Scenes
New Art Examiner, March - April 2002
Jeffrey Kalstrom
The focus at Franconia is on the needs of the artist. Unlike some sculpture parks the emphasis here is less on giving the public a polished presentation than on showing them artists at work. Franconia was founded seven years ago by John Hock (the park director, spiritual leader, and father figure), his wife Tasha Hock, and Fuller Cowles. As a nonprofit organization Franconia receives about one-third of its funding from Minnesota-based foundations such as the Jerome, the McKnight and the O'Shaughnessy. Franconia has purchased 75 acres near its current rented property and will start to move to its permanent home in the summer of 2002. The new site includes riverfront land along the St. Croix, eliminating the need to get into the truck for those afternoon swims, and offers artists more varied terrain into which to integrate their work.
Franconia is located about 45 minutes northeast of Minneapolis/ St. Paul, on a former farm with a typical farmhouse, barn and sheds. It has two large trailer homes that have been covered with graffiti by Minneapolis street artists. These house the eight to 12 interns, sculpture-mad college students who spend half of their time assisting visiting artists and half on their own work. Franconia is now equipped with two cranes, two fork lifts, two gantries, trucks, trailers, nailers, and more mig, tig, and pig welders than you can shake a stick at.
Typically two to four sculptors are at Franconia at one time, often working in ways that are new to them. In contrast to the solitude of the studio, here you work cheek by jowl with other artists and you have assistants, which means designating tasks and not doing everything exactly your way. Also, Franconia is open 365, 24/7. Members of the public are always coming up and asking what you're making, so it's understood that part of your role as an artist is to figure out how to make the seeming absurdity of your work seem sensible, important, and interesting to a lay audience, and to do so in plain language.
The roughly 75 sculptures on view at Franconia over the course of a season are there temporarily, usually for one year. Most of the work is produced on-site, and the best reveals the challenge to the artist presented by the outdoor scale and the ways it forces a negotiation with the balances of nature and culture, urban and rural. For example, currently on view is Tamsie Ringler's Landing on Eros, which presents two rotting hulks of Detroit steel humping in a field of green. The insides of both cars have been emptied and fused, and the resulting shared interior space is entirely covered in gold leaf. With headlights on and radios playing, it's all about love, sex, and steel ponies.
Another favorite is Sue Kosmalski's Dancing Mattresses, Fairy Tale Series, a stack of 12 metal box springs with a hidden motor and sensors that cause it to lurch, bounce, and squeak in a naughty manner when viewers get close.
In Jean Humke's Comfort from last fall, the artist dug a grave-like hole in the ground, laid in it nude, and had a two-ton steel plate lowered over the hole. The plate had a cut-out square just large enough to reveal her belly. In the spring at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she'd laid face down on a bed of white chrysanthemums in the same shape and size as the steel plate, leaving her body's impression in the bed of flowers for the duration of the show. At Franconia the steel plate and another white flower bed lie on either side of two life-size photographs on vinyl of Humke's dual performances. But even without this documentation the sculpture opens up juicy thoughts about the physical embodiment of life and death, desire and revulsion. It is work like this - in this rural setting - that makes the power and potential of Franconia evident.
(Jeffrey Kalstrom is an artist and teaches art at the University of Minnesota at Duluth)
Tamsie Ringler, Landing on Eros, 2001, at Franconia Sculpture park
1987 Mercury Sable, 1988 Chevrolet Corsica, 96" x 76" x 255"