I happened onto Peter Geyen's work by accident last week when I was in downtown Minneapolis. His exhibit "Know More Funny Business," which benefits Children's HeartLink, is up in the IDS Center's Crystal Court (on Nicollet Avenue) until November 10. You can see some images from the show on Geyen's facebook page.
The big parts of his work--the parts you see across the room--are slick and shiny, which always draws the eye, or at least mine, and the pieces, which are three-dimensional, are meticulously displayed, often in sleek white cases I found very neat and satisfying. The slickness is offset by the small bronze and wood (I think that's what the funny little chimps are made of, or maybe fiberglass?) figures, many of which seem to have wandered onto these monochrome expanses from some other older or earthier place: the little soldiers and elephants, the figure standing alone in a gaping maw with shiny teeth, gleefully brandishing some sharp object in his upraised fist. He doesn’t look lost or sorry, which is what I felt for him at first, and neither do the flying bronze gargoyle-like creatures who have been pinned mid-flight by their capes to a photographic image of the skull of a chimpanzee; the expressions on their faces seem to indicate that the whole thing is a sort of lark, although there’s also a kind of definition, a mischievous steeliness, a direction in their eyes that makes me think that they intended to come here. For what reason? That’s what makes the works fun to look at and contemplate.
What I mean to say is that the figures are that expressive and good. They were my favorite part. The juxtaposition of figures and materials that defy our notions of what “goes together” might not be anything new in mixed-media art, in and of itself, but Geyen does it in a way that embodies a sense of the movement, the gestures, that may have brought us to the places we find ourselves in. In the case of a lacquered surface made to look like black silk with something moving underneath, he does something else I always find interesting, which is to make hard materials look soft. There’s something creepy to me about this idea and I like that. What’s funny is that a hard material made to look like fabric made me think of it, and not bronze made to look like flesh. We’re too used to that by now. But I wonder if humans felt that way when they first made figurines and looked at them. I think I would have been afraid, I think I would have wiggled my toes just to make sure, I think I would have worried for a second that maybe I’d transferred the qualities of the life I had always felt coursing through my own heart and limbs into a piece of wood or stone.