Minnesota is a northern state. Days are long in the summer and short in the winter. Winters are harsh and summers often sweltering. As with many of its sister regions of northern latitudes and extreme climates, Minnesota has produced a variety of artists whose work dwells on issues of light, isolation and/or sadness-key elements of the depressive illness, Seasonal Affective Disorder. SAD features nine Twin Cites-based artists-Ana Lois-Borzi, Jan Estep, Theresa Handy, Chris Larson, Charles Lume, Molly Roth, Andrea Stanislav, Piotr Szyhalski, and Katherine Turczan-whose work is evidence of this impulse across a range of media, including video, installation, painting, photography, and sculpture. Meant not as diagnosis of the artists or the specific culture, SAD instead offers a view of ways in which artists interact with and illuminate particular environments and atmospheres and engage ways in which we understand human subjectivity. As with the age-old tradition of landscape painting, the artwork in SAD addresses a sense of place focused not on land, but on the qualities of light and atmosphere, and the sense of time to which those elements relate. Furthermore, the works in SAD all assert the connection between physical and psychic space, speaking to how our surroundings affect and define us.
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