Art: State Fair Fine Arts Exhibition easy on the ears

One of the eternal verities of the Minnesota State Fair is that the art show is always classy. This year's edition meets the mark with 386 pieces picked from 1,979 entries by a distinguished jury that includes the Walker Art Center's new director, Olga Viso.

Sculpture is a rewarding category this year; among the standouts are witty pieces with a sharp, conceptual edge. John Ilg of Woodbury was awarded first prize for a wall sculpture that will test visitors' integrity. It consists of a galvanized steel grid into which he stuffed rolled-up dollar bills to spell out the word "Honesty." Nothing but that virtue will prevent visitors from pilfering the money. We'll see, at the fair's end, how Minnesotans have dealt with temptation.

Eileen Cohen's pert "Easter," a pair of ceramic rabbit ears clad in fuchsia flocking, would do Jeff Koons proud; Maggie DeRee evokes contemporary wars with a pair of boots covered with military slogans and news clips, and Eva Christopherson's "Spill," a bucket spewing doll parts embedded in flesh-colored goo, can have many environmental, sexual and political interpretations.

Nestled among a lot of urban paintings, John E. Roy's "American Iron Icons" mixes media as deftly as did Joseph Cornell, whose famous dioramas must have been an inspiration. The artist from Little Canada has assembled in a plexiglass case dozens of cut-out photos of cars, gas pumps, motel facades and road signs plus some real toys and flotsam -- harmonicas, a length of barbed wire. A deftly organized 3-D collage, "Icons" is a loving tribute to mid-20th-century automotive culture and gaudy design extravagance.

On a more humorous note, St. Paul artist Howie Wold's "Homage to Rube" consists of a rubber duck in a garbage can lid and a bucket of golf balls atop a rickety Goldberg-esque structure through which the balls run. Can't tell if he's satirizing the fair's rides or poking fun at contemporary sculpture (or both).

Rebecca Yaker of Minneapolis also cleverly straddles that fine line between kitsch and culture with her award-winning "Sock Monkeys in a Meat Grinder," which poses a conjoined-twins sock monkey (one body, two heads) with one limb in an Oster grinder that's spewing out tweedy brown monkey yarn. Aesthetes will think immediately of Mike Kelley's abject sock dolls in the Walker's collection; knitters may think otherwise.

There's a large bay of urban scenes, including John Salminen's moodily evocative watercolor "Midtown Reflections" and Chuck Arnold's panoramic photo "Collapse," in which the disastrously pancaked I-35W bridge is the haunting centerpiece of a glorious vista of the Minneapolis skyline. Other walls and niches are filled with painted, drawn and watercolored still lifes, portraits of trees, landscapes, religious motifs, waterscapes, figure studies, abstractions, dolls, vegetables and birds. There's even one whole wall of waterfalls and another of pink flamingo things, among which "No Country for Old Motels," Jeff Baker's tribute to a decaying pink hostelry, gets the Best Title award.

Craft and design skill are exemplary throughout, and traditional techniques generally trump innovation. Still, Nadia Alenov of St. Paul has created an unusually luminous portrait of a magnificent snow-covered tree by inventively glazing a digital photo with shimmering encaustic (pigment in wax). Carole Nesheim of Northfield, Minn., takes the art of rug-hooking to new heights in "Joseph," a beautifully designed and executed interpretation of the biblical story of Joseph and his coat of many colors. And in her watercolor of a young man dreaming in long grass, Tara K. Sweeney of St. Paul evokes the beauty of a summer day with keen observation and rare grace.

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