The Sideshow
2012–2013
I left Patterson after three and a half years. The freelance and agency contract work that followed was something I liked even more — more freedom, more variety, less fluorescent lighting. MoCo was one of the gigs. On my last day there, everyone wore plaid and a button in my honor. Matt and Jena gave me a mason jar full of unsalted sunflower seeds. Those are the kinds of goodbyes you get when people actually like you, when the work was real and the time was short.
With freelance came space. I could run around Lake Calhoun and Harriet in the afternoon if the work was done. I could bike downtown at night, past First Ave, through the Mill District, across the Stone Arch Bridge with the city reflected in the river below. I started to feel something I hadn’t felt in years: time. Not a lot of it, and not without guilt, but enough to notice what I’d been neglecting.
I needed to make art. I’d known it the whole time, the way you know you need to call someone but keep putting it off. The printmaking community had been my family for four years and I’d barely printed. The presses at Highpoint were right there. The copper was affordable. The acid was waiting.
So in my last year in Minneapolis, I started to crank.
Six seventeen-inch copper etchings. Awkward circus creatures — figures caught in poses that were half-graceful, half-grotesque. Sideshow performers. Contortionists of the in-between. I don’t know where they came from, except that I’d always been drawn to the margins of things, the performers who don’t quite fit the main tent.
I called the first showing at Highpoint “The Sideshow.”
The prints got a good reception. I showed them at MAPC that year, at Open Portfolio, and they were accepted for more shows after that. People responded to the strangeness — the careful technique married to the weird subject matter. That combination of craft and discomfort was the most honest work I’d made since college.
But I felt the clock ticking the whole time. I was making the work I should have been making for five years, compressed into months. Pulling long nights at the press, the acid biting the copper while I watched, knowing I was about to leave the city that had given me everything I needed to become this person — and I’d spent most of it catching up on the wrong things.
Always feeling behind. That’s the thread that runs through Minneapolis. At Patterson, I was behind on design. At the press, I was behind on art. In Algoma, I was behind on being a dad. The feeling never left. It just migrated.
But those six etchings — those were mine. Awkward and tender and strange, like the circus they depicted. Like the artist who made them.