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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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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Circumstantial Evidence

January 11 – February 19, 2016

Reception: January 22, 6 – 8 p.m

Something of a peek into the artist’s archives, this exhibition will present new books and boxes along with older works that have rarely been exhibited.

Artist Statement

I have been obsessed with creating order out of chaos (or even slight disarray) since I was a child. With five siblings, and four major relocations before I was ten, I found it necessary to keep my possessions small, contained, and protected. As an adult, the compulsion to collect, organize and find containers for things has remained with me, and has directed much of my artwork.

Inspired by Joseph Cornell and other artists working with boxes, I created the first of what would become an ongoing series of “not empty” boxes in 1991. Originally, the boxes contained artificialia – manufactured, as opposed to natural, specimens. The small objects and elements that I found or constructed were included and arranged primarily based on their visual qualities. The Small Files, 2000, evolved from those early boxes, but was much more personal, serving as something of an autobiography through tiny objects I had collected since childhood. It is the earliest complete piece in this exhibition, but it closely relates to the most recent ones created over the past several months.

About ten years ago, I began focusing on the natural world and its small inhabitants; many boxes since then (and two artist’s books) have included natural specimens and artifacts that document specific moments in specific places. A number of experiences influenced this focus, including intensive beachcombing on Nantucket with my friend Rose Gonnella, a commission to create a Cabinet of Curiosities for the Carleton College Library, taking a course at Hamline University in the natural history of Minnesota, and a semester of collecting specimens in County Clare, Ireland, where I was a tutor for 13 students from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design at the Burren College of Art. Some More Specimens was originally a prototype for the Carleton Cabinet of Wonders, but was re-purposed to contain objects and memorabilia from Ireland.

Several newer not-empty boxes were created specifically for this exhibition, and delve into my own archives. Books not for sale houses books I have made since 1991 specifically for myself, family members or friends – books that I don’t necessarily consider “artist’s books” and have never exhibited. A set of three books contain reproductions of drawings given or sent to me by my nieces, nephews, and friends’ children. The box for From Friends was given to me by a friend, and it seemed the perfect container for gifts from friends; it includes small images and objects, often handmade, that I have received since 1979.

A slightly different series of pieces made for the show include artifacts from the archives of close relatives who have passed away. The containers for these all have a strong connection to each person, although most have been altered. Nana’s Handbag, the actual purse itself, was the inspiration for these homages. I chose this perfect container from among her possessions when she died in 2003, and have been meaning to do something special with it since then. Circumstantial Evidence provided the perfect excuse to finally make this piece for Nana and Pop Pop, and also to make boxes for my father, my brother, and my other grandmother.

This exhibition came along for me at a time in my life when I have been looking backwards and forwards from different points of view, and I am thankful to Jenny Wheatley and Augsburg College for the opportunity, as I am thankful to the many, many friends and family members who are represented in the work, either with physical objects or in spirit.

Artist Bio

Jody Williams publishes artist’s books under the name Flying Paper Press. She has taught workshops and presented lectures at museums and colleges across the United States and in Europe. Her work is in the collections of the Walker Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Minnesota Historical Society, and numerous other museums, universities, and libraries. Honors include Jerome Foundation fellowships, grants and awards from the Minnesota Craft Council, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In 2008, Jody Williams received the inaugural Minnesota Book Artist Award from the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library, and she was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant in 2013.

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE – Studio visit

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