March 4 – 22, 2018

Christensen Center Student Art Gallery

Artist Talk: Thursday, March 22,Ìý5:30 – 7Ìýp.m. Christensen Center Student Art Gallery

Home Sweet Home is an interactive installation piece that brings together aspects of the past and present to interpret the future of human interaction and communication. Jenny Weinreis uses a variety of mediums, such as needlework, printing, found object, and sculpture to explore the fast-paced, evolving world while staying rooted in the generations that came before.

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JANUARY 22 – February 1, 2018

Christensen Center Student Art Gallery

Artist Talk: Thursday, Feb. 1,Ìý5:30 – 7Ìýp.m. Christensen Center Student Art Gallery

Using stacked stone structures, Gardner’s work strives to show a connection that exists between the human world and the natural world while incorporating his submersion into adulthood.

Bio

Glen Gardner is a multi-media artist who is currently finishing up his last year in Augsburg Studio Art Program. He has taken up a focus on how humans interact with the environment, while expressing this with 3D media. His art focuses on bringing the audience to have an emotional connection to the natural and human world.

Statement

Growing up, I did a lot of hiking. A common character on these hikes were cairns, human-made structures of short, deliberately stacked rocks, and I was fascinated with them. Since then, I have come to believe that they are much more than just piles of rocks. On a functional level, these cairns of my early life served the purpose of marking a pathway where a trail didn’t exist. The instructions were simple: play a game of connect-the-dots with the stone piles. But they did something more. They showed me that I could be an architect in a human world. The simplicity of the forms, along with the abundance of material, encouraged these natural sculptures. I also began to realize that, because these stones had been exposed to the natural world, the materials gained a very intricate but consistent aesthetic. The processes of erosion effectively put thousands of years of work into these rocks, and the fact that similar rocks will be in the same place creates the ingredients for an interesting sculpture. By combining these natural processes with a human architect, and then performing this in a location that has been developed by nature for years and years and years, a cairn becomes a piece of art. Upon moving to Minneapolis, I noticed that the cairns I was seeing were taking a much different form. Before, they were used to mark a path, but in the Twin Cities this was much less needed. Instead, cairns here seem to mark a space for people, showing that a destination had been reached. They also spoke to the human compulsion to create and build. There have been several times at Hidden Beach when people just stacked rocks for whatever reason.

For my art, I wanted to recreate a feeling of entering a natural space in an unnatural setting while evoking childlike wonder among the participants. As I began this journey, I started to realize that these forms need to allow the natural world in. Unfortunately, I was lacking the time to erode materials for years and years, so I decided to leave a lot of forms up to chance. This meant that I would try to manipulate the form’s aspects as minimally as possible and allow the material to speak for itself. I began to see each stone that I made as a building block used to create a larger form. The results were these large and heavy spinal forms that could not be self-supported. The results were not jovial; they speak to me as a visual representation of me drifting away from the child inside, but still keeping those experiences in my heart.

Images from Exhibit

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Landscape Abstraction

November 14 – December 19, 2017

Matthew Winkler presents a new series of layered sculptures that explore the representation of place. Created with cut paper, wood, paint, and printed imagery, the works engage the gallery environment and set up an interplay physical and pictorial space and positive and negative form.

Artist Bio

Matthew Winkler creates multi-layered drawings and sculptures that are a poetic response to the built and natural world. He is a 2017 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant recipient and a 2014 recipient of a Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council Individual Artist Grant. Matthew is adjunct faculty at Winona State University, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, and Riverland Community College. He completed a BA from Williams College in 2004 and an MFA from California State University Long Beach in 2011. Matthew grew up in New Jersey and currently lives and works in Rochester, MN.

Artist Statement

I’m interested in exploring an interplay of physical, pictorial and perceptual space in my work. I use cut paper, wood, paint, and printed material to make layered two and three-dimensional constructions. These works contain a shifting relationship between positive and negative form and engage with their environment, registering changes in light and shadow and allowing for different views within an exhibition space.

Experiences with specific landscapes and architectural spaces are the starting point for each construction. The places I choose to focus on often contain layers of meaning – personal as well as social or ecological histories. I use a distinct process of collage, digital manipulation, drawing/painting, subtraction, and accumulation. Through this process I allow the form of each work to appear over time. I consider the course of making of each work a metaphor for the complex process of understanding and assigning meaning to place. I would like viewers of my work to have a physical/sensory experience with the work first and then question what visual forms are being represented, deconstructed, or manipulated.

LANDSCAPE ABSTRACTION – images

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Bowing

Artist Statement

My practice is a meditation on time and its role in the decay of objects and memories. Inspiration is drawn from historical objects, the architecture around me, or a personal relationship. My processes are repetitive and labor intensive; I draw, construct, and weave using materials to depict fleeting, fragile moments and to examine the temporary physicality of an object or idea. I create work to find the beauty and the unrest in this temporal state.

Artist Bio

Kate Roberts is native of Greenville, South Carolina. She received both her MFA and BFA at Alfred University in 2015 and 2010 respectively. She has completed residencies at Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts in Helena, MT, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, La Meridiana in Italy, and Le Cite International des Arts in Paris. Her work has been exhibited at the Tampa Art Museum in Tampa, FL and Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY; major exhibitions include the 69^th Scripps Ceramic Annual, the 2011 and 2015 NCECA Biennial, and Ceramic Top 40. She is currently a Lecturer of Ceramics at University of Washingto

BOWING – Q/A with artist

Has clay/porcelain always been your preferred media?

Yes! I have been working with clay since I was in high school. I fell in love with its ability to be manipulated into anything. It’s just dirt.ÌýIt can be hard, soft, rough, wet, vitreous, and all of these qualities can come together to make a beautiful piece. I have been working with porcelain specifically since my senior year of undergrad.

Ìý

How do you feel your style is evolving?

It is becoming looser and more abstract in its imagery. I am allowing the nature of the material toÌýdictate what will happen.

When do you know when you are finished with a piece?

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