Art Imitates Life

The artists' statements and bios are more entertaining than the visual art in this show. One gets the feeling that the artists had more fun and used a lot more imagination coming up with their alter egos than they did making the art. In one bio, a photographer who goes by the name of Miracle Don writes that he earned his nickname after surviving a trip through a two-story piece of heavy pulping machinery suffering only two broken bones, some lacerations and the loss of one eye. Meanwhile, studies by OSHA and the MacCurskey Machine Co. showed that there was a .006 percent chance of Don's survival. This caused him to experience an epiphany. "It is only through loss that one glimpses the here and now," he writes, "and man's travails are best told by what he has left behind." Only after losing his eye did Don gain the wisdom to see more clearly, knowledge he tries to pass on through his photography -- some of which is part of pop singer Michael Bolton's private art collection. Don's "Absence Is the Only Proof That We Ever Existed" series is vividly colored and textured; particularly beautiful is the photograph of a red-painted ax in a white metal holder attached to a white wall. Some of the ax's red paint covers the white metal holder, suggesting spilled blood. But for the most part, Don's soap-opera story is more interesting than his photos.

Similarly, the statement for Crystal K's art-therapy watercolor drawings and collage recounts a former child prostitute's Jerry Springer-ish tale of brutal beatings and the death of her "street mother." Crystal K uses the art-therapy images to, she writes, "explore the things that were good from being a little girl." She combines simple watercolor pencil-line drawings of early scenes from her life with corresponding cutouts from catalogs. A blond-haired, blue-eyed little girl wearing a pink dress with the words "Birthday Princess" smiles a toothy, saccharine grin from the bottom of one sheet of watercolor paper; Crystal's watery line drawing of a man watching a girl sit at a table with her cupcake dissipates in the center of the page. Crystal's drawings are sad, but the creepy perfection in the accompanying catalog images is more evocative than her own autobiographical drawings.

Crystal K's work hangs next to digital prints by one Harold Brown, whose résumé includes an MFA from the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and shows at the Walker Arts Center. This accomplished artist mounts his C-prints on foam-core board and arranges them in a panorama. "Untitled (Study for Tropical Storm Isetta #3074)" attempts to deal with, Brown writes, "philosophical speculations about the true nature of reality and the mysterious workings of the universe."

But the piece just looks like unprofessional digital snapshots of trash on a cheap blue carpet, leading the viewer to question the validity of art that aspires to such a grandiose and unspecific goal.