2023 McKnight Visual Arts Fellow: Lindsay Rhyner

Banner image: Detail of finished tapestry.

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This is the fifth in a series of articles profiling the six distinguished artists chosen as 2023 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 2023 cohort includes Tia-Simone Gardner, Kaamil A. Haider, Keren Kroul, Sieng Lee, Mark Ostapchuk, and Lindsay Rhyner.

Their two-year fellowship will culminate this spring with a McKnight Discussion Series:

Thursday, March 27, 2025: Adriel Luis (curator and artist) in conversation with Kaamil A. Haider, Keren Kroul, and Mark Ostapchuk

Thursday, April 10, 2025: Katie Pfohl (Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Detroit Institute of Art) in conversation with Tia-Simone Gardner, Sieng Lee, and Lindsay Rhyner

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Photo by Rik Sferra, courtesy of MCAD.

 

 

The best dystopias have a touch of camp, in my opinion. At least, when you’re living inside the real thing — pandemics, genocides, climate collapse, cultural backslide, and fascist overwhelm — something like Escape From New York is a preferable watch over, say, 1984. The latter’s just a little too close to home, too documentary-adjacent.

If you haven’t seen the former, you really should — it’s a treat. Kurt Russell wears an eyepatch, Isaac Hayes drives a Cadillac with chandeliers on the hood, and the streets are strewn with garbage. That’s a common motif in films of that era; the 1980s did not think very highly of themselves or the future. Forty years later, it is a privilege that Americans are not living in a full-on, burned-out hellscape ourselves, as many people in other countries have had to because of us. Here, however, cities reduced to rubble and cars burning through the night remain, for now, the realm of science fiction. They are dark visions, to be sure, but John Carpenter was among the best at lending them some proper color. It’s no surprise that several of his films can be found in the collection of VHS tapes Lindsay Rhyner has stacked on a shelf in her studio.

It’s actually an eclectic mix of cinema — from Howard’s End to Hey Vern, it’s Ernest! — in a studio filled with amazing bits of random nostalgia. Old faded advertisements, rubber Halloween masks, a framed glamour shot of Lieutenant Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s a scavenger’s paradise, especially for those of us nostalgic for the ‘80s and ‘90s. “I love collecting crap, but it's detrimental to my existence,” says Rhyner, who will be packing it all up to move studios soon. “But it's such a joy.”

 

Soft Burn, Hard Reset, installation detail, 2022. Two-person exhibition at the Quarter Gallery, Regis Center for Art. Photo courtesy of the University of Minnesota Department of Art.

 

All of this bric-a-brac, this wonderful detritus, adds up to much more than decoration or distraction; capital-s Stuff is at the heart of Rhyner’s studio practice, finding its way into her large-scale wall-hanging textile collages. She builds these tapestries out of a collection of source materials spread out across shelves, in bags, and under tables nearby. It’s everywhere: plastic toys, garden flags, sheets of vinyl, countless other items, and yards and yards of astounding fabrics, all of which Rhyner has sourced from thrift shops and dumpster dives here and abroad. There are racks of costumes and clothes, some of which Rhyner made, mended, or altered herself. “This is my costume department,” she explains. “Me and my sister have been collecting costumes our whole lives, and then she had to move, so her costume box got absorbed into here. I hope to be able to bring it somewhere else where people can go and pull costumes and use them.”

It feels like we’re backstage at a theater — a place the artist has found herself many times as a stagehand and custodian over the years. But the hustle and bustle of items in Rhyner’s studio all swirls around the giant worktable in the center of the room, where she puts together her tapestries — big, sometimes bonkers, oftentimes beautiful pictorial quilts she collages together out of this great heap of materials.

John Waters has defined camp as being necessarily unaware of itself. “True camp was so bad it was good,” he told W, adding the caveat, “and they didn’t know it.” There are elements of accident in Rhyner’s work, but I think she knows full well what she’s doing. Her finished pieces are mammoth in scale, sometimes over ten feet in length, and each scrap and shape is sewn together by hand using simple, methodical whip stitches. The finished quilts, however, are anything but simple, neither in terms of their components nor their composition. Rhyner pulls from her textile library to cobble together wildly disparate elements into one cohesive whole, starting from fabrics chosen on a whim and ending with these large, elaborate landscapes and wild, incomprehensible abstractions. Typically, she says, she’ll pick one good element early in the process to serve as the inspiration for the whole. On the tapestry currently under production on her worktable, she points out the keystone element: a two-foot-wide cartoon pizza.

