IN THE WINDOWS Mississippi River: Water Washes

I met Annie Hejny last summer, during the Women's Art Institute at St. Kate's.  She began this series of paintings then, collecting river water and combining them with her paints.  A subtle, worshipful consideration of the value of our water supply.  These paintings, that will be up through October, are especially beautiful at night.   Come by at night to see them glow.

Mississippi River: Water Washes

by

Annie Hejny

Annie Hejny was born in St. Paul and studied at the University of St. Thomas and St. Catherine

University, earning a double-major B.A. in Elementary Education and Studio Art with honors (2012).

Participating as a mentor and artist in the Twin Cities community, she has volunteered with Free Arts

Minnesota, blankslate theater, VISION and founded the PAINT Project, a collaboration between local

establishments to implement mural painting events in 10 countries during 2010-2013. Since 2014,

Annie is a member of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association (NEMAA) and the Women's Art

Resources of Minnesota (WARM).

As an emerging visual artist, she intentionally explores the spaces from her daily life and larger travels to create highly-saturated paintings. Recent exhibitions include Art-A-Whirl (Minneapolis, MN), 6x6x2015 (Rochester, NY) and One Wall (Chicago, IL).

She currently resides in St. Paul and works at the Casket Arts Building in Northeast Minneapolis. Last summer she participated in the Women's Art Institute at St. Catherine University. Most recently, she converted her single-stall garage into Gallery Three, a pop-up exhibition space for local artists.

MARIA KOROL, in the Windows on Cedar

         IN THE WINDOWS for the month of AUGUST

MARIA KOROL

I first met Maria last summer at the Women's Art Institute at St. Kates.  She is a lyrical painter and sculptor of narrative. 
          María Korol was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1980 and moved to the United States in 2004. Her former education in classic and modern dance shifted to an interest in the visual arts while studying at the University of California, Irvine. Since then, she has shown her paintings and drawings nationally and internationally in places as far afield as Bogotá and New York. She holds a Master in Fine Arts in painting and drawing from Indiana University, Bloomington, where she taught drawing, two-dimensional design and color theory classes. She taught drawing in Florence, Italy for six weeks in the summer of 2014, and at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and Design last year. She was recently Assistant Professor of Art and Gallery Director at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN. She is a fellowship recipient with the Akademie der Kunste for the 2016 residency in Berlin, Germany, and will be the Visiting Artist and Painting Professor at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia for the 2016-17 academic year.

In her own words:

I am fascinated by stories about raw human impulses: malice, envy, obsessions, sexual urgings, abuse, and also by moments of shame and vulnerability that everyone seems to have lived. The narrative impetus in my work comes from such experiences, from memory, but I also use what I hear, read or invent. Humor, spontaneity and rhythm are present in my drawings. The final aim is to tell a story in the vein of artists such as Paula Rego and Kara Walker. Using the comic strip and storyboard format, I make my characters reappear in different situations as the drawings pile up. The viewer is invited to become familiar with them, learns to decipher their thoughts and intentions through slow viewing. What seems like a simple smile may turn into a charged and complex sneer after careful observation of the interactions and events illustrated in the drawing.

 I am from Buenos Aires, Argentina and moved to the United States as an adult. I grew up a girl in a sexist culture, in a Jewish family during and after a chauvinistic murderous dictatorship. My experience as an immigrant fuels my ideas and perceptions. Immigrants are often pushed into a helpless and awkward state because of the possible inadequacy of their language, social behavior, and financial situation. I am interested in the sensitivity of the immigrant as well as in the emotions she brings about on the people that surround her. As Edward Said puts it in Culture and Imperialism: “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”

http://www.mariakorol.com/

INVENTORY METHODS, in the WINDOWS

INVENTORY METHODS, by Susan Hensel

QR code to take the survey

Gideon stands guard

Gideon wonders what I am up to

INVENTORY METHODS

Preparing to install 160 tubes

Preparing to install

INVENTORY METHODS : do the math.

Inventory Methods is an artwork about accretion and subtraction; accumulation and reduction.

It is a record of old pajamas discarded as useless and accumulated as rags.

It is a record of weights, each tube containing 4 ounces of waste materials: rags.

It is a declaration of the beauty that remains in the devalued, worn, discarded.

It is a record of an ongoing process of reduction and a questioning of the nature of what, and who, we devalue and discard.

Each tube represent 4 ounces of weight lost: a reduction in body size, a quest for health and a consideration of the pressures on bodies to conform to cultural standards. 

Gaining and losing weight is very public.  Unless one hides away from the eyes of others, the process is subject to value judgments, comment, encouragement, discouragement, vilification. That which is intensely private and personal, becomes a public spectacle, subject to comment.

With this artwork I want to direct the commenting process, developing community conversation at the intersection of numbers and beauty. I will use a QR code to bring people into an active commenting process.

When did curves become unacceptable?   When did fat cease to represent wealth and fertility?  When did advanced age become frail and disrespected?  When did age, weight, beauty and numbers begin to intersect with moral judgements?

As I lost weight, I wanted to mark the progress, but also name as beautiful that which was subtracted.  I accumulated art as I reduce my size.

There are 160 tubes.  Do the math.

Take a survey to add language to INVENTORY METHODS

Ophelia as she is changing in the new temporary studio

Ophelia Ascendant

I have rented a storefront on S. Bloomington Avenue for the duration of the renovation through Reader's Art so I can easily continue working on the bodies of work that have been languishing in the on and off work practice that was necessitated by life with a gallery.Each day that I get to work on this project, I come home exhausted after only a few hours of work.  So much looking!

 I try one thing and then another and look at the whole series of 10 drawings to see if they scan, if they tell the story that they have been created to tell.











 Little by little, they accomplish their work.





Each drawing is part of an installation and performance that I expect to present aroun this time next year.  I could do it sooner...except for Reader's Art!

Windows on Cedar is coming together

The Windows on Cedar project is coming together. The windows are tentatively scheduled through next fall. They will be filled, soon, by the work of Sarah Claire Ahlers, a local photographer who has taken portraits around the Corcoran Neighborhood of South Minneapolis and will be posting them around the neighborhood starting here, soon. What she is doing is similar to the INSIDE OUT PROJECT.

In March and April, in honor of Reader's Art 12, I will show Northfield artist Sharol Nau.