what moves between - 2022 MFA Exhibition Catalog

what moves between Prerna Cody Hilleboe Taylor Johnson Stephanie Lindquist Julia Maiuri Lela Pierce Hayden Teachout

April 5–23, 2022 University of Minnesota Katherine E. Nash Gallery

what moves between Prerna Cody Hilleboe Taylor Johnson Stephanie Lindquist Julia Maiuri Lela Pierce Hayden Teachout

April 5–23, 2022 University of Minnesota Katherine E. Nash Gallery

Contents The Graduate Program at the University of Minnesota Department of Art Located in Minneapolis, The MFA Program at the University of Minnesota is a three-year interdisciplinary program, balancing studio practice with critical theory and inquiry. Our students benefit from the resources of a world-renowned institution dedicated to research, education, and outreach, located in one of the nation’s most vibrant arts communities.

The department provides generous studio space and comprehensive financial support to all its MFA students across all three years of the program.

Working with award-winning Department of Art faculty who are prominent in their fields, MFA students also research across disciplines. They are encouraged to take diverse classes to support their creative research, ranging from soil science to puppetry. They work as Teaching Assistants, developing critical skills for future creative work and employment.

After finishing the MFA, our alumni have continued to be successful in their fields, working as professional artists, receiving grants and residencies. Alumni also work in museums, in academic teaching fields and in community organizations.

The Department of Art’s four areas provide a home base for MFA students: Photography and Moving Image; Drawing, Painting and Printmaking; Sculpture and Ceramics; and Interdisciplinary Art and Social Practice. Graduate students work across these areas, taking advantage of the amazing facilities at the Regis Center for Art, from kilns large enough to walk into, to a comprehensive printmaking facility—supported by expert technical staff. Our three-year MFA program allows graduate students the time to take risks, acquire new skills, get critical feedback and study abroad during the summer with our partner programs in Scotland and Germany. The MFA program culminates in a professionally installed exhibition at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, working with experienced staff to realize their individual creative research and visions.

4

6 Introduction—Jenny Schmid 8 Letter from the Chair—

Christine Baeumler

10 12 14 16 18 20 22

Prerna Cody Hilleboe Taylor Johnson Stephanie Lindquist Julia Maiuri Lela Pierce Hayden Teachout Unknown

A Bleak Beauty Dioramas in the Dark An Archive of Earthy Intimacies

Hollow

In the Company of Stars Degrees of Opacity

Essays—Christina Schmid 24 Installation 26 Acknowledgements

5

Introduction In December 2021, while we were working to schedule 3rd year reviews in preparation for this thesis exhibition, MFA candidate Taylor Johnson reminded me that this was her first graduate review in person. I was surprised- but it struck me- of course this was the case! Sometimes processing the totality of what this class has dealt with got lost in the daily quagmire of trying to plan an ever-shifting MFA program in a pandemic.

All the uncertainty of the last two years, from the danger of working as a TA for in-person classes before the vaccine was available, to not sharing real space while we viewed and discussed art- this class felt the most impact of any cohort. They have been dealing with this new reality since the spring of their first year of the University of Minnesota’s three-year MFA program.

The world outside of the Regis Center for Art was also intense, challenging, roiling, and changing, full of grief and violence as well as activism, mutual aid and a desire for a concrete shift in how institutions address racism and inequity. In summer 2020, after George Floyd was murdered by police, Minneapolis was the epicenter for the nation’s (and possibly the world’s) discussions, protests, and reckonings around these crucial issues.

It makes sense that what moves between is possibly our most serious MFA thesis exhibition, holding both the grief and care of the conditions that this cohort has been making art in. It does not shy away from processing strong topics, but does so with beautiful aesthetics, powerful metaphors and a presence that slows time by employing portals, encouraging prolonged attention, and embracing lineage. what moves between is an exhibition steeped in its time and context.

As we spent these pandemic years with the bottom two thirds of our faces covered up, we did a lot of looking into strangers’ and loved ones’ eyes, when in proximity with each other. The term smize was embraced, as in smiling with one’s eyes—as we desperately tried to convey love or appreciation at a distance, without the assistance of the rest of our faces. Or we gazed through mitigating technologies, trying to connect. The exhibition has a lot of eyes and reflections: Hayden Teachout’s dark reflective pool; Julia Maiuri’s uncanny small paintings; Taylor Johnson’s re-animated and bright-eyed taxidermy menagerie.

