MATERIAL DICHOTOMY

A group show curated by Nathanael Flink with artists Shana Kaplow, Sarah Kusa, Lee Noble, Samuel Peck and David Wyrick. Find Nathanael's blog post about the show here.

About the artists:

Shana Kaplow is a visual artist living and working in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her MFA from The Maryland Institute, College of Art, Mount Royal School of Art and a BA from Connecticut College. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at museums and galleries including The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Tianjin Museum of Art (Tianjin, China), The Asheville Museum of Art (NC), The Plains Art Museum (ND), The Soap Factory (MN), Rosalux Gallery (MN), 55 Mercer Gallery (NY), Franklin Art Works (MN), Detroit Artists Market (MI), The Art Space (Tel Aviv), The Third Place Gallery (MN), Weinstein Gallery (MN), Thomas Barry Fine Arts, (MN) and The Law Warschaw Gallery at Macalester College (MN). Her video work has been screened at The Walker Art Center, and the Austro-Sino Arts Program in Beijing, China. She has received several grants and fellowships for her work including The Joan Mitchell Foundation Artists Grant for Painters and Sculptors, the Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, the McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship, the MN State Arts Board Artists Initiative Grant, and the Arts Midwest/NEA fellowship. She has been an artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, The Red Gate International Art Residency in Beijing, China, and the Vermont Studio Center. The first book about her work, Object Objects, was published in 2019. Shana was a Professor of 2D Media and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Art Department at St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Sarah Kusa creates sculpture and installations that explore tensions between vulnerability and power, searching out intersections where the two coexist, however precariously. Her mixed-media artworks are rooted in abstraction and use a spare material language to ask questions about connection, protection and resilience. Kusa’s work takes forms ranging from abstract bodies to three-dimensional drawings to pliable boundaries that interact with the viewer’s own body. Materials and gestures are central to her work. Kusa has exhibited her work throughout the United States and was awarded a 2017/2018 Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists and has participated in residencies at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) and Ragdale (Illinois). She lives and works in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Lee Noble is a musician, performer, and multi-disciplinary artist moving between sound, video, collage, and installation. He is the designer and co-founder (along with Stephen Molyneux) of No Kings Record Co., a cassette label focused on field recordings, ambient, drone, and experimental music. He has performed at venues and festivals in the US, Europe, and Japan, including Sonihouse (Nara, JP), Hopscotch Fest (Raleigh, NC), Soy Fest (Nantes, FR), Rewire Fest (Den Haag, NL), the Chicago Art Book Fair, the Los Angeles Art Book Fair, the Wire’s Adventures in Modern Music Fest (Chicago), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Church on York (Los Angeles), Temporary Space (Los Angeles), and Issue Project Room (Brooklyn). His visual work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Austin, Minneapolis, New York, Manchester, and Berkeley, and in publications by Picturebox Inc., Thames & Hudson, and Secret Headquarters — so, there’s that.

Samuel Peck holds a BFA in Printmaking and Drawing from the University of Rhode Island, and an MFA in Printmaking and Drawing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Sam is currently a Phd Candidate in Art Education at the University of Minnesota. Peck's work is concerned with an artist-educator-researcher practice based in notions of relationships, experience, and memory. Painting, Prints, Installation and Visual Journals have become central to his practice. These compose his post-studio practice of derive, where a Plein-air painter would take themselves out into the world and document the world around them. He uses these practices as a place and space to move through the earth to comprehend and understand his inner play in step with but distinct from the situationist. The documentary artifact whether truth or fiction suggests an artifact in game related through shared background experience; objects collected and constructed in living in the accumulation of documentary material, its uses, and its hierarchies of value. Such as twenty-year-old t-shirts (found object), drawings on boarding passes from locations long forgotten, Notes for kids to classes (writing), paintings on newspaper, collage from available texts or installation in unused spaces, or the performance in preparing food for a potluck dinner or game of softball.

David Wyrick studied conservation and art at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He is best known for discrete sculptures carved or fabricated from stone or wood and site-specific (land-based) installations. Wyrick exhibits his work both regionally and nationally and collaborates as a fabricator with the Colorado-based interdisciplinary collective, M12, which undertakes collaborative projects in rural communities (both nationally and internationally) to explore the aesthetics of rural cultures and landscapes. Wyrick lives and works in Maiden Rock, Wisconsin—a tiny village (pop. 119) situated between the bluffs and the shores of Lake Pepin in the Driftless region.