I once had a fob designing and building floats for parades, miniature golf courses and haunted houses. Ever since that experience, the visual vitality and raucous drama of the carnival has been part of my work. This vocabulary has been applied to room-sized installations, single object sculptures and paintings.

These recent paintings evolve from a variety of sources. Some begin simply as doodles on a scrap paper that somehow develop inertia to become paintings. Other ideas are formed as a response to something I have read or experienced, like the three-legged frogs of Minnesota or the burning of 25 million auto batteries a year in China. These environmental oddities and disasters fascinate me because they define a crossroads where human, their technology and the natural world intersect. In my paintings I have tried to portray the similar relationships where humans and animals are joined as awkward inhabitants in natural and industrial landscapes. Like the 19th century American painters James Audubon and Frederic Church, whose art celebrated their journeys to remote lands, these paintings portray a surreal personal vision of an unbalanced world where comedy, horror, beauty, and reality become indistinguishable.

Drawings by Virginia Marvin
Virginia's Secret

Virginia's secret is a selection of 80 drawings, remarkable in their designs, descriptions, depiction of the female form and their mysterious provenance. Ranging from the merely alluring to the sexually suggestive, these designs were drawn by a young woman raised in a small Wisconsin town. They raise provocative questions about their sophisticated nature and their unlikely author, while offering an intimate glimpse into the life of a fascinating young woman.

Virginia Marvin came of age during the great Depression in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Her days were spent in studies, school plays, choir rehearsal, church and teaching Sunday school. Her evenings were spent going to the movies with girlfriends, numerous dates and flirtatious encounters with boys, particularly with Leonard Ahrens who was to become her husband.

She was deeply influenced by glamour and celebrity as presented in films, plays and by the offerings of the world outside her own, as experienced in numerous trips to Chicago especially the World's Fair of 1934. She saw Duke Ellington play, heard FDR speak and saw Sally Rand's fan dance. In addition, she starred in school plays and sang in recitals, wrote for the Prairie du Chien Courier, sewed her own clothing, made candy and baked pies and cakes.

Yet she pursued none of these talents, drew her borderline erotic pictures in secrecy, kept diaries that barely reflect the key events of her life married, had two children, and succumbed to a long and painful battle with alcoholism that diminished and shortened her life.

Everyone has a Virginia in their family, a woman with grand dreams, capable of much more than her circumstances allowed, and who made do with what society and family dictated as her place. With Virginia Ahrens we have a glimpse into a small, eventually tragic life that could have been more. Could she have made it as a fashion designer, writer, or performer if she'd pursued her talents? Or was marriage and motherhood her ultimate goal? Was she filling the void left by an inattentive spouse and an "empty nest?" Or did the discovery of the circumstances of her birth threaten her longing for love and respectability and trigger her descent into alcoholism?

And of course there are the drawings. Was she just "doodling," or did they reflect a greater talent and unacknowledged desire? The pencil sketches are intriguing and prompt a multitude of questions, which accompanying artifacts barely begin to answer. Diaries, hand-sewn clothing, and photographs, along with insights provided by friends and family amplify this exhibit. But it is the drawings that capture one's attention, and arouses the question: "Who drew these?"

How this exhibit came about
In 1997, Mindy Brancamp presented Virginia's drawings as part of an assignment for a Viterbo University Humanities course. They had been found mixed in with piano sheet music belonging to her grandmother who had passed away in 1978. Instructor Jay Salinas became intrigued with the unusual nature and subject of the drawings and teaming with Mindy's mother, Donna Ahrens, and writer Kris Slawinski, the four began researching Virginia's life and times, contacting old friends from Prairie du Chien as well as Marvin family members, for insights into this extraordinary life.

This show was organized by Jay Salinas and the Wormfarm Institution Inc.
Re-integrating Culture and Agriculture.

Matt Wycoff
Recent Works

While the source material for this exhibition is drawn from many different places, it is unified by an interest in the formation of the self through the collective expectation, or desire of the society in which the individual is submerged.

This exhibition moves from references to popular culture in the form of film and literature with an interest in Melville's Moby Dick to re-presentation of architectural models as material props for collective ideology. The work utilizes grids, veils, reference to modernism through presentation, advertising, sequins, and sins to induce notions of desire and alienation. It is in the dialogue between desire alienation that the work in this exhibition finds it's meaning.

There's no place like you is in opposition to the idea of the autonomy of the desirous subject. It means literally, there is no place like you, stressing society as the source of "personal" or subjective desire and questioning the nature of the concept "I." As objects of desire move into realm of props for a collective fantasy, the "I" is relegated to the status of an instrument; enacting the collective will. The alienation caused by this instrumentalization of the "I" is the focus of this exhibition.

In examining the shift in the social structure, from the religious economy of Europe prior to the large scale industrialization of production, and the market economy charisma from God to Dollar. The collective desire for salvation that was present through much of recorded history up to the indoctrination of capitalism was replaced by the collective desire for the accumulation of wealth. This transfer does not imply a qualitative change. It is shift in the collective unconscious and does not propose a "getting back to or a foggy memory of times past when people were masters of themselves. At the same time, it is not pessimistic. My concern is how these shifts affect the formation of my "moral" character, how they shape the collective concept of "I", and whether "I" is a "moral" character, how they shape the collective concept of "I" and whether "I" is a fallacy all together. If what we want is in question, if our goals and aspirations are put on unstable ground, with what are we to measure the self?