It is often said that no one really knows what to expect from the St. Claude Arts District galleries. If traditional art galleries typically have to work within the constraints that affect other small businesses, St. Claude's co-op spaces seem more likely to reflect the collective whimsies of the artists who own and operate them. Volunteer labor and lower rents allow for experimental and diverse programming, which gets multiplied at The Front, where four separate but connected rooms ups the odds for encountering the unexpected. Two Japanese artists currently command the first room. Yukako Ezoe grew up in America and Japan, and her mixed media concoctions, influenced by comic art and Hispanic murals, sometimes suggest the sacred ritual objects of a tribe of Latino punk voodooists. Naoki Onodera blends comic art influences into flat, slinky figures painted as if navigating a geometric universe, and together their visual quirks are collaboratively blended into their inexplicably coherent Bahama Kangaroo series (eg Punks Never Die, left). Asian connections also appear in the next room, where a virtual video collaboration between the Front's member artists and the Tokyo Art Lab is under way.
Bahama Kangaroo: Mixed media by Yukako Ezoe and Naoki Onodera, Thirds: Mixed Media by Hunter Thompson, Lindsay Preston Zappas and Jamie Solock, FATHOM (MCMLXXVI): Photography by Ryn Wilson, Through June 8, The Front, 4100 St. Claude Ave., 301-8654.