I have been making colorful abstract drawings and paintings for about 15 years. I use it as a way to explore aesthetic questions, consider composition, find new color relationships, understand pure formal speculation, experiment with various textures, and express emotion through the act of making. Often they are large scale, which allows for a unique expression through the physicality of the body and the translation of large gestures into marks. These paintings are from 2015 and were shown at Sen Yai Sen Lek.
SELFMADEMPLS
An artist-led architecture for urban self-reliance.
A Proposal for Creative City Challenge 2016
Team: Aaron Marx, Lucas Alm, Sarah Nassif, Jake Nassif, Paul Schmelzer
STATEMENT OF INTEREST
Self-reliance and connection to the land are common threads in the history of this place—from pre-settlement societies to European farmers to the early industrial era that harnessed the bounty of the land.
But modern living is erasing so much land-based knowledge and skills, as well as our identity as growers, savers, and rugged survivors. We are now citizens of the retail-financial-corporate complex, more oriented to stadiums than seedbeds. Push too hard on our modern assumptions and they crumble like an interstate bridge. American cities are one major security breach or climate event away from disaster.
Renewing our self-reliance—and our relationships with each other—is increasingly a matter of self-preservation. We are (again) a diverse population of people struggling to make a home together in a challenging place, with many mouths to feed and little more than our collective wits to protect us. What actions will we take to prepare? We believe the Creative City Challenge—with its goals of promoting health, community connection, and vital exchange through art in the city’s center—is the perfect vehicle to address this question.
CONCEPTUAL APPROACH
Artists, as usual, can show the way. For decades Minneapolis makers, growers, architects, technologists, and other creative toilers have been preserving knowledge and skills—and forging new ones—outside the mainstream cultural conversation. From urban farming and sustainable architecture to alternative transportation and homemade textiles, our artists know how to make it for themselves.
This summer in the center of the city, we want to amplify their voices and widely share their knowledge. We call it Self-Made Mpls: an iconic complex, part garden, part workshop, part classroom, part prototype, where citizens and visitors can rediscover together what we’re capable of.
Our team of two architects, two writers, and a community artist will create an iconic destination for experts to share self-reliant skills and for the public to understand and practice them.
PROJECT PROPOSAL
Self-Made Mpls is a proposal for an iconic energy generating windmill and accompanying garden space that transforms into a community gathering space for sharing knowledge and learning about sustainable living. The components of this project include:
Garden: A series of raised boxes will grow an assortment of foods ideal for the local climate, with the produce used in workshops and in a final public meal. Some beds will grow plants chosen to clean urban air and soil, while others will host a pollinator-friendly garden to help regenerate the ecosystem.
Tower windmill: A powerful beacon that draws people to the project stands as a primary axis and symbol for our endeavor. Lights powered by a mix of wind and solar energy will illuminate the tower and the structure below, while an iconic weather vane inspired by Leonardo’s helicopter—a symbol of human ingenuity—will top the tower.
Meeting space: The base of the tower will serve as a welcoming convening space for community events, a key aspect of the project. Wall panels, closed at night to store garden tools and event materials, will open to create a canopied environment for meetings and scheduled events. Inside the structure will be tables, seating, and a resource library, including key books for education and inspiration. The project’s concluding event will be a public feast made with food grown on site in the gardens.
Workshops: A key aim of the project is to demystify the practices of self-reliance. To this end, we will invite artists and experts to the project site weekly or bi-weekly to lead workshops where the public can learn practical skills. These contributors will be paid for their time as appropriate. Programming could include:
Farmers Market: Several times over the course of the project we’ll partner with Frogtown Farm or local Hmong farmers to host a pop-up produce market on the grounds. This could be done in conjunction with a workshop such as pickling when cucumbers are in season.
Publication: To ensure that the knowledge shared in Self-Made Mpls is useful long-term, we will produce a zine or newsletter that chronicles learning and resources. Copies of the publication will available free to participants and visitors late in the project. We intend to pay for the creation of this publication through a separate grant.
GOALS
How do we address the theme of CCC 2016?
We believe Self-Made Mpls represents the best of our city and region, embodied by people passionate about their ideas and eager to collaborate. This is the Minneapolis people outside the artist and maker community rarely sees: bubbling over with ingenuity and socially- and environmentally-conscious activity. The site also makes a striking visual statement. The incongruous presence of a large garden and windmill downtown will draw in visitors and locals.
How do we meet the city’s goals?