There is also a lot of loneliness in what moves between. The exhibition embraces empty spaces, like an echo of some of the quietness of the early pandemic and loss of community as we socially distanced and isolated: Cody Hilleboe’s photos, mostly unpeopled; Hayden’s solo body photos, face down in the lush fauna of a Pacific Northwest forest; the overall gallery display- all embrace a still aesthetic where there is plenty of room to take in each artist’s installation. The slowness helps, as we process heavy emotions in the show, and in our lives.

Lela Pierce’s video piece is more active, but we are given a pillowed space where we can lie down, gaze above us and absorb the movement, not to be too

6

overwhelmed. Stephanie Lindquist also creates a lovingly crafted bench where we can look at tiny universes of soil samples. The amount of labor and care to create this nurturing architecture is heartwarming.

There is also a deep tactile black across many of the artists’ work, an enveloping void that facilitates contemplation. It creates the space for Lela’s saturated objects and paintings and the mystery for Taylor’s hybrid lithograph animation, where she conjures the taxidermy back to life. A pair of Hayden’s photographs are barely legible; you must take the time to get lost in the deep tones to read the image. Prerna’s installation also invites a slow viewing with hidden text, layered and obscuring textures and conceptual depth. And there is also transparency, in Prerna’s etched glass blocks, Lela’s ice barrier, Julia’s shimmering small paintings, Stephanie’s images of bright foliage.

Tasting Tart Cherries, Stephanie’s cyanotype layered with dirt and other elements, where the figures get lost in the foliage and the layers move forward and back has stayed in my mind’s eye. There is confusion, obliteration, but the textures reflect and absorb, the illegibility is pleasant, re-igniting our lost focus, pushing out our preoccupations, inviting us to be present and use our senses, perceive, be in this still and glimmering moment.

We are almost at a million Americans lost to Covid and over 6 million worldwide, as the world struggles with further outbreaks and lack of equal access to vaccines. Life expectancy in the United States has decreased by two years, in part also attributed to the opioid epidemic.

It is not hard to predict that artists will spend time over the next years processing the grief of this era, and this group is in context with other current national exhibits that reflect on an important moment. It is a gift to experience an exhibition so beautifully presented like what moves between. For this exhibition, the Nash Gallery is open for a public reception for the first time in over two years, and, although I am sure we cannot make up for all that was lost to varying levels of isolation, we can appreciate this moment, this chance to be together viewing an exhibit that gives us space and time to process. A huge congratulations to the University of Minnesota Department of Art MFA class of 2022.

Professor Jenny Schmid Director of Graduate Studies University of Minnesota Department of Art

7

Letter from the Chair In the MFA exhibition, what moves between, the viewer encounters— physically and metaphorically—thresholds, portals, intervals, and occasional barriers. Through a wide range of media, the artists engage in a world of relations; personal geographies, ancestral soils, fragmented texts, folded garments, extruded earth, exposed bodies, abandoned places, glittering and vacant eyes, microbial growth, vast and intimate landscapes, and geometries that suggest other planes of existence. The show contrasts the familiar and otherworldly, darkness and light, vertical and horizontal, domestic and feral, remote and adjacent, the mundane and uncanny. The exhibition allows space for these dichotomies to coexist. Highly original artistic voices remain in conversation with one another. In quiet moments, if one stands still and listens, one can almost hear the artworks whispering to one another from across the room.

paper and has contributed the illuminating essays to this catalog. And gratitude to Howard Oransky, Director of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery and Teréz Iacovino, Assistant Curator, and those that worked on installing this impressive show.

Christine Baeumler Professor and Chair University of Minnesota Department of Art

Taken as a whole, the artworks seem intensely introspective, forged in a pressurized context. In March 2020, the University of Minnesota shut down and this cohort of students were not able to return to their studios until the summer of 2020. Opportunities to travel were canceled, classes were delivered in a mix of in-person and online formats. Uncertainty, disruption, loss, illness, and constant pivoting to adjust to changing protocols, was deeply exhausting. These MFA students persevered through the depths of the pandemic, the trauma of the police killings of George Floyd, Daunte Wright and Amir Locke, exposed inequities, periods of prolonged isolation and the expression of collective grief and resistance manifested in the Uprising.

