"North of Your Foot" Hot Air Balloon Performance

A performance and installation created by dance artist Laurie Van Wieren and visual artist Alyssa Baguss. This is a collaboration with a cast of Twin Cities dance luminaries, athletes, a hot air balloon, and artists of Bethel University. North of Your Foot illuminates the maps that we carry and allows the audience to navigate through a landscape of live and visual art.

An event in conjunction with Everything from Nowhere. 

Statement

Wanderlust is the strong or irresistible impulse to travel and explore. It is often driven by the desire to escape and leave behind the familiar to experience the unknown world. The internet has allowed us to wander to unfamiliar lands never having to leave the comfort and safety of our homes. Travel anywhere via Google Earth, experience other worlds through NASA satellites and daydream quietly while pristine images of the landscapes scroll through our screensavers. I am interested in how technology influences the way we experience the natural world. My practice examines this digital “wanderlust”.

This new medium of virtual navigation is exchanging an actual experience for an abstraction of experience forming new habits of thought and behavior about the natural world. This technological window results in a setting that has become literally flat to many of us. It is this “intangible” experience of the landscape that interests me as an artist. Acknowledging this transition from natural phenomena to intellectual conception, I see our relationship with the natural landscape becoming distant and foreign.

Artist Bio

Alyssa Baguss’s practice explores mediated natural environments through drawing processes. She is a visual artist and arts program director, who works out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Alyssa is a 2015 and 2017 recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and her work has been exhibited in the Twin Cities and regionally, including the Rochester Art Center, Burnet Gallery, Soo Visual Arts Center, Minnesota Museum of American Art, Rosalux Gallery and Augsburg College Christensen Center Art Gallery.

www.alyssabaguss.com