Adds character to the city by creating a destination that literally enhances the health and enriches the lives of Minneapolis residents. Every visitor takes away awareness, connections, and skills they can apply to living self-sufficiently.
Helps recognize Minneapolis as a regional center for excellence in architecture, urban design and the arts. Our architect-designed intervention will be an engaging destination that puts a variety of local ingenuity on magnificent display.
Enhances community identity and sense of place in the MCC plaza and contributes to community vitality through programming that brings people together to grow, learn, share, and survive.
River Mural and Pollinator Rain Barrels (Aug. 2016) was a public art workshop with Public Art Saint Paul making a 10′ x 4′ river mural on canvas and painting two rain barrels with pollinators to be used as garden collection units.
From Mary Abbe: “Aaron Marx’s installation, “Builders of the Universe,” takes its title from a book compiled by Albert Einstein of texts about scientific discoveries by astronomers, physicists and other architects of thought. In his installation, Marx uses motion-activated light to create ever-shifting images of leaves, cracked mirrors and shadows cast by an overhead sculpture composed of hundreds of angled cardboard shapes. Though inspired by science, “Builders” reads as a poetic meditation on those resolutely modern concepts: uncertainty and impermanence.”
This project or investigation has fallen under the broad framework titled “Builders of the Universe,” based on a historical text of the same name. It evolved out of my own struggle to understand the contradiction between faith and reason. For me, science has continued to inspire a deeper connection to being; for example, the second law of thermodynamics in fact shows us that a cloud never dies.
*This video was in the City Pages Top Music Videos, it was part of a large scale public projection at the Northrop.
Builders of the Universe is artistic exploration and urban intervention considering the role of memory on the perception of space and our place in the cosmos. By considering the non-linear shifts in our understanding of the universe through a study of Einstein’s Builders of the Universe, this project considers the significant paradigm shifts in science over the course of history, and asks questions about the nature of our relationship with the metaphysical nature of the universe. Some questions this work addresses are: How do shifts in our understanding of the universe help us to come to terms with the ever increasing demand for technology in art and architectural design? What can we learn about memory in the built environment by examining the most prevalent shifts in science and the construction of the astronomic world? How has the art and science of creative practice changed over time?
The physical manifestation of this project will begin with the concept of progress. Related to the idea of poetic analogy, this project will explore how physical, digital, and full size models can be used as a process of visualizing, thinking, and contemplating. Starting with Richard Pousette-Dart’s “process” work, where he documented the transformation of his painting Cathedral, this project will attempt to bring form to, and push the boundaries of, abstraction in three-dimensional form. It will be accomplished through a series of public art interventions, collaborative art making exercises, and a gallery installation – consisting of projections, environmental sensors, and energy parasites.
The goals of this project are to explore the relationship between artistic process, digital technology, and representational abstraction in 3d form and to develop compelling uses for new technology in a contemporary public and media art practice. There are many questions to be considered in this process: How can the traditional modes of making and the artistic transformation found in Pousette-Dart’s painting practice be applied to a technological, digital art practice? In what ways can digital art and a systematic documentation processes help to bridge the gap between science and art? How can digital technology and media art inform questions about memory in the built environment? And finally, can sustainability and source created energy be used to build awe inspiring interactive environments?
Once (maybe twice) in lifetime, something happens that transforms a favorite
pastime forever. For the sport of Mini Golf, that time was summer 2013, 2014
and 2015 at the Walker Sculpture Garden. Move Your Hole! employs the game’s
familiar assets and rules but with one crucial twist: the target hole roams. In lieu
of taking her usual shot, a player may instead relocate one of 6 topiary plugs into
the open hole, thereby opening a different hole—a new target!—for the round.
The new hole becomes everyone’s object—that is until another player chooses to
move the hole instead of swinging for it. With this deceptively simple change, the sport attains a mind-blowing new level of challenge, strategy and competition while remaining easy enough for anyone to play.
Move Your Hole! was created by MakeShi!t for the Walker Art Center’s artistdesigned mini golf. It was purchased by the Walker in 2013.
In the summer of 2000, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neo-conservative think tank of Bush administration officials and advisors, issued a document calling for the radical restructuring of U.S. government and military policies. It advocated the massive expansion of defense spending, the re-invasion of Iraq, and many other policies that have eroded our freedom and democracy.
Mosaic 4′ x 6′ archival print
This has cost us dearly. Over the course of eight years, 4,500 U.S. service members lost their lives fighting in Iraq. Years later, we are witnessing an unprecedented erosion of our constitutional rights: domestic spying on every American, attacks on freedom of speech, the prosecution of the press, corporations as people, and erosion of our democracy. Considering this, I created a 4′-0″ x 6′-0″ mosaic image of George W. Bush made from portraits of U.S. solders who were lost to the war in Iraq. These images were acquired through Mass Information and the Temporal Graffiti War.
