Redaer's Art 12: Jamie Weaver

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home


Jamie Weaver

West Virginia in Quilts recalls my childhood memories of growing up in rural Appalachia.  My family has long been involved with folk arts and crafts, and I was encouraged to explore these creative outlets both at home and in school.  Looking back, I realize that much emphasis was placed on West Virginia as a center for Appalachian crafts and tourism, and larger issues affecting the state, like mountaintop removal and rampant meth use, were swept under the rug.  When I was in school, we weren’t taught how to be socially, financially, and environmentally loyal to our state – we were told that to be successful adults, we’d probably have to move out of state.  So, with West Virginia in Quilts, I wanted to use a traditional Appalachian craft, quilting, to bring awareness to more serious issues affecting West Virginia. 

            I chose an accordion fold structure so that the book unfolds and spreads out like a quilt.  The title of the book works on a couple of levels:  It is a glimpse of West Virginia through beautiful quilt patterns, and it is also a state in quilts, or covered from view.  Since the truth rarely remains hidden, I let the ugliness underneath peek through the quilts on the surface; when the quilt unfolds, the whole story is revealed.  The front and back are covered with handmade paper that reminds me of quilt batting.

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home
March 16- April 26, 2012

Reader's Art 12: Marilyn Stablein

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home

Marilyn Stablein - An ongoing series of artist books Notions and Accessories explores an artist’s whimsical narrative history of needlework, notions, and women’s antique fashion and fabric accessories.  By utilizing actual found antique objects I hope to honor and celebrate everyday women’s historical tools and handiwork. Current completed artist books in this series include works devoted to The Bias Tape, Needles, vintage Handkerchiefs, and vintage nylon stockings and a stocking bag.


Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home 
March 16- April 26, 2012

Reader's Art 12: Esther Smith

 
Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home   Esther Smith




Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home
March 12- April 26, 2012

Reader's Art 12: Maryann Riker

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home  Maryann Riker

Maryann Riker is a mixed-media artist whose artist books and collage works convey a visual narrative to remind one of the past and journeys through which we all travel throughout our lives.  Her works incorporate digital images, Victorian iconography, and other symbols to convey a sense of memory and time as one opens and unfolds the work.   

Her works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally and are in the Special Collections of:  The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Walker Art Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, The National Museum for Women in the Arts, Yale University, Mills College, University of Iowa, Rhode Island School of Design, Lafayette College, Rutgers University, Newark Art Museum, Newark Public Library and many other private and public collections.

When not creating, Maryann is writing grants, reading mystery or historical fiction novels, practicing to be a wild wannabe or working on becoming a legend in her own living room.




Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home
March 16- April 26, 2012

Reader's Art 12 : Amandine Nabarra Piomelli

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home   Amandine Nabarra Piomelli

The Caretaker

A series of 14 photographs based on a true story (see below) and presented as a centered accordion book in a fabric like box. The title of the box is hidden by the band to keep the secret of the story safe.

Some secrets become obsessions and can change the course of one’s life. This metamorphosis is at the heart of a project made of several artistic short stories. One of them, The Caretaker, is based on the life of Mrs T. On her wedding day, her aunt, who she thought was her mother broke the secret about her  parents’ identity. This shocking revelation slowly changed Mrs. T.’s destiny and sent her off to roam about the world in search of her father.

Mrs T.’s Vietnamese mother had met a Chinese man in Hong-Kong, but their love story was short lived. Returning home to care for her dying mother, she realized she was pregnant. Two years after Mrs T.’s birth, her mother died and the little girl was raised by her aunt who hid the identity of her parents until her wedding day. Before the ceremony the bride received a box containing an old photo of a young man and a golden ring  that her mother had left for her. After spending the next 20 years raising her children, Mrs T. decides to leave her family to find her father. In order to finance her quest, she will work as a caretaker.

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home

March 16- April 26

Reader's Art 12: Kelly Parsell

Reader's Art : Longing for Home  Kelly Parsell- Circulate

This accordion-fold artist book explores the nostalgia and longing for our pasts. The piece highlights six different homes and their specific qualities for which the speaker/narrator still yearns. Circulate investigates the notion of “absence” and how objects, emotions, and histories can continue living on through memory.

Reader's Art : Longing for Home

March 16- April 26, 2012

Reader's Art 12: Rita Collins

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home  Montana artist Rita Collins  is an explorer,"At sixty, I am putting more focus on my own art. I find myself making lists of collages I want to create or books to write and bind. Many of these themes are from my daily experiences as an older woman trying to find her place in the 21st century."


Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home
March 16-April 26, 2012

Reader's Art 12 :Mary Bergs and Beth Dorsey

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home  Mary Bergs and Beth Dorsey are Minneapolis artists who collaborate. For the Reader’s Art Exhibition they are creating a collaborative book. Using the structure of an accordion book they plan to visually explore the concept of home as: 

·      A place

·      A state

·      A building

·      Something within us

·      A memory

·      A history

·      A facade

·      An emotion

·      Something familiar

Reader's Art 12: Longing for Home
March 16- April 26, 2012
opening reception, Friday, March 16, 2012

An orderly procession

Project Gutenberg, the online archive of literature, ironically destroys printed books in order to salvage the information. Ironically, the process turns well ordered, collated text into a collection of dis-bound, chaotic materials that may or may not convey conventional information to us.With the project gutenberg project Jeff Rathermel has collected this discarded material and compiled and re-oredered it into comprehensible collections of information. He has reconsidered the book in all its parts and has chosen attributes to highlight.

project gutenberg project

by Jeff Rathermel

September 23- November 18, 2011

Opening Reception Friday, September 23, 7-10pm

Gotta Love that Laser Level!

Jeff has the coolest tools!

What a cool laser level!

Without a laser level, this is how I would have hung the show!

project gutenberg arrived today

Boxes upon boxes and bags upon bags of artwork arrived today.  It is always hard to believe that a well ordered show comes out of the chaos of an install...But then there are people like Jeff Rathermel who are so organized and so experienced that anything other than order is unimaginable.

project gutenberg project

by Jeff Rathermel

September 23- November 18, 2011

Opening Reception Friday, September 23, 7-10pm

Opening Reception June 17

Carolyn Halliday uses the vocabulary and skills of textiles to sculpt forms that often reference body and/or nature. She hand knits wire and other nontraditional materials into forms that often grow from simple elements of nature and life’s daily debris. With her work, she magnifies nature,and references concepts of the feminine through the female form and domesticity.

My Father’s Religion grew from her experience growing up with a father who loved the woods. Her father’s religion was in the woods. The family spent all of their free time in the Northern Woods. At the time Carolyn would have preferred to stay in a hotel. Nonetheless, her father passed his religion onto her.

My Father's Religion is an installation that explores the calligraphic nature of a knit line, pays homage to the sanctuary of the woods, and questions if art, as in the Byzantium, can transform life. This installation is laid out like a Byzantine church(cross shape)The reference to the Byzantine church comes from her fascination with the idea that the images created for the church, during the Byzantium, were allegedly so powerfully beautiful that they converted people to Christianity. Can art or the beauty of nature transform one today?

Opening Reception, June 17, 7-9pm

shown in conjunction with:

The interview continued...

Mango Seed Quilt by Carolyn Halliday

When did you become interested in knitting with wire?

Around 1996, when Minneapolis was hosting Convergence for the Hand weaver's Guild of America, I was very involved (as a volunteer) with the art wear show. A woman named Kerry McDermot from Arizona, had 2 machine knit copper garments in the show. Something clicked for me and I thought th

at was the coolest thing ever. I went into our basement in search of wire, found some florist wire, and knit a doll.

Dolls? Where did that lead?

So then I got intrigued with non traditional materials. Because I am frequently outside walking and grew up often in the woods, I started collecting stuff that might be used for knitting (tree roots) or was inspired by stuff to work into knitting (sticks, rocks). The tradition of basket making, and the range of materials being used in that textile medium, has influenced me. I also was intrigued with the challenging of shaping and knitting----for example--hmmm-how would I knit that vase shape; how would a make a knit box, etc. The transparency, shadow play,and rigidity of wire were all exciting explorations for me.

Somewhere in all of this, I moved away from the folk art sensibility into work that was increasingly conceptual. I was always seeking and learning and looking for the melding of textile and craft into the world of fine art---a split that continues to intrigue me.

Opening Soon:

My Father's Religion

June 4- July 12

Opening Reception: June 17, 7-9pm

shown in conjunction with:

threads and nets and wires...knitting a life

As Libbie Soffer's work in ars domestica continues to question the threads of relationship and women's work through the ages...

Carolyn Halliday's work picks up the thread and makes it hard and soft at once, knitting in copper wire of various guages, entangling nature and definitions of body and self. Carolyn will lead a dialog with Libbie Soffer on Friday, May 20, around 7pm, as part of the Mending Circle Soiree that begins at 5pm.

