Dance | Analog/Digital | Real-time-ness: Mn Artists Guest Editor Kristin Van Loon

By Kristin Van Loon

Back to Reader

Kristin Van Loon's series on dance, analog/digital, and real-time-ness

Next up in Mn Artists’s publishing series, each of which highlight a unique cross-section of the local arts scene, is a suite of pieces from guest editor Kristin Van Loon. Van Loon is a dance artist, half of the duo HIJACK, and co-founder of HAIR+NAILS Contemporary Art Gallery, who has long experimented with process-based arts writing in the form of zines and printed matter. At the outset of her series, she proposed a Venn diagram including three overlapping circles: dance, analog/digital, and real-time-ness. At the conclusion, she mapped each of the resulting pieces onto the original diagram, revealing the connection points between the contributors’ responses. The full set of articles is collected below: though created before the era of social distancing, the collection offers strategies for how bodies might react with and against the omnipresence of screens—in real, unfolding time.

Kristin Van Loon maps themes across the series of articles onto the original Venn diagram.

Photo courtesy Kristin Van Loon.

Writings Commissioned by Kristin Van Loon for Mn Artists

Map of references from Outdoor Dances lecture.

Drawing by Kristin Van Loon with contributions from Morgan Thorson and Olive Bieringa. Photo: Alice Gebura.

MN Dance & the Ecstasies of Influences: Mapping Minnesota Dance Influences One Connecting Line at a Time

Independent curator and dance producer Michèle Steinwald shares a photo essay and retrospective on her lecture/discussion series, MN Dance & the Ecstasies of Influences, featuring maps by guest editor Kristin Van Loon that illuminate the grassroots web of connections that make up parts of the Twin Cities dance communities.

Artist rendering. The image is rendered in a halftone dot pattern on a lavender background with a grainy photocopier texture. It shows a repeating image (six times) of a young person trapped in a clear elongated glass test tube. The person has short black hair and is wearing a dress with a thick collar; large metallic buttons go down the middle left side, and there is a thick belt across the waist. The dress goes down to their thighs and on their legs they are wearing shiny metallic leggings and clogs on their feet. Their left hand is raised up by their face, palm open and thumb and forefingers extended. Their right hand is straight down by their waist, palm on their hip and fingers extended.

Christopher Corey Allen, poly styrene, x-ray spex 2020.

This Body Is Not a Temple

Transdisciplinary artist Christopher Corey Allen offers a slippery exegesis of the punk∞body: drawing on iconic punk moments, queer theory, and their own artistic research, they excavate punk as a practice of generative refusal, anti-containment as a gesture towards fluidity, and messiness as a language of dissent.

Image courtesy of Ellie Lynch.

Where Will You Dance?

From traditional theaters to non-traditional venues to electronic spaces, Ellie Lynch considers the liminality and the life span of performance spaces, physical and digital.

Image courtesy Colin Rusch.

Flow, Response, Disruption: On Dance and Finance

Colin Rusch, a former Mn Artists staffer and Minneapolis-based choreographer, demonstrates how the artist skills of listening, sensing, and predicting outcomes transferred directly into his second career as a Wall Street analyst.

The image shows a layered series of photographs taken from a similar perspective. It is the same view of photographs of the Shoshone/Idaho Mountains, taken over a period of multiple days with the available light being different every time. The general blue-ish hue is from a couple of digital photographs that were taken in the early morning. The photos are also layered onto a photoshop background that is orange-red, a hue taken from one of the other in processed digital photographs. A sliver of that color is seen on the left side of the photograph. It is an exposure of the background layer of a complex image. The images are not aligned perfectly, causing the overall lines in the image to appear blurred or unsure. The layering refers to the “rolodex” of light states in the writer’s memory of the place (mentioned in the writing). The title points to landscape photography’s role in Manifest Destiny (such as the photographs of Carlton Watkins).

Valerie Oliveiro, View from Juniper Road, Unmanifested, 2020.

LANDLESSNESS/LESS

Choreographer, performer, designer, and photographer Valerie Oliveiro constructs a text by using the guest editor’s images as a score, or improvisational prompt. The writing is also itself a dance—a choreography that chews on vernaculars, bends the light, and traverses the vastness of bodies and time.

This image shows a square stone Mayan ruin affixed to a dark wall in a museum setting. The tone of the ruin is tan with areas of faded blue and orange color. The ruin depicts hieroglyphic writing and two Mayan figures, one sitting, one standing, interacting formally.

Wmpearl, “Maya stone lintel, Usamacita Valley, Yaxchilan, Guatemala, Late Classic Period, c. 550–950 CE, limestone with paint, Dayton Art Institute,” 2012, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio.

Reading/living myth: a dance with time (for Olimpia)

Artist and poet Genevieve DeLeon reads The Popol Vuh on the Metro, superimposing Mayan mythology and present-day human figures to consider the twinning of art and life, the living and the dead, language and image, gesture and meaning.

A black-and-white drawing of a horseshoe-shaped piece of metal with a rolled-up measuring tape stuck inside showing the number 23.

Image: Karen Sherman.

The Kissing Number

Choreographer, writer, and handymam artist Karen Sherman takes us to the East Village in the summer of 1994 in a diptych of essays that contemplate a moment in queer culture, the early days of the internet, aesthetic fixations, and the transience of desire.