I have the deepest respect for the 2022 MFA class in terms of their persistence, resilience, and the resolve to lean into the possibilities of transformation, grounded in challenging experiences. Congratulations, Prerna, Cody Hilleboe, Taylor Johnson, Stephanie Lindquist, Julia Maiuri, Lela Pierce, and Hayden Teachout. I have no doubt that you will continue to evolve your practices as you shape and redefine contemporary art and its power to have impact.

I wish you all well in this next step in your journey—and am excited to see what emerges from your future endeavors.

I also want to acknowledge the extraordinary mentorship, instruction, and engagement of our impressive faculty and staff in support of our students. In the role of chair, I witness the labor that goes on behind the scenes. Enormous thanks goes to Professor Jenny Schmid, who has served as the Director of Graduate Studies during the pandemic. Her fierce commitment to the graduate program during unprecedented and arduous challenges is deeply appreciated. I also want to appreciate the extreme dedication of Patricia Straub, the Senior Academic Advisor and Graduate Program Coordinator, Shannon Birge Laudon, Administrative Director/Chief of Staff and Jim Gubernick, Facilities and Technical Coordinator—and all of our technical and office staff during this arduous stretch. Special thanks to Assistant Professor Christina Schmid who works closely with the MFA students on their thesis supporting

8

9

Prerna

Unknown

A modular practice at heart, Prerna’s work repurposes and scavenges materials that are assembled and disassembled, wrapped and arranged, as if always ready to be moved: an immigrant’s art practice. Routinely, her materials pretend to be something else, as if they suffered a certain confusion of identity or found refuge in subterfuge: Journal pages become paintings, sarees newspapers; clay morphs into handwriting while plastic poses as mortar; stanchions, rather than direct the movement of bodies, support words made from clay that drape and droop like strange, displaced garlands.

Some of the resulting forms suggest a matrilineal materiality and reference the domestic, gendered labor of cooking, cleaning, caring, or making kolam, which means sifting rice flour onto traditional Tamil clay floors in ornamental geometric patterns.

Nestled layers of meaning accrue inside and alongside each other.

Her materials are partly rooted in memory and a dream of belonging: wallpaper patterns from a house in India; handwritten pages from her mother’s journal as a newlywed; a Tamil homograph from a language the artist is aware of slowly losing.

Such intimacies collide with the architectural insignia of state: stanchions and dividing walls signal the brute force of machines. One churns out clay, the other relies on its bureaucratic authority to admit or reject bodies rendered legible in the eyes of the state. What both spheres of experience share is the making of the self: child, daughter, newlywed, mother—all roles that whether performed with diligence or not, construct cultural, familial, personal identity that is expressed in handwriting, choice of clothing, fluency in languages. On the other hand, designations like citizen, permanent resident, resident alien, foreign national carve out a place for the subject that becomes legible by subjecting to the governmental authority that defines who counts as a legitimate person in the eyes of the law.

sin. And yet, the dimensions of loss, memory, or the sound of the Tamil word that means both pity and sin, do not grant insight, understanding, transparency. Something remains opaque and leaves unanswered the questions: What does it truly take to know another? To know the self? The artist turns to study her mother’s handwriting, traces individual words, takes note of hastily jotted down recipes and those moments when the pen lingered longer ink blotted or when more pressure dug the tip of the pen into the paper. The mother remains a cipher, though. Even an expression as idiosyncratic as handwriting does not reveal what makes a person who they are. Then, another memory: The lefthanded child’s impulse was restrained, the pencil moved to the right hand, the body gently redirected.

Identity remains malleable. A body can be trained.

Personality, too, shape-shifts: “I am rowdy in Hindi.

I am defensive in Tamil. I am self-conscious in English,” Prerna writes. There is no essence to be found but a knot of relationships: Grammar not only charts the proper relationships between subjects, verbs, and objects, but between self and other, self and mother, even different parts of the self: if we can struggle to be true to ourselves, what inner workings are at play that obscure part of the self from introspection, recognition?

Depending on language, culture, context, and inclination, the “I” emerges differently. Attuned to structures of authority, the self is performed differently for the eyes of the institution, the profession, the state. But what moves between these systems–whether familial, cultural, institutional, or bureaucratic–is a fleeting sense of a self that cannot be contained, controlled, or surrendered. What Prerna’s work suggests is that amid layers of profound interdependence, between sentiment and subjection, something ineffable insists on remaining unknown.

