An invitation to exhibit in a two piece exhibition in Minnesota.

The first part took place in February 2005 on Lake Medicine. Frozen solid in the winter months the lakes in Minnesota become temporary shanty towns to fishermen who drive their SUV’s onto the ice, set up camp and bore holes to dangle their tackle in. The environmental extremes of both exhibition sites were addressed.

Virus elected to perform on the ice, by proxy. It seemed pertinent to stand on frozen water and reverse fish from the centre out to the shore. Heat was an obvious and serious method of attempting to get below the surface. Small metal pellets were fashioned and sent with detailed random instructions. These were heated until red hot and, based on experiments in Edinburgh, projected by catapult varying distances across the frozen lakescape.

The coldness and flatness of the exhibition site was peppered with the arc of hot missiles and the horizontality of the ice was pebble-dashed with metal nugget nest holes.

Part two took place six months later in the oppressive heat of downtown Minneapolis at The Soap Factory. August in Edinburgh and Virus conceived a body of drawings as a response to the ice activity six months previous. These were shorter in scale and had a dry, cold, calculated method and appearance. Twenty Five Non-Standard Deviations were studio based and formatted for facsimile. The drawings created by Virus, projecting invective and small objects onto paper, were faxed to the gallery and the resultant documents exhibited as the artwork.

The direct, physical nature of the instructed events carried out on the ice were countered by hand crafted drawings once removed, the copies as the originals, branded by their journey hardware.