Pete Driessen © 2021. Prairie Burn at Prairie Wetland Learning Center, April 2021, Fergus Falls, MN. Courtesy the Artist.
Special thank you to writer/actress Sheila Regan for her thoughtful write-up of my prototype show, Migratory Wing/Prairie Wildflower Bed, now open in the Kaddatz Building, Fergus Falls, MN. Link below:
Pete Driessen © 2023. Untitled/Prairie Wildflowers. Colored pencil & graphite on paper. 22 x 30 inches. Courtesy the artist.
Migratory Wing/Prairie Wildflower Bed opens at Kaddatz Building, on March 17, 2023.
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Kirkbride Building, MN State Hospital, Fergus Falls, MN. Source: Otter Tail County Historical Society & Museum.
This past January, I received an MSAB Creative Support for Individuals grant to investigate and create a potential community Migratory Wing/Prairie Wildflower Bed via my past research at the historic Kirkbride Building, former MN State Hospital, in Fergus Falls, MN. This unique public art project, in conjunction with my past Hinge Residency with SpringBoard for the Arts in April 2021, will allow me to engage and collaborate with rural Minnesota communities by creating a prospective accessible, site-specific Minnesota-native prairie wildflower garden bed project reflecting the former healthcare ecosystem at the Kirkbride Building.
Specifically, I will be combining the forms of hospital beds with garden beds to develop and produce a prototype community garden bed mimicking the flight patterns of the many waterfowl and wetland species that travel through the western Minnesota prairie lakes regions. With a series of garden plots that reflect the monumental Kirkbride architecture, and based on the historic metal hospital beds used by former government institutions, the garden beds will house native prairie wildflowers and traditional grasses that once nurtured the past hospital residents.
Pete Driessen is a fiscal year 2022 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the creative voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Wing Dam, Anderson Center Sculpture Garden, Anderson Center for the Arts, Red Wing, MN. 2021. Native Dolomite Limestone, cement base, rebar, threaded steel rod. 5.5 ft. x 9 ft. x 32 ft. Site appx. 40ft. wide x 100 ft. long. Overall stone weight appx 20 tons.
Welcome to Pete’s new art website. New portfolio additions, exhibitions, documents, and updates are coming soon! Here is a brief artistic statement on my recent site-specific Wing Dam sculpture that was researched, developed, designed, and created over a period of a year in conjunction with my 2020 artist residency at the lovely Anderson Center for the Arts, Red Wing, Minnesota.
Wing Dam is an abstract, site-specific series of five locally resourced native Dolomite Limestone wedges installed as a staggered alignment of parallel chevrons, gently shifting in scale, reflecting the Cannon and Mississippi River confluence, revealing geologic time and geographic materiality, and illuminating ideas of spatial modularity, water flowage and navigation, and post-colonial and industrial river culture.
Gently aligned with the cardinal directions, the Wing Dam is sited in reverence honoring native burial mounds yet questions our human control of fresh water. A typical ‘wing dam’ is a rock structure used by the Army Corp of Engineers to direct flowage and navigation. Together, the sliced open grouping of wedge forms contrast with the flat land and abstractly evoke the contours and spirit of the convergence of the Cannon and Mississippi Rivers, located just over the bluff from the Anderson Sculpture Garden.
Megalithic in nature and character, the boulderesque stones jettison up from below the earth, much like how wing dam rocks suddenly arise from the flowing shallow river water as one passes by in a watercraft. The motion-based experience is one of linear elegance in design, yet stark in contrast to the natural river bluff landscape. The wedge structures create a unique repetitive illusionary appearance paralleling the scattered geological drift formations leftover on the midwestern escarpment from the Laurentian period, so abundant to the MN/WI lake and river regions.
Wing Dam is located within the beautiful Anderson Center for the Arts Sculpture Garden, found just north of downtown Red Wing, Minnesota on the Great River Road/State Highway 61. Open 24-7 during daylight hours. For further information at www.andersoncenter.org.