The titles of Prerna’s sculptures reference this practice of defining and measuring: the weight of definition, the volume of loss, the length of sin, the height of pity, the density or memory, the width of

10

The height of pity (installation view) 2022

The weight of definition (detail) 2022

Extruded word column, CNC routed pink insulation foam and drywall, sarees, my mother’s handwriting, paracord, dowels

Laser etched glass block, high-density polyethylene

11

Cody Hilleboe Cody Hilleboe’s weathered looking ceramic sculptures—some built by hand, some made by an extruder, a machine that spits out long tubes and coils of damp clay—echo the lines and shapes in his photographs: sand dunes and rusted burn barrels, eroding sandstone surfaces, deserted buildings that are slowly coming undone, and salt flats where hot air shimmers over laboring human forms.

The photographs set the stage for the objects that pair white porcelaneous stoneware with red earthenware. The material is reminiscent of adobe architecture, built from unfired bricks and designed to provide shelter in relentless desert heat. There is no shelter here. Hilleboe’s spacious installation suggests wide open spaces where barren land bakes in the sun. Such expansiveness meets with a kind of compromised interiority: hollow extruded structures collapse on themselves, variations on brick-like building blocks deteriorate from rectilinear into organic form. Only one thick-walled white vessel remains intact. The sculptures read like purposeful, rather than forlorn, remnants of something left unspoken, not so much by choice but by material recalcitrance: The brain, the body, the clay can only hold so much memory.

The landscapes of Hilleboe’s work hold great significance for the artist. After a near fatal opioid overdose and lengthy recovery, the desert was the place where Hilleboe achieved and started practicing sobriety. His work grapples with loss, grief, and the effort of re-membering: putting a life back together; relearning cognitive faculties and basic mobility; paying homage to friends lost to the opioid epidemic; and losing trust in the legal processes meant to hold accountable those who enriched themselves by misleading doctors and patients for years about the highly addictive nature of their pain killers. The body, like clay, has a memory. And when it comes to trauma, it is the body that keeps the score, as Bessel Van Der Kolk, professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, writes.

No longer understood as a mental health disorder, trauma has more recently come to be seen as a memory disorder: Experiences that the brain could not file, categorize, and integrate keep looping and

12

A Bleak Beauty

repeating. Thus, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder make visible the subconscious efforts to order and file what was incomprehensible in the past. One way of approaching Hilleboe’s practice is through the lens of trauma.

The work is heavy on process, driven by experimentation, and a quest for ordering experiences, memories barely recalled, sensations re-learned and filtered. Clay is a means of sifting-through, kneading-through, grappling with materiality in an intimacy borne of repeated gestures: coiling pinching scratching smoothing before firing, glazing, sitting with. Then, ordering. Objects enter the studio and join assemblages until something else aligns, another constellation announces itself, and the elusive sense of order is once again elsewhere.

The making is meditative and materially intense, the process designed to take the maker beyond the neurotypical markers of intention, volition, and agency, and instead allow for a visceral, intuitive knowing that is closer to feeling, maybe, and manifest in the work. The work is an extension of care to the bereft—bodies, places, and dwellings. They conjure loneliness and isolation, dive deep into an existential meaninglessness and tend to all that can be found in this deeply felt inner space, a hollow like no other.

Installation View 2022

Installation View 2022

Digital print and acrylic with earthenware and porcelaneous ceramics

Digital print and acrylic with earthenware and porcelaneous ceramics

13

Taylor Johnson In natural history collections of old, colorful dioramas complete with stuffed animals sought to represent species in their habitat, wowing viewers with their lifelikeness. Appreciated for their educational value and put together with much attention to detail, the displays and their distinctive aesthetics have long been a source of fascination for artists.

From opportunities for voicing institutional critique to conjuring eerie domestic and commercial spaces, miniature and life-size installations have served countless creative agendas and conceptual purposes. Taylor Johnson’s work engages with this artistic inheritance yet brings a distinct sensibility to the construction of dwellings and dioramas.

