Worth A Look: The Periphery of Power at Gamut Gallery

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"Worth a Look" is a series of semi-regular essays about excellent art, interesting ideas, and whatever other cool stuff we find around town. Go see art; it's good for you.

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What’s the best group show you’ve ever seen? I’ve been wracking my brain for my own answer, trying to think of exhibitions that stood out as a whole — as a singular orchestra of artworks building on each other to create something collectively cohesive. More often, in my experience, it is the individual artworks within larger exhibitions that resonate, and I count myself lucky when I find the ones that stick with me. 

There aren’t really any metrics to fall back on either, as each show amounts to the sum of its curator’s taste and convictions, the framing and pacing and packaging of the work on display, and the impact of each artist’s work at the moment of encounter. The question of quality for any exhibition, from museums to coffeeshops, is whether you’re still thinking about the work after you’ve left. It’s about the ones you can’t shake, the ones that make you want to go back again for a second look.

There are a few of those in C4W: The Periphery of Power up at Gamut right now — most of all Devin Newby’s small, luminous portrait Beautiful Strangers. That piece alone is worth a visit, nestled in among the other 44 works of art that juror Esther Callahan chose from a whopping 1,076 submissions. Carving out a show from a lot that big is not an impossible task, but it is a tall order: not only picking the works that speak to you most clearly, but reverse-engineering a cohesive thematic structure, a rough conceptual scaffolding on which the whole endeavor can rest. Callahan landed on “The Periphery of Power,” a phrase that calls to mind the very line between power and powerlessness itself — artwork standing strong just this side of the precipice. “Each selected piece,” Callahan writes, “is part of the fearlessly celebratory nature of the exploration of beauty, autonomy, representation, and desire.”

 

Sarah Vanasse Miles, Embrace, 2022. Oil on canvas, custom pine hand-built frame, 36 x 48". 

 

Even without the statement, you can draw your own connections. By my count, all but three of the works include the human figure, and most of those are solitary, with only a handful of exceptions. In an example of the latter, my friend Sean Ferris’s delightfully demented characters exchange heavy-lidded glares with one another, meticulously scratched in ink on coffee-stained paper above the phrase, in all caps: “Beach Beauties and Studio Poses.” There is a power dynamic at play between these strange twins sizing each other up, each suspicious of the other or perhaps of their own shortcomings in relation to the phrase that frames them. Across the room, in an oil painting by Sarah Vanasse Miles, two brightly-colored figures take the opposite tack and embrace in a warm, bodily geometry, creating a quiet sense of sweet, melancholic intimacy inside a richly-toned wooden frame. (It is a rare piece of picture moulding that perfectly compliments a given painting, but this pairing is spot on.)

There are a few more: a snapshot of strangers on the subway by Yvette Griffea-Gray, a series of four swim-capped women churning the gears of an elaborate contraption by Lorelei Beckstrom, two bearded men leaning in for a kiss by Daniel Allyn Lee, and, in another stand-out moment, a soberly strange photograph by Samantha Rickner of a child laying across the lap of a shrouded adult. It’s a middle class pietà of domesticity — the apparent parent nearly erased by the lounging (and very much alive) child inside their living room, the receding lines of the shaggy, white rug creating a vanishing point of the mother’s head.

 

Top: Samantha Rickner, Braden, 2019. Archival pigment print, 4x5 large format film, 24" x 30". Image courtesy of the gallery. Bottom: Desireé Forgét, CUT HERE, 2023. Acrylic on jigsaw-cut plywood, 68 x 45 x .5". 

 

Everyone else in the exhibition appears to stand alone: Shanna Allyn’s pin-cushioned subject frozen in silhouette; Nikolina Lazetic’s portrait of a woman with an arresting, ethereal gaze, as though emerging from a tintype; Lucy Comer’s weary, colorful traveler, rifling through their purse in the radiant heat of a summer sidewalk bus stop. Indeed, female-presenting characters make up the majority of Callahan’s Periphery, likely no coincidence given the state of the world. Kathryn Blommel’s exquisitely rendered charcoal figure reaches one hand through the cartoon hole of her torso towards another, perhaps in some sly mockery of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Desirée Forgét’s life-size, jigsaw superheroine shoots light beams out of her eyes like some Cyclops Wonder Woman. And a lone figure, cloaked all in black, huddles on the dirt shoulder of a roadside watching traffic move by in Christopher Jones’ curious photograph, Portrait of a Woman.

But for me, best in show is still Newby’s beautiful stranger, at once shrouded in a rich orange shadow and gleaming under a bright white spotlight. The eyes of any portrait are usually the knock-out punch, but Newby has left them hazy brown, somehow all the more piercing for their lack of pupils, instead pushing your attention to the sitter’s red lips and the way the light catches the curve of his eye socket. It looks as though an old photograph has been colorized, over-saturated beyond the sepia tones of the original, with all the nostalgia of a face forgotten if not for this lone document. For being only 12 x 16”, it is a fine piece of painting.

Full disclosure, I’ve had a long relationship with Gamut Gallery, going all the way back to my very first inclusion in a Twin Cities group show, in the 2014 iteration of Call 4 Work. I don’t know that I could tell you much about that group of works either, but it is a testament to the gallery's eleven years of exhibitions that Gamut has always stayed true to their namesake, showing a wide range of works from artists at many different stages of their careers. Of the 44 artists featured in this C4W, boasts Gallery Director Cass Garner, 33 have never shown at the gallery before. 

I still haven’t landed on the “best” group show I’ve ever seen — surely some effort of curatorial transcendence is slipping my memory — but this one is solid. There are works here that have stuck, that have followed me out the door, and that’s enough for me. Just imagine meeting forty-four people at a party — you’re bound to hit it off with some more than others. Go check it out, and see if you don’t fall in love with any strangers along the way. ◼︎

Devin Newby, Beautiful Strangers, 2023. Oil on gessoboard, 16 x 12".

 

C4W: The Periphery of Power is on view at Gamut Gallery through August 18, with an Artist Talk Thursday, August 3, at 7pm. $5 pre-sale, $10 at the door, free for Gamut members.

See the whole show at gamut-gallery.myshopify.com, or follow them on Instagram @gamutgallerympls.

All photos by the author unless otherwise noted.

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This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.