SOOMAAL FELLOWSHIP EXHIBITION – 2019

Soo Bood, Bood / Come Jump, Jump – Kaamil A. Haider

August 1 – 29, Gage Gallery

Artists Talk & Reception: August 17, 2019, 6pm, Gage Family Art Gallery

Artist Statement

Soo Bood, Bood / Come Jump, Jump is a multi-channel video installation that uses traditional Somali dance as its starting point. The work examines the internal environment and logic of dance and its accompanying elements of movements and sound. Dance, as in all cultures, particularly in this Somali cultural context, call for many reasons, e.g., celebration, social connection, and self expression. This installation offers varied vignettes of the transformation and transcendence the body assumes as the dancers move, chant, clap and stomp in a unified frenzied rhythm.

In his practice, the artist’s engagement and preoccupation with rituals through repetition are related to his exploration of memory, archives and experiences of his community. Themes of discussion found in this installation, and in many other works by the artist, are constant discourse within the Somali diaspora communities such as the passage of knowledge, rituals and physical connection with their heritage as they forge a new life in their new homes.

Bio

Kaamil A. Haider is Somali born visual artist and graphic designer based in Minneapolis. He has received his B.F.A. in Graphic Design at the College of Design, University of Minnesota. In his art practice, Kaamil considers the power of memory and archives in relation to his personal experiences and that of his larger community. With over a dozen exhibitions, themes of discussion found in his artworks are constant discourse within the Somali diaspora communities such as the passage of knowledge, rituals and physical connection with their heritage as they forge a new life in their receiving societies.

In addition, Kaamil is a co-founder of Soomaal House of Art, a Minneapolis based Somali artists collective supporting a growing number of emerging and established Somali artists living in Minnesota and beyond. He is the recipient of the 2018 University of Minnesota Alumni Association’s U40 Alumni Leader Award for his academic achievement and community engagement through Soomaal. Kaamil is one of the two 2019 Soomaal Fellows, an initiative by Soomaal House of Art and in partnership with Augsburg University Art Galleries. He is also a 2019 Springboard for the Arts’ 20/20 Artist Fellow.

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SOOMAAL FELLOWSHIP EXHIBITIONS – 2019

August 1 – 29, 2019 – Gage & Christensen Gallery

Artists Talk & Reception: August 17, 2019, 6 pm

Gage Family Art Gallery

Soomaal House of Art (Soomaal) is a Minnesota-based Somali art collective that provides studio space, studio critiques, artistic community, mentorships for younger Somali artists and an annual exhibition space with educational programming.

Soomaal House of Art provides a platform for Somali visual artists who want to create and use art to shape and frame critical discourse around vexing local and global issues of our time. Moving forward, we hope the collective action of this group will lead to sustained partnerships with Minnesota institutions and, together, inspire more Minnesotans, especially Somali Minnesotans, to harness the power of art as a tool for intellectual and civic engagement.

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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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I Want to Believe

June 9 – August 4, 2017
Christensen Center Art Gallery

In 2015, Brandon Kuehn received the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. He traveled around the state of Minnesota documenting and creating original artwork about the state’s paranormal stories, myths, legends, and more.

Artist Statement

What is the difference between what we know and what we believe?

The Hopi people of the Southwest United States believe they were seeded by Kachinas or ‘Star People’ in their ancient past, and their descendants look today at the sky and await their return. Similar stories influence numerous cultures, both past and present, and have given rise to thousands of “UFO Religions,” around the world. I Want to Believe is a look at the iconography of the UFO phenomenon and its impact on our collective subconscious.

Artist Bio

Brandon Kuehn is an artist and educator who received his BFA from the U of M, Twin Cities, and his MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design. In 2014 and 2016, Brandon curated The Art of Darkness: Inspired by the Paranormal, at the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts in Fridley. He has exhibited his own artwork nationally, and in 2015, he received a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant for his work: The Paranormal Art Project .

I WANT TO BELIEVE Images

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NOW

June 9 – August 4, 2017 Gage Family Art Gallery

Reception: Friday, June 9, 6 – 8 p.m.