First, her work departs from natural historical precedent by eschewing any ambition to resemble life: She leaves bare the four-legged models intended to hold taxidermy pelts and mimic aliveness, their shapes alien and oddly vulnerable. Their skins painted black and flocked for texture, the nameless creatures’ allure lies in an uncanny resemblance to recognizable mammalian forms; yet an irreducible difference persists. Vulnerable and slender, the black forms linger in a theatrical, mostly monochromatic environment. They fail, in their eerie beauty, to uphold the fantasy of extending life. Tending to these abject forms that typically become invisible and imagining a habitat for them, Johnson devises rituals of care and mourning. Rendered invisible by natural history dioramas, death here is made felt, and mourned.

Nowhere does this ethos of care become more pronounced than in Have We Been Here Before? A stone lithograph shows the body of a dead fox lying in the woods. Assembled from footage taken by a trail camera, the image does not depict a particular animal, but a combine of fox-ness. In countless stories from myth to folklore, the fox appears as trickster and demon, sly, smart and deceptive—and still, the fox remains elusive, a hard-to-grasp specter, shape-shifter, survivor. In the shimmering lines of rotoscope animation, the artist hand-traced the outline of a fox, a ghostly spirit that rises from the dead composite fox’s body and assumes a different

14

Dioramas in the Dark

kind of life: The spirit fox is neither here nor there, a liminal figure that pauses and sniffs before vanishing into the luminescent darkness. Death becomes transformation, loss letting go, as the artist transforms the fox’s passing into a ritual of mourning.

Johnson’s interest in set design is apparent in her installation in what moves between. A Soft and Quiet Space I sets the stage: Three walls are covered in risograph prints that create a sepiatoned semblance of foliage and undergrowth. The two-dimensional pattern grows out of the wall to form a nest-like protrusion, an upright structure reminiscent of both shelter and portal. A projection further animates the scene in a twist on the pursuit of lifelikeness in dioramas of old. The flickering light conjures an uncanny space, a stage void of visible action. A Soft and Quiet Space II furthers the theatrical quality of the work: In a dark diorama, nameless creatures lie and lurk amid sparse vegetation. One unfortunate critter seems pinned by the outline, its body only half-covered in black paint, a wannabe trespasser between worlds, caught in flagrante.

Johnson’s strange tableaux flaunt their artifice as the artist speculates what habitats for critters caught between life and death might look like. The taxidermy forms have not yet fulfilled their ostensible purpose of creating lifelikeness after death.

Here, they help stage symbolic resurrections and irreverent departures from the divide that separates the living from the dead. Like strange ghosts, they hover in-between, asking (as ghosts do) not for respect but love.1 Notes 1.

This line comes from Korakrit Arunanondchai’s three-channel video installation, no history in a room full of people with funny names 5 (2015): The ghosts “do not ask for respect. All they ask for is love.”

A Soft and Quiet Space I (detail) 2022

A Soft and Quiet Space II (installation view) 2022

Laser-cut risograph prints with projected animations

Flocked taxidermy forms and organic materials

15

Stephanie Lindquist Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that “grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language.” As a professor of environmental biology and member of the Potawatami nation, she appreciates the way “science polishes the gift of seeing” while remaining all but impervious to “intelligences other than our own.”1 Stephanie Lindquist’s creative practice similarly straddles different languages to map relationships between land, plants, people, and story. She draws on the language of science, specifically soil science, and studies Indigenous ways of knowing. Like others working as decolonial riders within the colonizing machine that is the university, she is keenly aware of the “impossible position” that she holds as “a by-product of colonization,” yet nonetheless acts on a “desire against the assemblage that has made me.” Her art holds the complexities of an ancestry that has been “displaced by colonialism, only to arrive at a place as another participant in colonization.”2 Soil plays a central role in her artmaking.

“Soil,” Lindquist writes, “replies to my desire to belong somewhere.” This desire propels her work, which begins and ends with conversation. In urban and rural communities in Minnesota and Sierra Leone, Lindquist engages with farmers, youth, scientists, and knowledge keepers to learn about soil and share experiences with caring for the land. At this stage, her process is social, the kind of study that “you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering ... being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch”3 and more: making cyanotypes with teenagers in Mɔndema village, Sierra Leone; listening to Uncle Dauda who farms there tell stories; learning how to categorize and name soil from University of Minnesota soil scientist Nic Jelinski; or tasting and gathering sour cherries in Frogtown, a neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota. All of these encounters find their way into her imagery: digital photographs turned into cyanotypes before being

16

An Archive of Earthy Intimacies

painted with soil samples—some baked and sterilized, some raw—mixed with oil to bind them.

