THEY/THEM PROJECT

April 8-May 9, 2019 – Christensen Gallery

They/Them Project interviews non binary individuals, offering a platform for them to be seen and heard, while informing and educating everyone on how words and actions affect the Trans+ community.

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May 16 – July 18, 2018

Gage & Christensen Gallery

STILL. HERE.
Barbara Kendrick

In this two-person exhibition titled Still. Here., Barbara Kendrick tackles aging and Monique Luchetti takes on death, both reckoning with mortality.

Kendrick plasters her own image onto a pantheon of historic statuary plucked from the halls of museums, confronting our culture’s aversion to seeing the wrinkled truths of aging.�� Luchetti resurrects anonymous dead birds she finds in ornithology collections, draws portraits of them, in the hope of redemption.

Bio

Barbara F. Kendrick, Professor Emerita, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, received her B.F.A. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her M.F.A. from The Ohio State University. She has exhibited her work in France, England and Greece as well as throughout the United States. She has received fellowships from the Millay Colony, the MacDowell Colony, the Henry Luce Foundation and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Other residencies include Yaddo, Jentel, Ragdale, Bemis, the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Cergy-Pontoise, France, Fundacio Artigas, Gallifa, Spain and the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland. She has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council, Shirley Holden Helberg, the Mid-America Arts Alliance and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Artist Statement

Observe me. Here I am, dressed and draped in my wrinkled skin. My face is pasted on an image of a marble bust, a self-portrait with the immortality of marble and the deterioration of flesh. My sagging, crepey skin mocks the perfection of marble, a bold, vulnerable, confrontation with the evidence of aging.

As a culture we have an aversion to the wrinkled truths of aging. Self-portraits by women showing their aging skin are rare. In Fleshed Out, I use photos of my wrinkled neck, chest, arms and hands as draped clothing, substituting the folds of my skin for the folds of sculpted fabric.

The self-portraits are digital collages, inkjet prints ranging in size from 12 x 12 inches to 26 x 20 inches. The images of the busts and sculptures come from museum collections or public sculpture. Imposing my face, with its visible pores, age spots and wrinkles onto smooth, generalized marble faces gives them a specificity they lacked. Marble lasts, flesh does not. Photos of my wrinkled skin become stuff to work with, a material I manipulate in Photoshop, to clothe the sculpture.

Women my age are nearly invisible in a youth-oriented, anti-aging culture. We do not want to see bodily evidence of deterioration and decay. I confront these fears as I clothe marble busts in the skin we would prefer to erase or veil.

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May 16 – July 18, 2018

Gage & Christensen Gallery

STILL. HERE.
MONIQUE LUCHETTI

In this two-person exhibition titled Still. Here., Barbara Kendrick tackles aging and Monique Luchetti takes on death, both reckoning with mortality.

Kendrick plasters her own image onto a pantheon of historic statuary plucked from the halls of museums, confronting our culture’s aversion to seeing the wrinkled truths of aging.�� Luchetti resurrects anonymous dead birds she finds in ornithology collections, draws portraits of them, in the hope of redemption.

Bio

Monique Luchetti lives and works in Brooklyn NY. She has exhibited national and international, most recently at the Western Colorado Center for the Arts, the Peale Museum, and the Brattleboro Museum. Luchetti has received numerous grants including the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, an Artists Space Grant and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Grant. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, and Zingmagazine and she has been an artist-in-resident at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs NY, JOYA, Spain and Altos de Chavon, Dominican Republic.

Artist Statement

Over the past few years I have spent many days researching ornithology collections, looking through hundreds of drawers of bird study-skins. The collections remind me of a library’s deep storage, long forgotten cemeteries, and ancient archeological sites. The kind of places humans cherish for the clues offered to us about our own species.

These silent places interest me, they bear witness to past lives now forgotten, like the lost voices from a first-century Greek marketplace buried under the twelfth-century Basilica of San Lorenzo in Naples. Voices that were once heard in the excavated whorehouse in Pompeii, or in the Mithras temple found 6 stories beneath the Church of St. Clemente in Rome.

For me, ornithology collections are as these places are. Drawers filled with study-skins that were once living birds, with song, and flight – and souls. Now they are remains, cataloged, anonymous, an identity tag tied to a leg specifying their species, date of death and perhaps the name of their cataloger. The study-skins in my work embody my own personal sense of loss and of hope.

The focal point of this work is a large drawing, Forget-Me-Not. The artwork is 7 feet high and 17 feet long and composed of 27 assembled sheets of paper. The drawing represents bird species that are endangered or threatened with extinction in the United States. The research for this drawing was done at the Yale University Peabody Museum. The other drawings in the exhibition are studies done from the collection at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia.

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March 1-30, 2019 – Gage Gallery

NCECA: March 26–30

Reception: March 28, 5-9p.m.

This recent series of idiosyncratic sculpture and painting by Jim Shrosbree continues the artist’s ongoing investigation and use of abstraction to permeate humanistic experience. The title infers a set of actions that are both playful and vital, consciously defining and alerting us to their call.

