Sean Smuda Blogs from France

The local artist is spending three weeks in Tours, France for an artist exchange residency.

Image credit: Sean Smuda

Recommended by the Editor

Local Artist Sean Smuda Heads to Tours, France for an Artist Exchange Residency

By: Sean Smuda

Editor's note: Sean Smuda is a Minneapolis-based artist, gallerist and liaison for the Minneapolis-Tours Sister Cities Association. He’ll be blogging for metromag.com during his artist liaison residency in France. See his work on his website and in “The Commission” from the January 2011 issue of METRO.

The audiobook of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast lulls me to sleep on the flight over to France. When I finally arrive in Tours, Bob Corrick and Beth Parkhill from the Minneapolis-Tours Sister Cities Association meet me at the train station and we ponder, what would the Hemster (a.k.a. Ernie) eat? No question: mussels, if oysters are unavailable (frîtes optional), with local (Loire Valley) wine, salad and café crème—booya! After dropping off bags, Bob, Beth and I part so that I may walk off this long period of not walking (two planes, one Metro and a TGV). They drop me off in tremendous traffic caused by construction of a new light rail (hola, St Paul!) But soon I am on a tranquil no-cars-allowed street where I am surprised by meringue pastries the size of my head.

They present an interesting non sequitur as to their origins: are they derived from some sort of tribute to the (Brazilian/Parisian) inventor of the engine-propelled hot-air balloon, Alberto Santos-Dumont? Or the other direction human heads rolled outside of soccer? Then, I am grateful to spy something even more non sequitur: the beautiful twin spires of 13th century cathedral St Gatienne (pictured above).

Like a compacted collection of enormous stained-glass cubist tee-pees pried apart with the jaws of life, St. Gatienne wows as it comforts. Seeing people quietly praying in public with their semi-native African and Vietnamese garb is a trans-colonialist explosion of color in the cathedral’s somber side-rooms. Wow again. After passing a very Ian Curtis-like BVM I have a brief meeting with hyper-social deconstructive artist/curator Pierre Henri Ramboz Didouphe for about five minutes, until I realize I am an hour and a half late for…dinner with Beth and Bob and Didier Frappier and Juliette Rieke, with whom I’m staying. Didier is a fabulously classical photographer I met through Beth last year in Minneapolis. His work in Africa and India (amongst other places) embodies great formalism, spirituality and humor. I crashed until 11, got up for a couple, crashed some more. Kicking a cold, allergies and lag.
 
The next day I walked around with Didier for about 4 hours. Maybe the streets here wouldn’t smell like ammonia if the dog weren’t France’s version of the Sacred Cow. Just sayin’…It is a lovely day, everything is budding, much is in bloom. There are sequoias and swans in the park about two blocks from Didier’s house.

It’s a mini-Grande Jatte day. (I got 99 problems but Minnesota winter ain’t one!) We stop by the Oz Art Gallery, where Didier is showing in June, and I have a conversation with the curator   about the possibility of swapping artists between here and Minnesota—to which he seems cautious and amenable. On the way out we pass by the Opera, which has a few sex shops nearby. Tied outside one of them is a hound that barks at customers until a woman from the shop comes out to pet him, thus birthing my comment and future title of some such high-C tragedy, “Even Dogs Need Love.”