Lindquist’s motifs vary, but hands feature prominently. Holding seeds, reaching out, touching the head of a sunflower, they are often the point of contact between the living land and the human. At times, the images verge on abstraction, as if asking, what else can dwell in this visual field, where patches of dark and light trace both small moments and large cultural movements? The land holds histories of colonialism and care, exploitation and stewardship, topsoil erosion and deeply felt connection, even trust, in its capacity to nurture life. The threads of stories tangle into knots and give rise to an archive of earthy intimacies. The paintings layer loam, sand, and silty clay, gathered by and given to the artist. The provenance of the materials matters, as do the bonds between the soil and those who tend to it. The work honors these interactions and the forms of belonging they sustain. Rather than a given, belonging becomes a practice, a rehearsal, a doing that foregoes pretensions of reaching closure and instead stirs up the complicities and complexities of a practice that is creative and destructive, steeped in colonial history and invested in finding ways and means to decolonize.

Notes Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2013. 57-58.

2. la paperson, A third university is possible. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Xxiii.

3. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Autonomedia, 2013. 110.

1.

Untitled, (installation view) 2022

Tasting Tart Cherries (detail) 2021

Micrographs of potato agar inoculated with 17 soils, bench, mortar, Lake Elmo sand, sodium silicate, acrylic, light

Frogtown, 7.5 YR Catena, Glaciolacustrine, Peat, Rushford Quartz, St. Paul Decor, acrylic and cyanotype on canvas

17

Julia Maiuri

Hollow

Julia Maiuri’s paintings draw on an archive of film stills gleaned from horror movies and television programs such as Goosebumps and The Twilight Zone, shows designed to raise questions about the possible, probable, and uncanny. Rather than the blood and gore of spectacular CGI-enhanced monsters, it is the moments when the ordinary shifts and gives way to the inexplicable that the artist is drawn to, the liminal spaces when what has been taken for granted slips into something unfamiliar, eerie, and ominous. Domestic spaces, especially bedrooms with their air of vulnerability and privacy, feature prominently in her work, as do ever watchful eyes. They widen in surprise or fear, cast sideways glances, stare apprehensively, and meet our gaze in a semblance of alarm. Elsewhere, hands reach for doorknobs, about to open and reveal what lurks behind closed doors. Together, the paintings dwell in a state of not yet and linger at thresholds, where the sense of threat is still an intuition only that has not yet materialized into the shape of an actual intruder. A deep sense of uncertainty pervades the work, a mood that congeals into a dense psychological space and thickens into a palpable atmosphere. Nothing reads as explicitly scary and still a sense of unease, of premonition, prevails.

Visually, the intimately scaled oil paintings and gouache drawings invite close viewing. They suggest a particular choreography of encounter that demands a proximity that could make viewers feel like voyeurs, peering through keyholes and witnessing moments not meant to be shared. The paintings’ size also conjures life amid a global pandemic, as unprecedented restrictions on studio access made many artists retreat to their homes. Many creative practices along with choices of scale proved adaptable to enforced domesticity. But in Maiuri’s oeuvre, the home is already under siege, haunted by mostly invisible specters that are not quite alive and barely dead, on the cusp between the imaginary and the disturbingly real. In a way akin to horror films’ mediating the anxieties of the zeitgeist— from atomic proliferation to genetic engineering— Maiuri’s paintings reverberate with the amorphous angst of early pandemic days.

The scenes the artist captures are first composed as digital collages. They overlay images but, unlike cinematographic fades, never reveal which image recedes and what is about to come forth and into focus. The paintings hover in this state of in-between, the logic of cause and effect suspended, time held in abeyance. Maiuri’s palette offers no clues either. It is deliberately scarce, drawing on complimentary colors that come together only in moments of heightened tension: pink and green hues combine to dramatic effect in Shadow in the Room, where the presence of an intruder becomes more than intuition, a silhouette visible against a bedroom wall.

