Dreamsong

Dreamsong’s family exhibition, Kooks, features artists Bruce Tapola, Melba Price and their daughter Oakley Tapola. Longstanding and irascible members of the Twin Cities’ art community, Bruce and Melba’s independent DIY ethic and distrust of American moralism was forged as art students during the gleefully conformist years of the Reagan administrations. An inheritance passed to their daughter, whose work in assemblage, bookmaking and clothing design is also irreverent and handcrafted, Kooks evidences the paradoxical wholesomeness of a family thoroughly opposed to the imposition of so-called ‘family values’ by an increasingly authoritarian American state.

Dreamsong is pleased to present Short Stories for Discerning Readers, Part II, a collection of small-scale, collaborative works on paper by Melba Price and Bruce Tapola. Alongside their respective studio practices, Price and Tapola have colluded, in one fashion or another, with each other and with their artist friends since 1978. In May of 2020, they began passing drawings back and forth on their porch in attempt to entertain each other with wit, skill, humor, wisdom, or lack thereof. As these works multiplied, narrative typologies began to emerge (romance, science-fiction, western) that were immediately complicated by artistic agreements and disagreements, misread contexts, and by attempts to support and undermine (to humorous effect) the other’s intentions. Bearing the hallmarks of a long and successful marriage – confusion, absurdity, love, beauty, and humor – their finished pieces read like small parts of larger stories, both integral and insignificant to their idiosyncratic and mischievous whole.