Public Acts of Drawing is a real-time art-making event that merges free-form collaboration with large-scale urban spectacle. Participants put pen to paper alongside local artists, dignitaries, and a few hundred friends. Drawers of all ages, skill levels, and styles are welcome. Special contributors will help steer and energize the proceedings, but the results are delightfully unpredictable. Over the course of the night, the individual marks of many will become a vibrant lattice of interpenetrated doodles, the Hive Mind documented in graphite and ink. Ground Zero for the project is a spacious drawing table with a hand crank that provides a gradual feed of fresh paper, lit by energy-efficient LEDs. Using a GoPro camera linked to a high-powered projector, the draw-a-thon is simulcast on downtown architecture, turning each small gesture into a heroic act. Public Acts of Drawing made its debut in 2012 on the (now destroyed) Pillsbury A Mill in St. Anthony Main. It’s a project of MakeSh!t, a free-form collective founded in 2010 with a mission to explore the social and process-based aspects of art—in other words, collaborative making. Current members include Lucas Alm, Justin Heideman, Aaron Marx, Jake Nassif, Craig Phillips, Paul Schmelzer, and Witt Siasoco.
The Codex Leicester (also briefly known as Codex Hammer) is a collection of largely scientific writings by Leonardo da Vinci. The codex is named after Thomas Coke, later created Earl of Leicester, who purchased it in 1719. Of Leonardo’s 30 scientific journals, the Codex may be the most famous of all. The manuscript holds the record for the sale price of any book, when it was sold to Bill Gates at Christie’s auction house on 11 November 1994 in New York for US$30,802,500.[1][2]
The Codex provides an insight into the inquiring mind of the definitive Renaissance artist, scientist and thinker as well as an exceptional illustration of the link between art and science and the creativity of the scientific process.
The MIA will be having an exhibition related to the Codex sometime this year. I think it would be interesting to have an artist in residence, working with the Codex and developing engaging community outreach and educational art workshops related to the scientific journal.
Thinking about a way to use digital tools in the creative process. Where 3d modeling is not just a way to execute an already formed idea. How can we use technology to help inspire a new and creative way of making? This image is the parametric modeling of randomly distributed points. Using Rhino 5.0 multiple models were developed thinking about the development of a “New Star” sculpture for Franconia sculpture park.
I have exciting news I’d like to share with you! Made Here, the largest urban walking gallery in the world, has officially chosen me to be a part of their winter 2014 exhibition, “Brilliance”! My work will be showcased at _705 Hennepin_ in the heart of downtown Minneapolis!
Here’s a quick ‘about’ statement from Made Here:
“Made Here, with Hennepin Theatre Trust, showcases Minnesota’s wealth of artistic talent to activate the vibrant downtown Minneapolis Cultural District. From locally created visual displays in vacant storefronts, to pop-up parks and art galleries and live performances in commercial spaces, the rich diversity of the Twin Cities’ cultural community is front and center for all to share.”
“Brilliance!” will be having its debut, Friday November 28th, and I would love for you to join me in witnessing the bright life this installation will bring to the wintry streets of Minneapolis (more information to come)!
Public Acts of Drawing is a real-time art-making event that merges free-form collaboration with large-scale urban spectacle. Participants put pen to paper alongside local artists, dignitaries, and a few hundred friends. Drawers of all ages, skill levels, and styles are welcome. Special contributors will help steer and energize the proceedings, but the results are delightfully unpredictable. Over the course of the night, the individual marks of many will become a vibrant lattice of interpenetrated doodles, the Hive Mind documented in graphite and ink. Ground Zero for the project is a spacious drawing table with a hand crank that provides a gradual feed of fresh paper, lit by energy-efficient LEDs. Using a GoPro camera linked to a high-powered projector, the draw-a-thon is simulcast on downtown architecture, turning each small gesture into a heroic act. Public Acts of Drawing made its debut in 2012 on the (now destroyed) Pillsbury A Mill in St. Anthony Main. It’s a project of MakeSh!t, a free-form collective founded in 2010 with a mission to explore the social and process-based aspects of art—in other words, collaborative making. Current members include Lucas Alm, Justin Heideman, Aaron Marx, Jake Nassif, Craig Phillips, Paul Schmelzer, and Witt Siasoco.