Artist Bio

2017-2018 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee, Jim Shrosbree, just completed a third artist residency at Yaddo.�� He is noted for his sculpture, painting and works on paper.�� They have been exhibited nationally and internationally and his work is included in such collections as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Des Moines Art Center, Mint Museum and University of Iowa Museum of Art.�� In addition to his most recent award and residency fellowship are those from the National Endowment for the Arts, Iowa Arts Council, Idaho Arts and Humanities Commission, MacDowell Colony and Watershed Center for Ceramic Art. Shrosbree earned his MFA in Ceramics at University of Montana.�� He is Professor of Art at Maharishi University, Fairfield, Iowa.

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Temporal Patterns – JULIANE SHIBATA

January 17 – February 20, 2019 – Christensen Gallery

Reception: Thursday, January 17, 6-8 p.m.

Integrating real flowers with ceramic ones, Shibata explores the ephemeral in a large-scale installation that celebrates both ornamental and time-based patterns encountered throughout life.

Bio

Juliane received her MFA in Ceramics from Bowling Green State University, having previously graduated from Carleton with a BA in Studio Art. She has taught at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and Hope College in Holland, Michigan. She was selected as a 2016 Emerging Artist by Ceramics Monthly and has been an artist in residence at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Tennessee and The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China. Juliane received 2018 and 2014 Artist Initiative grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and her work belongs to the permanent collection of Northern Arizona University’s Art Museum and the Brown-Forman Collection.

This year, her work was included in exhibitions at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, the Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College, Raymond Avenue Gallery, Inver Hills Community College, and KOBO Gallery in Seattle. In March 2019, Juliane’s work will be featured in four exhibitions that coincide with the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts conference in Minneapolis.

Juliane Shibata is a fiscal year 2018 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Above Image: …vita brevis (detail) 2017, Porcelain and real carnations

Photo credit: Eric Mueller

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GARNISH – DAN IBARRA

January 14 – February 20, 2019 – Gage Gallery

Reception: Thursday, January 17, 6-8 p.m

Garnish is a deliberate exhibition of new ideas and new practice. The tendency to focus on perfection and celebrate final outcomes in work can distract us from our chance to see and recognize any creative act for what it truly is; a momentary hue of prototype, investigation, or iteration in a broader spectrum of lifelong creative process.

Dan Ibarra is a Minneapolis-based graphic designer, and printmaker.��He is interested in the influence of invisible, unconscious, and ephemeral creative acts in humanity, language, and visual culture.

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SORTA LIKE Conversation – ADAM WHITE

November 1 – December 14, 2018 – Christensen Gallery

Reception: Thursday, November 1, 6-8 p.m

Adam White’s installation work uses altered comic book story narrative, by way of dialogue bubbles, to represent the wave of information we constantly process from day to day. Thrown out of context by removing the comic imagery, the remaining dialogue can only hint at a larger story, unable to provide the full narrative.

Bio

Adam White is an artist living and working in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 2007 he received a Master of Fine Art with a focus on Installation and Paper Sculpture from the University of Maryland, College Park, and in 2004 a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting and Drawing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He has exhibited work in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City.

His current studio work uses altered comic book story narrative, by way of dialogue bubbles, to represent the wave of news or personal information we constantly process from day to day. Thrown out of context by removing the comic imagery, the remaining dialogue can only hint at a larger story, unable to provide the full narrative. The work, composed of thousands of overlaid paper word bubbles, varies between medium to large scale wall installations.

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ADRIFT

November 1 – December 14, 2018 – Gage Family Art Gallery

Reception: Thursday November 1, 6-8 p.m.

Artist Statement

The artwork that comprises the series Adrift (2017-2018) deals with human migration and, in particular, the global refugee and migrant crisis. ��More than 65 million people around the world are now officially displaced from their homes by conflict, violence and persecution – the highest figure recorded by the United Nations since the Second World War.

I felt morally obligated to make work that might add to the compassionate and sympathetic viewpoint supporting refugees seeking asylum and safety.���� Media sources have provided a steady stream of now-familiar imagery showing groups of people kept behind chain link fencing, incarcerated children in detention centers, or figures in life jackets crowded into flimsy, inflatable rafts crossing the Mediterranean Sea.�� As Susan Sontag points out, “the western memory museum is now mostly a visual one,” and the volume of images depicting far flung, upsetting stories has reached a fever pitch. The paintings in Adrift ��present a cobbled-together synthesis of familiar media images representing this humanitarian crisis.

As reference, I have either used media photographs as inspiration or repurposed them by fixing them directly to the panel or canvas. This practice allows me to work within the conversation that already exists. The “seams” between the borrowed photographs and the painted surfaces are meant to be evident. Using photographs as an element in the work allows me to honor their existence, power, and gravity. The painted surfaces re-orient the original photos towards a more dream-like space where a reset or pause button can be hit that allows for reflection where shock and horror once reigned.