Placing her cancer interior and exterior into a creative context, NOW, is a series of photographs, sculptures, and design work that presents the physical and emotional transitions Boecher encountered during her cancer treatments in 2015. It presents a nontraditional perspective of living with cancer that is not only cathartic and direct, but also provocative, playful, and at times irreverent.

Funding for 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.

Artist Statement

The shock, fear, and disbelief one feels after receiving a cancer diagnosis is difficult to articulate. Those who have cancer or overcome it understand the vulnerability, uncertainty and emotional rollercoaster that it creates. Once diagnosed, to remember life as assumed and normal is no longer an option.

In November 2015, I was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer, a value-laden cancer that is the most fatal of all cancers. It accounts for approximately 1 in 4 cancer deaths annually and was expected to cause 158,080 deaths in 2016.

At the time, the doctors were encouraged by the size and timing of discovering the node. They suggested a possible curative outcome and prescribed an aggressive six-month treatment plan that included chemotherapy and radiation to both lung and brain. Despite their optimism my response was quite the opposite: anger, sadness, fear, disbelief, shock, confusion and an overall lack of control. Although I thought that a variety of profound experiences had taught me resiliency and mindfulness, this diagnosis was, in some sense, the most difficult because it forced an immediate examination of my own mortality and death in a manner that felt real and more imminent. Because social issues and personal experience have always inspired my creative work, I knew I had little choice but to use my diagnosis to create a new body of work.

NOW��is an installation of color photographs and three-dimensional objects which presents the physical and emotional transitions I encountered during both private and public moments while in treatment and recovery. This work attempts to challenge conventional notions of cancer by presenting a perspective that is in turn personal, investigative and confrontational but also playful, positive and at times irreverent.

While a series of self-portraits simultaneously depicts horror and disbelief, other prints present the inescapable nightmares, dreams, and fantasies that have been equally pervasive. An installation of radiation masks as wall mounts, mounds of fallen hair and broken eggshells challenge the viewer to confront the harsh realities during and after treatment. Cancer fortune cookies, Wooly Willy and Magic Eight Balls, all childhood games of chance, lend a playful air and provide a less weighty perspective of cancer.

NOW��challenges traditional cancer perceptions and stigmas attached to cancer with a non-traditional creative approach. It presents evocative visuals with elements of play to underscore life’s uncertainty without being cathartic or overly sentimental.

A year and a half after diagnosis, I now live in three-month increments where CT scans determine my next step. As a result I have developed a profound appreciation and gratitude for time, strive to assume little and take even less for granted.

With cancer there is no looking forward or turning back, only��NOW.

Bio

Susan Boecher’s creative practice spans over 20 years and continues to emphasize social research and activism through community-driven photography. She established��OverExposure, a media arts nonprofit that partners photographers with nonprofit groups on theme-specific photography projects.

NOW – images

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REVISIONARIES – TIM ABEL, MELISSA WAGNER-LAWLER & ANGELA ZAMMARELLI – MAY 15 – AUGUST 10, 2015

Reception:��May 15, 6 – 7:30 p.m.

The concept for Revisionaries first existed as a digital experiment between three artists in the form of Precarious Worlds, a show for the online gallery platform Gallery Gray, in 2011. In this remix, there is a chance to re-contextualize ideas that were first uncovered in the potential space created in the digital show and a chance to inject new ideas through experimentation and collaboration that can only take place in the physical space offered in the gallery.

Exhibition Statement:

As artists, our artworks share an interest in saturation: a tendency towards decoration through pattern, layers of color, information and fragmentation. Angela Zammarelli uses fabric, cardboard, and herself to make sculptural objects and installations. Melissa Wagner-Lawler uses digitally layered text and pattern to create a visceral, delicate surface on the page that takes the form of artists books and works on paper. While, Tim Abel uses printmaking, papermaking, and sewing to make sculptural paperworks that vary in size from the handheld to large-scale installations.

Artist Bios:

Tim Abel is a paper-based artist and community art educator living in Wisconsin.

Melissa Wagner-Lawler is a printmaker and bookmaker who resides and teaches in Milwaukee, WI.

Angela Zammarelli is an artist living in Massachusetts who creates environments with found materials coming from free piles, trash/recycling, and hand me downs.

All three received their MFAs from Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

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