Artifactuality

 Artifactuality looks to bring together disparate personal narratives exploring themes of interpersonal relationships and a psychic split with reality-- real or artificial. While the works visually cohabitate in the space, there is a spectrum of experiences that all serve as personal artifacts interweaving in the background. The exhibition acts as a museum of sorts, documenting, archiving, and presenting the emotional baggage, worries, and relics of queer and femme-lived realities.

For instance, Brett Morgan looks to question and establish the permanence of queer culture and history through fragments of textile, while Jaina Cipriano communicates feminine grief through found object set design. Brett and Jaina both confide and create authentic spaces of emotional expression through their work as an intersectionality begins to emerge within the compelling and challenging lived experiences of each artist present. Artifactuality serves as a space to create fluid communication embodying the artifacts of lives lived, lives lost, and artificial truths.

Lindsey Cherek Waller (they/them and she/her) is a studio artist at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota. They paint to create a queer, non-binary world where pleasure can be experienced beyond what capitalism allows. She primarily paints queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people and ideas. With tenderness, care, and joy, Waller documents and archives queer life and ideas despite histories of erasure and violence against the LGBTQIA+ community. 

Jaina Cipriano (she/her) is a Boston-based artist communicating with the world through photography, film, and installation. Her works explore the emotional toll of religious and romantic entrapment. Jaina communicates the complex grief of growing up as a woman in a culture dedicated to stifling authentic emotion and communication. She creates spaces where people with similar trauma can feel witnessed by others as the first step to liberation from this cycle of silence, the facade of isolation. The subjects she depicts seek strength to save themselves.

Gabrielle Cordes (she/her) is a queer, Puerto Rican-German visual artist and sculptor based out of Minneapolis, MN. Her work explores intersections between natural and artificial processes, functions, and aesthetics that create new contexts and connections between the two through the use of mixed-media. She is continuing this exploration while evaluating varying impacts of consumerism.

Brett Morgan (he/they) is an artist from Pennsylvania who works across craft traditions, primarily using ceramics and fibers. Brett's work is informed by the feminist and queer histories and traditions of craft, his upbringing in rural Northern Appalachia, popular culture, and the secondhand objects he rescues from the thrift store. He is fascinated by how objects and images influence and affect the construction of identities in both domestic spaces and public places. They memorialize the queer folks that have passed on, moved away, or were erased, while also making visible the presence of rural queerness.

Danni O’Brien (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Baltimore, Maryland. Her practice is rooted in irreverence, haphazard play, and owned queerness. They cycle through acts of deconstruction and reconstruction of found materials: employing assemblage, ceramic hand-building, paper making, woodworking, and CNC routing to create transformations of the cast-offs of a consumerist landscape. Dystopian survival, queer identity, and conspicuous consumption are reinterpreted as protrusions delivering and glowing with light, alluding to an absurdist future constructed with the plastic detritus of the last century, providing newly found function and hope.

Samantha Pasapane (she/her) is a sculptor who uses foundry methods, metal fabrication, concrete, and mold-making in her work. She is also obsessed with nail polish. She was born and raised in Morristown, NJ & currently lives in Hoosick Falls, NY. Her work combines abstraction with industrial building methods and materials. Pasapane’s shapes are informed by human anatomy and plumbing–the same that are used to build the structures all around us. Explorations of corrosion and toxicity paired with desire and obsession convey perceptions of wants versus needs. She feels nostalgic for a society that predates this one but never really existed while examining personal relationships and self. 

Marla Roddy (she/her) was born and raised in Johnstown, PA, also known as Pennsylvania’s poorest

city. Currently living and working in Indianapolis, IN, her work explores and obsesses over the real and imagined worries that accompany the role of women as caregivers and emotional laborers. The anxiety and neuroses that surround personal health anxiety and rumination on Roddy’s role in familial relationships inform her sculptural work. The physical manifestation of these internal thoughts and feelings often involves articles of clothing or other domestic textiles from family members and hair to create an intimate connection. Ritualistic processes, like sewing and wrapping, act as a form of meditation and mourning to work within and through these emotions. 

Ivonne  Yáñez (she/her) is a fashion designer and illustrator currently an MFA candidate at MCAD, MPLS, MN. She utilizes dreams as a medium to represent a gauzy and ephemeral view of reality. To conceptualize dreams and other brujerías tangibly, she utilizes soft materials and textures, such as fabric and embroidery with fantastical supernatural symbols, metaphors, and depictions of magic in Mexican popular culture–referencing a legacy of dreams and superstitions. Introspective and emotionally charged, her work engages themes like memory and archival imagery in atemporal moments when the present meets the past to be situated in the same story. 

Artifactuality is co-curated by Allison Baker and Janell Hammer

Allison Baker earned her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, a BFA in Sculpture, and BA in Gender Studies from Indiana University. Currently she is an Assistant Professor and chair of Digital + Studio Arts at Hamline University. Allison's personal work investigates hegemonic femininity as a site of transgression and resistance while utilizing humor with a serrated edge. 

Janell Hammer is currently earning her BFA in Studio Arts and Art History from Hamline University, with a concentration in Printmaking and Fiber art. Currently she is a Studio Manager for Allison Baker and Gallery Assistant for Soeffker Gallery in St. Paul. Janell’s work focuses on framing classical themes and motifs in a contemporary and feminine lens.