 

The beginnings of a new tapestry at a very early stage. Photo by Russ White.

 

“This is sort of how it starts,” she explains. “I just throw shit on the table and then see what happens. But I'm going to base it on this pizza, I guess, because I think the colors and stuff are really beautiful, and I love the blobby thickness of it.”

For all the kitsch and happenstance that goes into the process, the final result can be quite sophisticated. Finished usually with a solid color fabric frame, the giant pieces hang — loom, even — like some regal adornment in a royal hallway, but more eccentric and sometimes more menacing. In some of the tapestries, Rhyner seems to be offering up portals into other worlds; other works appear as filters through which we can see our own. One gigantic piece she shows me is based on a photo she took of an abandoned gas station on Bloomington Avenue — a high-minded, labor-intensive, and quite beautiful rendering of urban decay. Here, the sections of fabric are arranged very pictorially and with no small amount of drama: dark clouds sweep across the horizon from the left towards a brilliant orange block of sunset sky illuminating gray piles of city snow in a variety of patterned fabrics. The building sits low and ramshackle, while the illegible gas station sign towers over the horizon. It’s a sweet, sad, strange sort of hellscape she has crafted here, erasing all other signs of civilization save this one last, ominous refuge.

In another, two cars zip by on a black, single-lane road cutting straight through what appears to be the rough outskirts of town, just past a desert of groovy, flat plaid. Other cars lay crunched and totaled alongside, while inside-out Santa Claus appliqués lay on their sides, touched up with acrylic paint to look like raging video game infernos. The title is The Great California Tire Fire; Snake Plissken would be right at home (though I suppose only if this were the sequel, Escape From LA, which is also in Rhyner’s stack of tapes).

 

Top: Tapestry about Bloomington Avenue gas station. Bottom: The Great California Tire Fire (detail). Photos by Russ White.

 

There’s an inherent 8-bit glitchiness to many of Rhyner’s works, in some cases simply because of the tiled pattern repetition common both to commercial textiles and old video game backgrounds. But she also breaks up and builds space in the same way those old game designers did, playing with depth and flatness at the limits of their technology. The angle of Tire Fire’s flat black road calls to mind the sidewalks of Paperboy, for instance, while others seem to reference the birds-eye-view maps you move through in classic games like Jackal or The Legend of Zelda.

The tapestries also share a certain spacial sensibility with traditional Chinese and Japanese ink landscapes — a similar willingness to let negative space do some of the heavy lifting in completing a picture. The spaciousness invites you in, but oftentimes it’s still difficult to know quite where you’ve landed. Rhyner’s travels inspire many of her compositions, as with the high-rises under construction she witnessed in Paris ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics. But other pieces are far less literal, as with a smaller abstraction created during a residency in South Korea.

 

Top: Image courtesy of the University of Minnesota Department of Art. Bottom: Image courtesy of the artist's Instagram.

 

There can be a real sense of the uncanny in works like this, especially when the elements seem like they should be recognizable but simply aren’t. A repeating pattern of cartoon gourds — or maybe they’re jello molds? — teases the possibility of comprehension, only to abandon it immediately behind strips of fabric printed in a swampy tumult of yellow and turquoise. Your brain tries to make sense of what you’re seeing, but sometimes the artwork bests your efforts. They are monumental and confounding pictures.

Rhyner is an expert colorist, creating coherent, well-balanced palettes across each piece, even dying or painting her textiles if they’re not just right. It’s an astounding amount of work, especially when you pay attention to the thread lines — the artist uses them like a pencil outlining every single thing, binding all of the disparate materials together and inscribing textures into their surfaces. Her shapes and strips lilt throughout these imagined spaces like contrails or tire tracks; sometimes they streak across the tapestry like jagged claw marks or frenetic, otherworldly licks of flame. All of these intricate details add up, giving the viewer plenty to take in both up close and far away, and keeping Rhyner working on pieces sometimes for months at a time. “It always gets pretty big and out of control, but I just do what I feel like doing,” she says.

