Ben Heywood, the Soap Factory's executive director, paced on a scuffed wooden floor before a row of quirky landscape photographs and a crowd of well-heeled board members and friends.
"This is a factory; the building you're standing in right now was built in 1882," he told the group.
Heywood is giving a tour of the Factory's latest art exhibit, "You Were Never Here." His short, dark hair shoots upward in front, indicative of someone who has too much on his mind to care if every strand is firmly in place. It's a forgivable trait for someone who runs Minnesota's third largest art gallery – and the gallery's only full-time staff member.
A few days earlier I spoke with Heywood. He reclined on a striped chair in his office and clasped his hands behind his head and peered toward the ceiling.
"My job is to be in charge of everything, really," he said nonchalantly. "This includes raising $180,000 to $200,000 from organizations like the McKnight and Andy Warhol Foundations as well as private donors, to funding the non-profit gallery. I also sift through hundreds of artist submissions, search for visual or conceptual patterns to develop into next year's exhibitions and maintain the 124-year-old, 50,000 square foot space."
The Soap Factory is the current incarnation of No Name Exhibitions, an art collective formed in 1988 by local artists looking for a non-judgmental space to show their work. A handful of part-time staffers and a collection of volunteers support it.
After originally exhibiting in a storefront beneath their studio, the Skunk House, and the Grain Belt Brewery complex, Pillsbury donated the riverfront building Heywood now sits in, the former National Purity Soap Factory.
"Instead of a factory for making soap, it's a factory for making art," Heywood said. "The thing about industrial spaces is that you can do what you want with them. They're not precious in some kind of way. Digging a hole in the floor, knocking down a wall, is something that happens all the time in factories."
So when Steven Powell approached Heywood with the idea of cutting a hole in the floor so he could build an 80-foot periscope out of wood and cardboard tubes that takes the sky and projects it into the ground, Heywood had no qualms about tearing up the dusty floorboards.
Another characteristic setting the Soap Factory apart from other local art institutions is its dedication to young and emerging artists. "I'm interested in seeing work by people I haven't heard of," Heywood explained.
The Factory cultivates this ambitious crowd of up and comers by opening the building's second and third floors as artist studios.
Through a door marked "No Entry," up the age-mottled stairs, you're likely to find spray painters, puppet show performers, multimedia artists, musicians and dancers. In the center of one floor is a large space blocked off by black tarps, where the performance group Live Action Set rehearses. Local band Faggot is rumored to have practice space here and a circular wooden spinning platform is being built for their upcoming music video.
Kaitlyn Busse-Wolfgram, a recent College of Visual Arts graduate, trades a volunteer/intern position at the Soap Factory for a chunk of space upstairs, where she had been pouring beeswax for a sculpture for the next exhibit, "Earth From Above: The Volunteer Biennale 06."
The Volunteer Biennale is a chance for the Soap Factory's volunteers to display their art. Busse-Wolfgram's beeswax sculpture will sit inside a 12-by-8 foot yurt, the tent-like dwelling of Central Asian nomads she built two summers ago for a camping party. It will sit across from the Soap Factory's entrance, where Vandana Jain's "GE Highway" now rests. Jain's installation, a take on the General Electric Company's logo, snakes in a wide circle near the floor, like a kid's cardboard racetrack manically looping upon itself.
Heywood and his tour group make their way through a room immersed in white paper, painstakingly stapled into place like a surge of whitecaps frozen in time, emerging by a collection of stainless steel water fountains scattered across the ground at different heights, like sprouting flowers. Past two walls of paintings, several video rooms, and a row of clothes rolled upon briars and spread collar to hem on the ground, are 500,000 individually punctured aspirin tablets, strung from the ceiling like giant layered necklaces.
What ties together this exhibit's seemingly unrelated body of work is a sense of human interaction with landscape. But you won't find this explanation printed on any program.
"When you go to a big well-funded art museum, it's a very mediated experience because the money supporting that kind of organization requires them to explain a lot of what they're doing," Heywood said. "There's not a lot of labeling here; I want people to have an intense confrontation with things without having a space in between telling them how that reaction should happen."
And the Soap Factory, unlike the other galleries, accepts failure.
"Artists are given the chance to kind of push their practice in new directions without there being hundreds of thousands of dollars riding on something not working properly," Heywood explained.
But for a man who accepts failure, Heywood's tenure with the Soap Factory is a success story. Local curators often scout the Soap Factory for new artists and three recently made the leap to the Walker Art Center's pristine white gallery space after showing in the Factory's unpolished bowels. The Soap Factory is expected to have more than 10,000 visitors this year – quite a feat considering the gallery's season is only six months long, thanks to a non-existent heating system.
And with 1,500 luxury condos under construction in the vicinity of the Soap Factory, its audience is only likely to grow.
The Soap Factory is currently accepting artists' proposals for the 2007-2008 season. For more information, visit their Web site.
www.soapfactory.org
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