press release

Monique Prieto , Michael Webster. 5-0
Great Poor Farm Experiment IX
August 4, 2017–June 30, 2018

Monique Prieto and Michael Webster: 5-0 is the first large-scale collaboration between painter Monique Prieto and composer Michael Webster. Premiering at The Great Poor Farm Experiment IX, the exhibition will inhabit the Poor Farm’s eight exhibition spaces.

Creating abstract assemblages, the LA-based Prieto and Webster embrace the Poor Farm’s rural Midwestern remoteness by taking “not-knowing” as a point of departure. They will utilize a geometric language: fivefold symmetry, pairs of circles, immobile sounds, darkness... and most importantly the torus, a doughnut, the most reduced representation of a body, two complete spaces that don’t communicate, even while each is inside the other.

Michael Webster will perform his Fade on Family—Songs Without Singers on the mighty Webster word organ during the weekend of The Great Poor Farm Experiment.

Microlights: Microlights Cinema presents an outdoor screening of videos by various artists addressing precarity and play. Stimulating and lighthearted, this screening is rightly suited for the night air and our gathering beneath the stars. More info about programming at Microlights here.

Ssummer School: Led by Minneapolis-based artist and educator Aaron Van Dyke, summer school is a gathering of artists taking part in a dialog around art making, teaching, and learning. Summer School aims to be somewhat of an antidote to the shortcomings of formal education, stressing openness, experimental forms of education and educational and artistic agency. It resides within the opening weekend of the Great Poor Farm Experiment.

2017 Summer School Faculty: Lane Relyea (Northwestern University), Mathew Zefeldt (University of Minnesota), Monique Prieto and Michael Webster.

Lazy River, Show Me Your Raft, Canned Edition: organized by artists Richard Galling and John Riepenhoff, the annual Little Wolf River float will take place Saturday, August 5, 2017. Awards will be decided by a panel of judges and given out for rafts that are the most: Waterlogged, Wabi-sabi, Wet & Wild, Waupacan. This year's limited collectable—custom koozies stuffed with the newest unlimited edition of canned Poor Farm Pils, a beer developed by John Riepenhoff.

Sponsored with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.