Garbage at Minneapolis Art Institute

Who ever guessed garbage could be beautiful? At the Minneapolis Art Institute, you'll come face to face with Michael Kareken's awe-inspiring images of landfills, scrap yards, and polluted rivers. The sheer size of Kareken's canvases and the detail in his paintings are awe-inspiring. Yet, it's Kareken's ability to depict light and beauty where the rest of us would see only blight and ugliness that sets him apart as an artist.

Word on the street is that this MCAD professor and painter is not seeking to make an environmental statement with his paintings. However, it's hard not to view his work through an environmental lens when Kareken gives us shocking images of piles of trash right in our own backyard. His painting of a glass-ridden landfill is serene on one hand yet also evokes a powerful emotion on the other, screaming,"Wake up, America! This consumerism has to stop!"

(This one image helped me understand why my friend spends several hours a week digging through trash in the lunchroom of the local elementary school, separating paper from plastic from styrafoam, modeling environmental behavior for the next generation. Some things have got to change. Kristi Pearson and Michael Kareken -- you'd be a good team!)

See Michael Kareken's exhibit "Scrap" at the Minneapolis Artists Exhibition Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts through Sunday January 24.

http://www.artsmia.org/index.php?section_id=2&exh_id=3279