Upcoming Exhibitions
From Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program
Flourish
Jennifer Davis, Erika Olson, Terrance Payne, and Joe Sinness
Friday, October 22, 2010—Sunday, January 2, 2011
Minnesota Artists Exhibition Gallery
The Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program presents "Flourish," a group exhibition featuring new work by four Minneapolis artists: Jennifer Davis, Erika Olson Gross, Terrence Payne, and Joe Sinness.
Davis's delicate paintings include a cast of animal, monster, and human characters who all have parts to play in her colorful fantasies. But her charming, Easter-egg palette belies the underlying psychological dramas of introversion and lost innocence.
Olson Gross is a multi-media artist whose sculptures and paintings express the poetry and fecundity of nature. Her most recent bucolic landscapes are intricately painted. The illustrative, woodblock-print flatness of her animal and flora forms resemble collaged scraps of paper attached to the canvas.
Payne's large oil pastels on paper produce a sense of humor tinged with melancholy; the hand-written captions reveal his characters' internal narratives of disappointment, apathy, and resignation.
Rendered in colored pencil with a fastidious, hyper-realistic attention to detail, Sinness' baroque-style drawings are filled with color, pattern, and texture. The work implies sexual double-entendres and employs sly turns of phrase.
Peter HappelChristian and Margaret Wall-Romana
January 21 - April 3, 2011
Minnesota Artists Exhibition Gallery
The scientific method is a process for documenting events, creating knowledge, and testing theories. Peter Happel Christian measures, collects information, and records data, creating sculptures and photographs that are positioned at the intersection of art, science, and history. He observes the technologies that mediate our everyday relationship with art and natural phenomena, including geography, cartography, and topographical surveys. As part of his MAEP exhibition, "Ground Truth," Happel Christian has invited MIA staff to collaborate with him. He has asked to borrow their office plants, which he will then install in the MAEP galleries and care for during the show.
Margaret Wall-Romana's work engages with the traditions of oil painting. She controls the physics of paint, but also lets go of that control to open up to the paint's own properties. The irresistible tensions on the surfaces of her large-scale paintings keep viewers looking. Wall-Romana structures her paintings using an elaborate atmospheric perspective balanced with non-illusionistic color. A sharp student of art history, she conflates the still-life delicacies of the Dutch Golden Age with Mannerist attitudes towards scale, Hudson River School atmospherics, and yolky Abstract Expressionist smears. Formally, she pushes the physical properties of paint to their limit, with her use of thin, translucent colors to create delicate surfaces, and chalky impasto for ripe forms and textures.
Paula McCartney and Liz Miller
April 22 - July 3, 2011
Minnesota Artists Exhibition Gallery