Maiuri mines the visual tropes of suspense— doppelgangers and moments that induce a doubletake and deja-vu, the vertigo of not knowing who to trust, or the tell-tale glint in the eye of a character not yet infected by a lethal alien parasite—to create exquisitely cinematic paintings. Their oneiric quality hints at the deeply personal dimension of the work, but the paintings steer clear of both narrative closure and autobiographical revelations. Maiuri’s layered compositions and her deft handling of the medium create an intrigue that is as seductive as it is subtle.

Installation View 2022

House 2022 Oil on canvas

18

19

Lela Pierce

In the Company of Stars

The blackness absorbs and engulfs. It radiates darkness, a deep, luminescent shadow borne not from absence of light but abundant possibility: a state of emergence, of before, of not-yet. A sensibility reminiscent of Afrofuturism meets with the pursuit of a transformative ancestral practice of healing in Lela Pierce’s work. Its complex temporality is inspired by the Ghanaian symbol called sankofa: a bird, head turned backwards while feet face forwards, reaches for the wisdom of past, embodied in a precious egg, to carry this nascent life forward. This movement reverberates in Pierce’s research. She studies the visual languages of her ancestors from Eastern Europe and Western Africa, while incorporating movementbased practices, the teachings of Manisha Jha in Madhubani painting, and pysanky folk designs from the Carpathian Mountains. What unites these varied gestures and forms that enter into Pierce’s work is a deep desire for a decolonial repertoire of material and gesture that reaches beyond the here and now, both into precolonial pasts and speculative futures.

Pierce’s exhibition in what moves between centers on the motif of a sun star: revered, the radiant star holds a crystalline pattern. On the floor, small colorful offerings turn the scene into a devotional space.

The drawing becomes an altar whose alterity does not explain itself. It simply exists, its precise lines a paradoxical exercise in unapologetic opacity, beyond the need for explanation, rationalization, citation. The austere geometry of the central star morphs into colorful drawings whose designs conjure connotations to imaginary spaceships, alien atomic structures, energy signatures, and mysterious routes of soul travel. Some resemble Adinkra symbols, which, like the Sankofa, once were a means of “supporting the transmission of a complex and nuanced body of practice and belief” in African philosophy.1 In physics, Adinkra symbols graphically represent supersymmetric algebras to help visualize supergravity and supersymmetric representation theory. Futurist tendencies merge with ancestral patterns.

20

In another transformative gesture, elements of Pierce’s two-dimensional drawings become threedimensional wall-mounted sculptures: beads, folded paper, and painted ceramic forms embody and extend the lines and shapes of the constellation of sun stars. Like the African fractals famously studied by Ron Eglash, complex patterns shapeshift, merge, and disperse, living emblems of growth and change. The Vortex Star Shelves playfully push back against sleek metal sci-fi designs familiar from popular culture and instead embrace a colorful multi-dimensionality where hard-edged precision mixes with dangling clusters of beads.

The blackness of interstellar space meets subterranean dark in Sankofa: back and forth, a digital video projected on a screen mounted above a bed-like structure complete with patterned pillows. From below the screen, viewers look up at the artist dancing, moving, gazing down. Some sequences of the video show her digging herself head-first into the dirt before emerging in a ritual un-burial. Larger, longer stories reverberate in these bodily gestures: the longing to belong, to make kin with the living soil that could be(come) home, digging into the deep where generational roots take hold. What moves between futurist desires and the yearning for connection with the ground? Adorations for a Sun Star offers one more unlikely alignment, a moment of Sankofa: slabs of clay, shaped by the soles of the artist’s dancing feet, dusted with plant-derived pigment whose colors suggest sand from alien planets, conjure a space far from the oppressive past and present faced by Black people and offer an Afrofuturist alter-story that dares imagine a future where radiant, immersive Blackness thrives.

Notes 1.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1st paperback ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. (1993)

Vortex Star Shelves (installation view) 2022

Sankofa: back and forth (installation view) 2022

Acrylic paint on wood, ceramic

Digital video with sound

21

Hayden Teachout “There is nothing elegant about processing grief, loss, or change,” writes Hayden Teachout. In what moves between, his artwork contradicts these words. A square black basin, cast from concrete, holds a shallow pool of water. Self-portraits, engulfed in deep darkness, fragment the body, rendering its shape and proportions illegible for a moment. Or two. A free-standing sculpture holds a rectangular plywood box that seems to offer a glimpse of an interior space. But the promise of seeing what is inside only reveals the eye/“I” caught in the act: a mirror reflects the eye looking. Refracted Reflections II thus acts as a material metaphor for the challenge of all interpretation: the meaning we make, like the stories we tell and the art we create, ultimately may just say more about the teller than the told. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Teachout has long been interested in the slip of tongue, the serendipitous glitch, the moment when the perception of an object shifts.

