Zumbro Bend/Main

‍In Zumbro Bend: Three Desiring Bodies, Minneapolis based visual artist Pete Driessen installs three separate site-specific works, each a different abstracted fork in the river ecosystem. Titled after the South Fork Zumbro River that winds around the Rochester Art Center, the artist illuminates meandering sociopolitical variants on the river as creative life force, terrain erosion and deposition, land extraction and water channeling. 

Driessen’s inventive constructed environments, both self-contained and/or site specific, often fuse painting, sculpture, mixed media, sound, and installation, frequently based in site, land, architecture, historical research, and community exchange. In past and current work, the artist orchestrates a collaborative ensemble of creative relationships with sound artist, sign painter, frame maker, and other civic, artistic and business communities.

Through the language of painting, form and space, Driessen investigates river system topology, land erosion and sediment deposition structures, and the animate quality of flowing water systems. The Zumbro River, a Mississippi River tributary with three separate forks, offers three exhibit positions with distinct material situations. The Dakota name for the river is Wapka Wazi Oju (Pines Planted River), referencing the grove of great white pines at Pine Island on the middle fork of Zumbro River. 

The first fork, Zumbro Bend, presented in the large Onofrio Gallery, reflects upon the river environments meandering erosion and deposition, with wood, limestone, and mixed media painting. The gallery floor serves as a floodplain, with work arranged around the curvilinear structure of a river bend. In the second fork, the Gel Lab, located in the Davies Gallery, the artist experiments with gloss acrylic gel medium, positioning the river via our human bodily connections to innate desire, creative production, and reproduction qualities. The third fork, the Bait Shop, outside Davies Gallery, nostalgically reflects upon the artist's locational identity within the water culture of the Minnesota & Upper Midwest through recreational and tinkering structures.

A river bend or meander can be defined as water flowing in a curvy, bendy path, like a serpent or snake. As a river makes its way through topography that is low or flat, it develops bends as it erodes its way through the path of least resistance via gravity to the sea. A river bend actively creates multiple natural formations such as oxbows, incised meanders, scroll and point bars, slip and cut slopes, meander scars, and floodplains. 

The artist views the river as a living body with animistic qualities. All rivers are sources of creative life, production, and reproduction. The river has healing and resourceful properties, forms natural bonded alignments, and co-creates with the larger ecosystem that it winds through. Driessen’s painting style, developed over four decades, reflects this animistic quality, and the belief that everything, including inanimate objects, has a living presence.

Within the broad river bend theme, the artist addresses three types of desire for each gallery. Our human desires for connection (Bait Shop), creativity (Gel Lab), and control (Sinuous Bend). These three human desires abstractly probe the nuances of the sinuous, the sensual, and our bodily tensions within the spatiality of river watersheds and river bend sites. Driessen references the origins of the word erosion, from eros in Greek, meaning desire or the act of self-preservation; and deposition, from Latin for the laying to rest or burying.

With the artist as curator, the river is envisioned as a thriving power source that is subject to negotiation and confrontation. Both organic and synthetic contrasts of power reveal themselves, whether between river, human, and mother nature, or with artist, curator/museum and audience. Parallel to the variable ebb and flow of the Zumbro, the status of the art object, space and spectator perpetually shifts.

Driessen sets up three asynchronous, nonsingular, and nonlinear viewing spaces that stone skip outside of the traditional white cube to more full spatial environs. There is no one way to view the river. River viewing requires multiple oculi, multiple parallels, and multiple horizons. River time, though seasonal, is also nonlinear and viewing the site-specific river space is multidimensional and ever shifting. Along with the addition of Chooch Karton’s sound art, the space of display and presentation develops ever-changing audio, visual and creative frequencies.

Sinuous Bend

A theatrical space is visually and physically set up with high river bluff thicket vista, low river floodplain, circling river forms, boulderesque objects, and wave(length) crests. The extracted stones, held in place via commercial rubber chocks and portable containment berms, visually implore that if one removes a river stone, you also move the other parts within the whole river ecosystem. A series of twenty-one thicket paintings on black satin gently shimmer as a whispering river bluff. The center of the gallery becomes a low water level, curvilinear alluviation or sedimentation bar.

The Sinuous Bend installation touches upon many forms of water, biological, and geological sciences, and how human behavior interacts, extracts, assimilates, and/or shifts the local and global environment. With visual cues from helical shapes, molecular forms, wave frequencies, liquid resonance, and mathematical sinuosity, the artist expresses that our feeble human attempts at hydrological control of river systems are at best temporary. 

Sinuosity within river structures is based on the calculation of multiple oscillating curves. To interpret sinuosity, one begins at an inflection point to consider the curvilinear length (actual path) divided by the shortest path length (straight line) of a curving river, and how it becomes a “dimensionless quantity.” The rhythmic wavelength, frequency and resonance of river bends are ever fluctuating and recalibrating. Zumbro Bend affirms that humans play a transformative role in the continuous nurturing, cultivation, or modification of river systems.

For the exhibition, Driessen directly utilized erosion and deposition methods as a strategy in generating his Sinuous Bend and Oxbow paintings, map drawings, and sculptural elements. Erosion is the geological process in which earthen materials are worn away and transported by natural forces such as wind or river water. Deposition is the depositing of eroded river rock and soil, leaving it as sediment and debris. The dynamic energy within a river bend and its water current is ever coevolving and constantly moving sediments, in turn restructuring the river habitat. Driessen reclaims previously quarried stone remnants and former sculpture components to exemplify the extraction waste, placing the artist/viewer/gallery as extractors. 

The exhibition is filled with local Rochester and regional Southeast Minnesota touch points. The artist referenced historical river, flood, flood damage, river maps, hydrology, water treatment and watershed archives at the History Center of Olmsted County, which informed the artworks in Zumbro Bend: Three Desiring Bodies. Black and white aerial utility photographs from Northwestern Bell in the late 1970’s springboard a grid of twelve topographic river collages. Four historical sepia-toned river stone wall construction images became footings for two large wooden Line/Template sculptures referencing river channeling. A newspaper flood image of a broken culvert and bridge emerged into an actual three-dimensional steel culvert and safety grate with painting composition. Lastly, the Thalweg & Sinuosity Studies have been created on the artist's thrift shop find of a 1968 U.S. Army Corp of Engineers Upper Mississippi Navigational Charts.