, "people who are, in effect, caught between the direct experience of an event and the image of that event (an image which is later replicated around the globe). Ms. Frazier took the video that allowed us all to see what she saw. She exercised her right to look in the face of a regime of power that aimed to, but could not, diminish her own agency."

Those images and that video reflect endlessly not just in our media — often to heartless effect — but in our own memories, burned in, as the title suggests, like afterimages of the real thing. Where and how the piece will be situated here in this place remains to be determined, as does how the people of this city will choose to move through the work's spaces and shadows. 

There are any number of long straight lines, if you can follow them, that connect the way back and the far away to the right here and the right now. They can cross oceans and centuries and land all of a sudden looking back at you in the mirror. Newsom and Carruthers are interested in drawing those lines — in clearing those corridors and creating the circumstances by which we might catch a glimpse not just of ourselves but of the whole damn picture. Of the people before us, behind us, and beside us all at once. The trouble — or perhaps, in some ways, the beauty — is that we’ll never all see it from exactly the same spot. ◼︎

 

Detail of Hide and Seek. Image courtesy MoMA PS1 & The Museum of Modern Art.

 

The Venice Architecture Biennale is on view through November 26. To see more of Dream the Combine's work, visit their website or follow them on Instagram @dreamthecombine. Their Vimeo channel also includes video documentations of several pieces, made in collaboration with filmmaker Isaac Gale.