artwork by Allen Brewer

On the large, well-lit wall of Barbette Restaurant on the corner of West Lake Street and Irving Avenue in South Minneapolis hang an array of pictures by two local artists, Allen Brewer and Greg Gossel. But this isn’t your usual art-in-a-café exhibition, this is a collaboration with Yuri Arajs’s Placement Gallery to bring a series of bimonthly exhibitions to the stylish Uptown café. These works will be on display through September.

The Barbette exhibition is just one of many shows that Placement Gallery, aka Arajs, has in the works. Among other things, he also exhibits paintings in the window at Mitrebox Framing, 213 Washington Ave. N., Minneapolis; and Sept. 14 is the opening day for OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Drawing, a Placement show at 509 NE First Ave. in Minneapolis.

Barbette’s Wall of Art
The first table outside on the sidewalk at Barbette affords an excellent view of the artwork through the window while enjoying the soothing autumn air. Both artists’ works are large-scale enough to take in from just that distance, and the play of one off the other creates a pleasing rhythm for the eye to follow.

Gossel’s works tend to be moderately large, measuring 24 to 30 inches across, and boldly graphic with strong black lines and faded primary colors; he mixes retro pop culture images with advertising hyperbole (“This is what you’ve been waiting for!” “50 percent off”) in a balanced collage of screen print, spray paint, and the like. The effect is at once vaguely disturbing, thought-provoking, and aesthetically pleasing.

Brewer paints quirky surreal creatures with qualities that ought to come across as creepy yet somehow don’t. A woman with long, tapering, wavy fingers and toes -- two on each hand and three on her feet -- with similarly long, curved, snakelike arms sits in a thin, leafless treelike form. Her expression is mild-mannered and serene; she seems to be a benign fantastical creature who’s just biding her time.

Most of Brewer’s subjects have that same bizarre yet somehow sweet quality, often infused with a subtle humor. He claims some folk art influences and that could be what gives his paintings their gentle demeanor.

I have to agree with Arajs when he says, “While these works don’t seem to want to live next to each other, there is a happy visual symmetry when viewed together.” This is accomplished in part because of how Arajs has arranged the pictures so as to balance the bold graphic qualities of Gossel with the subtle soft-around-the-edge oils by Brewer.

Gallery About Town
Placement Gallery opened in late spring only a couple of months after the closing of Outsiders and Others, the outsider art gallery Arajs founded and ran with Beth Parkhill since 2003.

Although Placement opened with its first show at 509 NE First Ave., and returns there on Sept. 14 with OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Drawing, the gallery is not located there.

“I am Placement Gallery,” said Arajs in May as we stood in the spacious second floor of the Northeast Minneapolis space. When he took that show down, he also planned to move on to other places, intentionally operating a gallery with no permanent address. But a funny thing happened on his way to making preparations for the next Placement show; after casting about for another temporary location in need of his curatorial eye and skilled hand with a hammer -- having to postpone the show a month in the process -- he ended up back at the same second-floor space.

“Placement is still going to go from location to location, it’s just luck of the draw that I had the opportunity to use that space more than once,” says Arajs.

Arajs isn’t looking for a permanent address, part of what Placement is involves temporarily transforming vacant spaces into galleries, a kind of art installation in itself. Each show is an invitation to come and explore a little corner of the city where most of us wouldn’t venture otherwise. “It turns exhibitions more into events -- you want to see the space that the show is in. For me with every show I do there’s a different dynamic to it because I’m working with a different space; it’s more of a puzzle.

“There are lots of great spaces in the city, lots of spaces out there that are unutilized. By doing these exhibitions, it brings awareness to those spaces, activity to the block, to the building. My goal is to go into spaces that are currently unoccuppied -- it’s good for the building owner, it’s good for the art,” he says.

While Arajs sees his creative transformation of otherwise vacant space as a benefit to the building owner -- after all, it brings not only rent for a few months, but also attention to the space, and that could mean that a prospective permanent tennant walks through the door -- property owners don’t seem to share Arajs’s creative ideas about real estate marketing.

“I’m talking to people all the time and the majority of them want long-term tennants, it’s hard for them to see the benefit of what I can bring them; I have something worthy to bring to an empty space -- we bring visibility to them, we bring press to them,” he says.

“I have to tell you, it drives me crazy,” he says. “There’s spaces that I looked at three months ago, and it’s still empty and I could have been there.”

But now he’s happily transforming the Northeast space once again in preparation for a show he has been readying for several months. (“The space has changed a little bit, it’s kind of a disaster again,” he said a few weeks ago.)

The new show, Placement’s second “major” exhibition, features five artists who “do very obsessive work, I mean in terms of patterns and detail in types of line work,” says Arajs. The artists are Ben Boylan, John Fleischer, Melissa Gahagan, David Gaul, Nick Howard.

OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Drawing, opens Friday, September 14, 7 to 10 pm, with a reception and party, at 509 NE First Ave., second floor, Minneapolis.

For the latest on Placement’s exhibitions and events, visit http://placementgallery.blogspot.com.

Parts of this article first appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of MOQ: Minneapolis Observer Quarterly, in which Arajs also discussed the former Outsiders and Others Gallery. Back issues of MOQ are available for $4 postpaid by sending your request and check to Minneapolis Observer, 5353 44th Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55417.