His practice courts such encounters with images and materials that temporarily suspend the habits of perception. evergreens in winter is a case in point. A body lies face down in the woods. Ancient trees tower above the naked human form that looks pale and vulnerable amid the lush, verdant growth. The image does not explain itself: Does it suggest a crime scene or stage a fantasy of an intimate return to the land?

Does the photograph express a yearning to disappear into the moss-covered ground, to no longer think, feel, move but just surrender and cease to be? Does this image show a body desperate for soothing? The camera angle keeps the figure’s head out of sight, as if to emphasize that the head, the proverbial site of reason, fails in the depths of grief. Meaning itself collapses. And so evergreens in winter does not announce its intention. Even the title of the work erases the body at its center, “untenanted by meaning,” nude but utterly opaque at the same time. Hayden Teachout’s work is an exercise in degrees of withdrawal.

Degrees of Opacity

seems incommunicable, a bottomless “abyss of sorrow,” as Julia Kristeva writes in Black Sun. Untreated: in progress shows a piece of untreated canvas, roughly the size of a human body, leaning against a wall. The surface of the painting to date has absorbed the content of over twenty spray cans, as Teachout pushed the painting-as-body to the limits of how much darkness it could hold.

And still, not all of the surface is evenly covered.

Scratch marks hint at a visceral encounter with the work in progress: clawing, scratching, tearing at an engulfing, absorptive blackness. The potential violence of such marks is obscured, though, since it is not the painting Teachout shows but a photograph of the painting. Its surface removed from scrutiny, the urgency of the gesture recedes, as if in keeping with Kristeva’s laconic assessment: “it is also noteworthy that the work of art as fetish emerges when the activating sorrow has been repudiated.”

The artwork holds the sorrow, embodies the sorrow, stands in for the absent object of loss.

Whether Teachout’s work reads as an intimate chronicle of mourning or stands in for the collective losses of life and death in a global pandemic, the aftermath of a profound rupture runs through this work. Titled as a personal apology – “sorry mom, I am trying my best”—the work extends a gesture of care, of assurance, that in between the thick shades of black, something else moves furtively, on the cusp of transformation.

Notes 1.

2.

Julia Kristeva, Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1989. 101.

Julia Kristeva, Black Sun. 9.

A second large-scale photograph takes a more abstract approach to the question of a grief that Installation View 2022

evergreens in winter (installation view) 2021 Inkjet print

22

23

Installation

Installation View (left); Stephanie Lindquist, Prerna, Cody Hilleboe

24

Installation View (top right); Lela Pierce, Julia Maiuri, Prerna Installation View (bottom right); Hayden Teachout, Taylor Johnson

25

Acknowledgements De Dakota Makoce, this is Dakota Land

University of Minnesota Department of Art MFA Program

The Department of Art at the University of Minnesota is located on the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of the Dakota people. The Dakota and the Ojibwe people are the Indigenous peoples of the land currently called Minnesota. The University of Minnesota is a Land Grant University, and as such has benefited from the cession of land by the federal government for the creation of the University. By offering this land acknowledgment, we affirm tribal sovereignty and will work to hold the University accountable to Indigenous peoples and nations.

Professor Christine Baeumler, Chair Professor Jenny Schmid, Director of Graduate Studies Patricia Straub, Graduate Program Coordinator Shannon Birge Laudon, Administrative Director Howard Oransky, Nash Gallery Director Teréz Iacovino, Nash Gallery Assistant Curator Christina Schmid, Assistant Professor and essayist

Cover Image: Stephanie Lindquist, Kini and Abu Lounging (detail), 2021

Thank you to: The staff and faculty at the University of Minnesota Department of Art MFA students, their families & friends Department of Art students, alumni and donors The College of Liberal Arts and the Graduate Program at the University of Minnesota Photography by Easton Green Catalog Design by Sara Fowler Congratulations to the UMN MFA class of 2022!

Installation View; Hayden Teachout, Julia Maiuri, Cody Hilleboe, Prerna

26

27