 

 

Up close, you see the adornments: little lemon charms that have been dipped in green nail polish in the one she made in Korea. “It's just fun to fuck with little details like that,” she says. “I really love doing that, where I can go on autopilot and just do it, and then it's part of a larger piece. I just love that part of the process.” During her residency there, Rhyner was staying in a farming community; as a result the piece is riddled with scraps of seed bags common to the area. As with many collages, the provenance of source materials in Rhyner’s work can be fun to puzzle over, camouflaged as they are inside these wild vistas. It’s not dissimilar to the nostalgic impulse of fandom and collection, either — a respect for the old, the weird, the mass-produced, and the utterly unique.

There’s a fine balance any collage artist must strike between what is found — and, quite often, hoarded — and what is made. Some quilts she comes across are just too good as is to scrap for parts. “When I see old pieces of fabric that are really beautiful and just thinking about how these people all sat around together and embroidered these insane tapestries with crazy narratives and pictures and stories on them. I just love that.”

 

Top: TASSLE (left) and SCALE, 2016. Fabric, beads, and metal. From Rhyner's 2017 exhibition PRV'S at Hair+Nails. Bottom: Photo by Russ White.

 

Rhyner got into sewing initially through creating costumes with her sister; a 2017 solo show at Hair+Nails featured an extensive collection of her Punk Rock Vests with custom-made back patches. Her sister was the one who found a motherlode of costume chain mail pieces in what Rhyner deduced was “some kind of fantasy role player person's trash. They were throwing away all their figurines and their comic books and shit.” The aluminum lattice found its way into a tapestry based on a photo the artist took of tomatoes in her garden covered in an early snow. The sci-fi vibe of her dystopian aesthetic is there — the metal pattern is quite similar to Worf’s sash, actually — but the red fruits provide a certain counterpoint, a resilience mixed with vulnerability, alongside a wink to the classic wristband tomato pin cushion so many textile artisans use. It’s a sweet bit of liveliness underneath all that armor.

Another piece, Baconated Room, plays with its food, as well. Here, straight out of a nasty old 1960s magazine ad, a tablescape of meats takes flight, levitating into a great, spurting cloud of raunchy, low-relief guts, bones, and ribbony entrails. Again, Rhyner has brought us into a space, in this case a room of mustard, pink, and black inspired by the spare, harrowing interiors of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Whoever might have been sitting in that chair seems to have been eviscerated by the charcuterie.

 

Baconated Room (detail). Image courtesy of the University of Minnesota Department of Art.

 

From Hannah Höch to Gee Vaucher, Richard Hamilton to Winston Smith, collage often carries with it an inherent social critique of the dominant culture the artist is putting through the blender; the same goes for John Carpenter, Paul Verhoeven, and so many of our other middlebrow auteurs. There is also an inherent joyfulness in artistic output of this sort — in the finding of materials, in the flipping of norms. Rhyner is building on the traditions of quilting, textiles, and tapestries by expanding their visual vocabulary to include mass-produced plastic shit from our global market of garbage. When I put it to her this way, she laughs and immediately agrees: “Absolutely. I mean, I got heaps of global garbage.”

I wonder now where all of my old VHS collection has ended up — I swear, just seeing a stack of tapes like that does something to me on a molecular level. Every movie I owned back in the day came armored in black plastic, so it’s all got to still be out there somewhere, likely either in a thrift store or a landfill. Maybe my generation’s nostalgia for all of these corny, campy old things is a coping mechanism to insulate us from the end of the world as we thought we knew it. What did nostalgia look like for generations in centuries past, before we defined our adolescence by cheap toys or action-packed b-movies about living with doom? In his book Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, Dorian Lynskey notes that, “In 1989, Susan Sontag suggested the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now was wishful thinking, and what we are living with instead is ‘Apocalypse from Now On.’”

It sure feels that way these days, but in the end, I’m no pessimist. There will always be someone, somewhere down the line — maybe they’re kids right now, maybe they’re not even born yet — picking through what we leave behind and making something fucking rad with it. A portal to something new, I hope, built out of the scraps of what has been. ◼︎ 

 

Photo by Russ White.

 

To see more of Lindsay Rhyner's work, follow her on Instagram @lindsayrhyner.