Within the former Pillsbury Flour Mill, Andy Messerschmidt maps earthly inventions, particularly through the colonial and hedonistic interferences that toil with the archaic and contemporary – celestial echoes of rituals, industries, and eclectic histories caught in perpetual exchange. His main oeuvre gathering together the detritus of human culture, albeit sardonically, likening them to totems and sitcoms, sacred sites and parades, oil spills and incense, imbricating them, but into a constellation of sorts; myth and media, ruin and ritual, sacred and pop-culture profane, pointing towards contradictory directions, yet bound by the same gravitational pull of confliction.

At the core of Messerschmidt’s inquiry, lies a paradoxical conduit – a symbolic thread via visual and sonic realms that attempts to coalesce the past and present. Messerschmidt invokes the Nazca lines, incense smoke, erected lingams, even the spectacle of the Thanksgiving Day Parade as versions of the same gesture: cries sent upward, signals stitched out of belief, desperation, or both; eclectic references yet wieldy, often comic, often desperate. Yet they are also deeply human, evidence of our desire to transcend the ground, even as it bears the scars of our industry and excess.

Directly, the grain elevator itself becomes part of this conversation. Once a vessel for holding the earth’s yield, its sheer verticality echoes the human compulsion to ascend. Now emptied of grain, it acts as a resonant chamber for Messerschmidt’s archive of visual ideations. Further examined to highlight the conceptual playwork: Exxon Valdez beside Gothic cathedrals, skinwalkers beside shopping malls, sacred mountains beside sitcom laugh tracks. In these juxtapositions the land becomes a palimpsest, a surface where history, belief, and spectacle are written and overwritten.

Messerschmidt’s work does not separate the sacred from the profane, instead, it acknowledges that they now coexist and controversially coalesce in the contemporary. Furthermore, in acknowledging this abrasive collision, Messerschmidt initiates provocative conversations to convene. It’s not proselytizing, but positively catalyzing. What’s the use of sitting properly (silent)?

A restless séance, a field where symbols accumulate, collide, and combust. It is a world both tragic and sardonically comic, scarred and heartbreakingly illuminating—a reminder that transcendence is never clean, but always cobbled together from the piecemeal.

Andy Messerschmidt (1976, Illinois/USA) currently lives and works in Ely, Minnesota. He received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2002 and earned his BFA from Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois in 1999. Andy has shown extensively in New York at Plane-Space Gallery for seven years and continues to have shows in the United States and abroad. Recently, he has exhibited in Germany, Japan, Hawaii, Kansas City, Philadelphia and Minneapolis. His ongoing Agroccult series is a body of over 1000 landscape paintings depicting geomancy (land divination) and metaphoric stimulation of the Earth’s nervous system through acupressure applied by humans.

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