The large paintings of the sea are meant to disrupt the picturesque ideal of ocean panoramas. I want to place the viewer in the water as if swimming (or drowning).�� News photos of ocean crossings often place viewers at a safe distance (such as on the shore), where we are allowed to witness migrants’ passages at a safe remove. The paintings are meant to be somber reminders of real-life struggles and individual human lives. The water is depicted as black, tumultuous, or in extreme close-up as if to engulf and surround the viewer. My intention is to put the viewer in the same position that refugees and migrants are forced into. The works in Adrift represent a loose and unspecified narrative that the viewer can piece together. The images are taken from media sources of the last few years, but they are also meant to represent the long and grim history of perilous ocean crossings, slavery, and human suffering.

Bio

Canadian painter Chris Willcox was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. She earned degrees from the Ontario College of Art and Design and the University of Guelph. She earned her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, in New Jersey. She moved to the Twin Cities in 2000 to accept a position at Macalester College in St. Paul, where she is a tenured professor in the Art and Art History department. Her work has been shown at galleries in the U.S. and Canada, with her most recent being at the MAEP galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Phipps Center for the Arts. She is the recipient of numerous grants, including Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council Grants, and most recently in 2013-14, a George and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in Painting and a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant.

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UNDER COVER by Margery Amdur

September 6 – October 17, 2018

Christensen Center & Gage Family Art Gallery

Artist Talk: Wednesday, October 17, 12:30 p.m.

Adeline Johnson Conference Center

Creative Process Panel Discussion:

Wednesday, October 17, 6:30 p.m. Auditorium 150, MCAD

Artist Statement

As an artist, I traverse multiple disciplines and my art does not fit easily into categories. ��I have worked for much of my career with landscape and personal typographies as metaphors for cultivating visual tensions where issues of abstraction and representation intersect. If one of the jobs of representation is to show how the world looks, abstraction is free to reflect our sense of what matters in the world.

I was trained as an abstract painter; but my work rarely resides within a two-dimensional picture plane. ��I use unorthodox materials to build form and mass in ways that include extravagant and ornate surfaces. Additionally, I utilize the installation format as a way to navigate what once existed as a large divide between Painting and Sculpture. ��Within this context many of the handcrafted elements can be manipulated to permit recycling and revitalization of older ideas, and can also be tailored to more than one location. I believe that when an artist chooses the installation format as their primary form of expression the relationship between the artist and the viewer/audience, becomes more actively engaged and a richer dialogue inevitably ensues.

In the past two years I have produced work that continues to reveal the importance of my hand as a primary tool, and has primarily been oriented for gallery and museum settings. Cosmetic sponges have become my building blocks. By manipulating commercially produced “make-up” sponges I have created formations inspired by natural and architectural geometry. ��Luscious and voluptuous constructions have been inspired by “living walls,” basalt formations, and aerial views of sprawling urban metropolises. I build ��“poetic moments” that become densely layered and eventually monumental. At the core, my constructions probe an array of paradoxes— organic and inorganic matter, machine manufacturing and handcrafting, permanence and impermanence, beauty and deterioration.

Bio

Originally from Pittsburgh, Margery Amdur received her B.F.A. from Carnegie-Mellon University and her M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Margery has had over 60 solo and two-person exhibitions. Her international exhibitions include Turkey, Hungary, Poland, England, Iceland, Latvia, and Suriname.

She has been reviewed in national and international publications including��Sculpture Magazine,��New American Paintings,��Fiber Arts,��New Art Examiner,��and Art Papers. In 2014, her work was on the cover of ArtVoices, and will soon be in a third edition of the��Manifest International Publications.

For over twenty years, Margery has been actively creating site-specific, indoor and outdoor temporary and permanent art installations. In 2012, she completed Walking on Sunshine, a permanent public art project, in the Spring Garden underground-subway station, Philadelphia, PA. In the fall of 2015, as part of the Art in Airport Program, Margery created My Nature, a mixed-media, and site-specific installation in Terminal B, at the Philadelphia International Airport. As part of her six-week residency at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, she and a group of students created Inside/Out, an installation in the interior of one of elevators on CEU campus. In 2016 and 2017 the US Embassy selected Amass #16 to be installed in the US Ambassador’s Residence, in Riga, Latvia. Amass #17 was permanently installed in the newly completed US Embassy Headquarters in Paramaribo, Suriname.

Spring 2018 should prove to be a dynamic and productive period. Margery will be exhibiting her work in Material Slip, an international exhibition at the University of Hawaii. In April,��she returns to Riga, Latvia as artist in residence at the University of Art and Design. In addition, she currently has an installation in Riga’s Sixth International Textile Fiber Triennial at the Museum of Applied Arts and Exhibition Hall Arsenals. As the recipient of the Jerry Shore Fellowship��Margery will spent the month of May at the Vermont Studio Center. Fall of 2018, She will be exhibiting a new installation, in the Gage ad Christensen Center Gallery at Augsburg University, Minneapolis MN.

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