Mia celebrates the pleasure of pure, virtuosic draftsmanship with the first museum show of Minnesota artists and twin brothers Bly and Rowan Pope. They have worked side by side their entire lives. Their focus on drawing and meticulous, painstaking process sets them apart. Each dedicates hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of hours to a single work, drawing skillfully, obsessively, until pencil has transformed paper into a provocative image rendered with photographic precision.

What is The Cloud made of? Water molecules or pixels? Where does it reside? The sky or the ground? Last summer, HomePaige (ongoing artistic collaborator Paige Carlson) and WurldWideReb (my primary digital alter-ego) explored these questions through the creation of a 9 episode web series. Hard Drive chronicled our 18 day road trip around the western half of the US in search of a more intimate connection with our data. We visited Google data centers, an iCloud storage facility, and a supercomputer center, finding ourselves overwhelmed by the level of secrecy and the amount of resources needed to power these monuments. As a video and performance artist, the resources I use to create my artworks are often more abstract, harder to quantify or ethically analyze. I find myself placing trust in physical hard drives to store my files, finding power in my embodied acapella voice to tell stories and inspire catharsis, feeling more present when I’m offline. Yet, I stay up to date on Climate Change data and policies by endlessly scrolling Twitter, a company known for lack of transparency around their own carbon emissions. As caring individuals in love with blooming Lilacs and obsessed with our smartphones, how do we hold these contradictions?

Sean Connaughty goes back to Lake Hiawatha almost daily. The lake is near his home, and he loves how it offers him the chance to find quiet, peaceful spots in the middle of a city. And he likes to see wildlife like eagles and otters. But the thing that really keeps him returning lately is the trash. "Over time, I began to notice mass quantities of trash accumulating on the shore," he said. "So I started picking up trash." He'd spend hours collecting things like straws, cigarillo tips, Styrofoam containers. Diapers, plastic water bottles, syringes. But he noticed that his efforts weren't making much of a difference. After any rainfall, trash would cover the shore yet again.

Trauma collapses past and present. It suspends the passage of time. Not only does trauma alter the experience of the past: it steals the capacity to imagine a future. Since the logic of trauma asserts that the worst already has happened, life seems over; impossible to plan, dream, and believe in wild possibilities, in change. The literature on trauma calls this "a foreshortened sense of the future." To tempt the mind into unruly speculation, Iyapo Repository, a project in residence at Macalester College's Law Warschaw Gallery in St. Paul, asks for participation in creating an archive of the future. Envisioned by two New York-based artists, Ayodamola Okunseinde and Salome Asega, Iyapo Repository pays homage to Afrofuturism's Octavia Butler and the heroine of her Xenogenesis trilogy, Lilith Iyapo, but charts its own path into a complex not-yet: an archive of what might come to be that holds the imaginary residue of an even more distant future.