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Fox Tax seems to have indulged a benevolent impulse when crafting the call for their current show. Give us your idealism, they told artists, and we will present it to our clients as they shuffle in and out for their yearly tithe to the government. The call was sent out in June, when the outcome of the election was still uncertain, and the show opened recently, which may mean that works were completed around the time when even a shut-in Minneapolis artist could feel the first vertiginous drop of our failing economy.

The viewer could be forgiven for observing the show through less cynical eyes. In fact, he or she would be completely within her rights, at an opening just two days before the inauguration of the “Hope” president, to dismiss the entire show as a kind of fashionable despair: the vestiges of an elite cynicism best left in a former era.

Indeed, it isn’t that the works themselves are bad, but a viewer expecting an artistic complement to his sunny state of mind may feel like he reached up to the light and got punched in the gut. It is, of course, each artist’s right – sometimes duty – to prick the bubbles of optimism on which the zeitgeist roams. But taken as a whole, the show doesn’t feel prescient or even cantankerous. It feels anachronistic.

Which is no shade on the individual works. The lens of “idealism” just does not lead us to their most nuanced interpretation. Even Emma Berg, who helped pick the work, seemed disappointed by the outcome.

Take Michelle Westmark’s photograph Your Pretty Pony. Presented here in a lage, lush print, the vivid grass green and latina pink lead with playfulness. But the subject, a piñata in the shape of the titular pony, suggests despair and silence. The horse is, for instance, here to be smashed. The only reason for its survival is its utter isolation. So, we conclude, Westmark wants to present idealism as something fragile, solitary, cheap and childish. It turns what could be a serene and contemplative work into a one-liner.

By the time I approached Jaime Carrera’s work, a series of small equations made of cut paper iconography, I was prepared for pure cynicism. Carrera, one of those local artists who truly lives out his work, has played with the simple male and female icons found on restroom doors and combined them with other symbols (dollar signs of various sizes, mathematical symbols) to create mildly thought provoking visual jokes about gender equality. The brightness of Carrera’s media somehow elides sarcasm, and the forms are memorable and playful.

In a recent conversation, Mark Fox lamented how many of the works approached the idea of idealism negatively. “Almost all of them,” he said.

“It’s kind of a dodge,” I replied. How else can you explain the inclusion of Becca Shewmake’s interesting but utterly bleak painting of some kind of acid polluting death cloud with a vagina dentate at its’ center? Or Katherine Stemwedel’s <I>Love and War</I>, in which man, woman and beast tear at each other in an orgy of violent clichés? Stemwedel’s work has a quality: the warmth of the Renaissance, the busy symbolism of Bosch, but is there a way in which its decadence evokes anything resembling an ideal?

My personal favorite at the gallery was Kate Burgau’s enormous painting. From her artists statement, you might expect more of the same from Burgau: “Her work expresses the belief that there is an unhealthy balance between creating and destroying… crumbling indifferent structures, desolate places, and suffering human relationships.” Interesting, then, that Burgau’s majestic painting has only the horror of life observed, alongside a wonderful dose of natural order, watchfulness, protection, and family. Burgau’s vision of nature is distinct: it’s easy to project the anthropomorphic roles of fables onto the birds in the paintings. Here, the notion of idealism is not easily read into the work, but neither is it ridiculed. The lens enriches the interpretation.

But for each sincere and audacious work, there are two that take low blows and easy digs at the assignment. This underscores the juvenile pessimism in the technically proficient work by designer cum painter Keith Eric Williams. The work is a vulgar presentation of a banal idea. It is art’s place to resist and oppose, and it should not be otherwise just because many of the traditionally disenfranchised feel swept up in the romance of a popular new president. But despair is not rebellion, and even rebellion is not revolution. I would have been pleased to see a greater percentage of Minneapolis’ promising young artists stepping forward with some courage and conviction.

You may sense a little wounded malignance here. They have lured this critic in with the promise of something pretty, and then kicked me in the teeth. I am happy to return the favor.

The show is worth seeing for its highlights and for its wide range of voices. One who enters without illusion about its aim is unlikely to be disappointed.

***

Cheryl Wilgren Clyne is leaving the Rosalux gallery. If you hurry in before Friday’s peepshow exhibit (which is sure to be well attended) you may catch the last pairing, at least for a while, of Clyne and gallery owner Kimberly Tschida Petters.

In July of 2007, I wrote about Clyne’s work in <I>Not the Running Type</I>. There, she explored the philosophy of mind and the emergence of pre-linguistic infant thought. Since then Clyne has continued her pediacentric work. An intervening exhibit was streamlined and more accessible, but also a little bit rote. With this show, entitled <I>Here is Better than Anywhere</I>, Clyne reminds me what I like about her. She has an almost mechanical ability to circle around a set of concerns, then underline, and texture their recombinations until she elicits something like a wholly original synthetic thought.

Clyne is leaving to pursue collaboration with some Chinese artists in Beijing just at the moment when she seems poised to integrate her studies, models and paintings into a more encompassing and integrated whole. I’m very excited to see what she does next.

Kimberly Tschida Petters’ work here, a furthering of her simplified landscapes, is the most satisfying work yet from this artist. Vibrant, thoroughly abstracted and flattened, Petters’ affectless and blocky sensibility is a perfect counterpoint to Clyne’s nostalgia-free pictures of childhood.

Another landscape artist, Carolyn Swiszcz has an exhibition entitled Innovation Road at Franklin Art Works. The paintings, the size of old 4:3 television screens, are colorful, simplified and apparently quite literal renderings of banal settings: 3M’s familiar glass headquarters building, a highway rest area. Swiszcz’s tendency to leave rough edges in her works (a freehand pencil stroke here or there) seems at odds with their cheerful modernism. Her exhibition is the latest expression of the gallery director’s penchant for bright, cartoonish representational paintings.