Carolyn will open My Father's Religion on June 17, shown in conjunction with:

There is a certain mystery that lurks here...

Just off the center of the gallery lurks a mystery: a house that neither hides, nor quite shelters space. Enclosed in this house is our basic human vulnerability. It stands like a ghost, a chimera, a reminder that our sense of control and safety is a necessary trope that allows us to live in this world. When you look through it, it softens our vision like sweet nostalgia.

ars domestica continues through the end of the month, May 28.

More Mending Circles remain. Bring your mending and your stories. Libbie Soffer will provide company, expertise or her own nimble fingers, as needed.

Mending Circle times:

May 16, 17, 18 & 23, noon-5pm

Friday, May 20, 5pm until around 7 pm when Carolyn Halliday will lead a discussion with Libbie about her work.

And, remember, the Susan Hensel Gallery is always open Monday 10-5 and on other days by very generous appointment.

ars domestica- COMING SOON

Ebben Install Begins

I am excited! This show will grow as the week proceeds. Today, the first load of parts arrived and the primary screen was built. It always begins as a mess! Bags of parts and tools, boxes of framed gouaches.

What will tomorrow bring?

In the House of the Mineral Spirits

installation, performance, works on paper

by

Dean Ebben

January 14- February 28, 2011

OPening performance and reception for the artist

Friday, January 14, 6-10pm

Color of Conflict opens soon

COLOR OF CONFLICT

A new exhibit at Susan Hensel Gallery

Dec 1, 2010-Jan. 1, 2011

reception on Friday, December 17, 7-10pm

The object is yarn. The subject is war.

Color of Conflict, opening at Susan Hensel Gallery December 1, is a collaboration with photographer John Hensel, my son

Always a multimedia artist who seeks narrative, I brought the world of fiber into my studio practice. Color of Conflict is a show of photographs that wrest the meaning from a series of yarns spun during my sabbatical. These yarns, containing army toys and the colors and forms of armed conflict, can be knitted. But their true horror is revealed in the photographic display.

In the art world, one talks about transgression. Transgression can be loosely defined as breaking expected boundaries or expectations. Yarn is expected to be soft, warm, useful, at times even life saving. It is often associated with leisure, craft and women's work. Rarely is it thought of as an object, a material or a subject of fine art. In this project, yarn paradoxically uses its traditional softness to express a hard/harsh/violent reality. It uses its allusions to its life saving properties( warmth, padding, protecting) as a field of discussion about war and death. It uses a "women's art" to discuss a "man's pursuit."

This body of work was completed during a six month sabbatical from gallery life. I took the risk of closing Susan Hensel Gallery for six months in order to return to studio practice and research. During the sabbatical I spent much time exploring the narrative capabilities of fiber. I have become part of the artyarn movement, a radical group of spinners who push the idea of what yarn can be to its maximum. Usually, it is a lighthearted game, spinning Christmas baubles and Halloween eyeballs into fluffy masses of wool. It’s mostly about process and fun. I love process as much as the next person, but process alone does not satisfy me in the long-run. I have been adding, multiplying, accreting and inserting meaning wherever I can in handspun yarn.

There will be a reception for the us on Friday, December 17, 7-10pm. Come see the yarn. Come meet the photographer.

The Gallery is pregnant?

Things are brewing, even as sabbatical continues. It is an exciting time in the quiet gallery. Nothing is hanging on the wall. Everything is pregnant with potential!

The windows are growing and blooming with the art by Debora Miller. Drive by, especially after dark to see them at their best!

Soon we will have another South Minneapolis Wild Wool Market: October 23.

In December a new show will open...its title is unknown...but it is a collaboration between Susan Hensel and her son John Hensel. John is a fine photographer who is able to take an idea, a glimmer, really, and make it sing. I had a weird idea that involved yarn that told a story. His photography makes that potential story real. Stay tuned for dates! The party will be sometime over the Christmas holidays, since that is when he visits Minneapolis. And then, Dean Ebben's show will open in January. Dean is a local guy who moved on to New York. He comes back every year to see family and to teach at Minnesota Center for Book Arts. On January 14 he will open IN THE HOUSE OF THE MINNERAL SPIRITS at Susan Hensel Gallery with an installation and a performance. Stay tuned!

Like I said, nothing is HERE, right now, but the place is pregnant with the future! How exciting!

Dean Ebbens, Similar Journeys

Read about Dean Ebben's recent show at St. John University

Dean's In the House of the Mineral Spirits will be the re-opening show, at the end of a 6 month sabbatical, for Susan Hensel Gallery in January 2010.