lineage: 2023 MFA Thesis Exhibition

lineage
2023 MFA Thesis Exhibition
March 28 – April 15, 2023
Katherine E. Nash Gallery

The Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota presents lineage, a group exhibition of four artists about to complete their Master of Fine Arts degree in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. The exhibition includes works by Olivia Gallenberger, Camila Leiva, Nik Nerburn, and Hawona Sullivan Janzen. 

By molding and shaping clay as a form of somatic release, Gallenberger uses ceramics as a surrogate for her body. Drawing from her familial archive, Leiva combines larger than life graphic novel spreads, textiles, and found objects to create an intimate and complex portrait of her grandmother. Nerburn constructs images and objects of whimsy and catastrophe using a regional vernacular of specific handicrafts. Informed by her multifaceted ancestral ties, Sullivan Janzen creates spaces, photographs, and experiences that unpack one’s ties to place and kin.

Learn more about each artist below:

Photo by Nik Nerburn.

Olivia Gallenberger

Olivia Gallenberger (they/she) is a visual artist based in Minneapolis. She is a teaching artist at Northern Clay Center and Foci Minnesota Center for Glass Arts. Their multidisciplinary practice explores themes of memory loss, psychiatric care, medical violation, and familial relationships. Their interest in science fiction as a means of escapism seeps into the work via alternative fictions of the body. Gallenberger investigates the color blue as material and metaphor while considering how predisposed obsession affects the intersection between life and art. She is currently fascinated by the concept of portals and wormholes, what travels through them and what lies beyond them.

oliviagallenberger.com • Instagram: @oliviaoverboard

Artist Statement

Past, present and future are in a state of constant flux.

Art is a prophetic way of unknowingly telling the future.

Reliving past experiences and fighting present demons.

My body is no longer what it once was. Mourning my former self.

I have to navigate my body and my relationship with art in a new way.

Rebuilding the muscles in my leg and foot so that I can walk.

Clay, fiber, and photography help me travel through an unknown portal.

To reimagine my ideas of a studio practice.

I am reclaiming my body through the somatic experience of making.

Photo by Nik Nerburn.

Camila Leiva

Camila Leiva (B. 1987) is a transnational Chilean and U.S. American artist and educator whose body and soul are often seen traveling between Minneapolis and Santiago. Her life has been shaped by brave and loving women, especially by her grandmothers and her mother. She grew up in the visual, musical, and literary culture of Chilean social movements for justice, during the final years of the Pinochet dictatorship and in its neoliberal aftermath. She paints community murals, hand-draws comics, sews textile arpilleras and molds earthenware clay. She is razor-focused on telling the unknown story of her grandmother Fabiola Letelier, Chile’s most dogged human rights lawyer. Her work explores themes of memory, histories from below, and questioning the public versus private dichotomy imposed on women’s lives.

camilaleiva.com • Instagram: @camilalei_

Artist Statement

Trae una flor, un poema, una cancion / Bring a flower, a poem, a song is an invitation to learn about an extraordinary and imperfect woman named Fabiola, and the implications of growing up as her granddaughter. At the heart of the work is a graphic novel, told in first person narrative by the artist, that mixes archival research, family stories, and childhood memories. Hand drawn ink comic pages are enlarged, deliberately merging the art forms of muralism and comics, whose origins lie in democratizing the storytelling of the subaltern. Polychrome clay figurines emerged as a tactile way to process the painful family stories of dictatorship, and turn them into carnivalesque protest scenes reflecting the tradition of marching in the streets of Santiago. Finally, a Chilean textile form, known as an arpillera, transforms the inherited pieces of Fabiola’s old clothes into a portrait imbued with memory. 

Photo by Nik Nerburn.

Nik Nerburn

Born in Bemidji, Minnesota, Nik Nerburn’s cross-disciplinary photographs, videos, and sculptures reflect his passion for people’s histories and stories from places that are “off the map.” His wide-ranging work addresses urgent subjects like toxic masculinity and the rural-urban divide, while also centering craft, generosity, trust, and humor. Informed by the collaborative traditions of puppetry and documentary filmmaking, Nerburn works with amateur genealogists, community archivists, neighborhood clubs, small town philosophers, and little museums.

niknerburn.com • Instagram: @datanodata

Artist Statement 

Nik Nerburn’s current body of work tends to personal and familial stories, using regional vernacular artistic forms like yard art, model making, dollhouses, and tramp style wood carving. His photographs reveal miniature domestic spaces unraveling by way of personal and mythological disaster. Mostly composed inside of dollhouses, his photographic tableaus embody precariousness and turmoil rather than the dollhouse's middle class ideal. Using traditional processes such as whittling, chip-carving, frame making, and metal casting, Nerburn braids narratives of both whimsy and catastrophe. This is where a giant secret lives in a tiny house, stuck like a piano you can't fit out the door. 

Photo by Nik Nerburn.

Hawona Sullivan Janzen

Hawona Sullivan Janzen is a Saint Paul-based social practice and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of grief, loss, love and hope. A 2020 Jerome Foundation Naked Stages Fellow, Hawona has received funding from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Arts, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, the McKnight Foundation, and the Visual Arts Fund in support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her writings have been read on National Public Radio, featured in 10-foot-tall broadsides, performed as a jazz opera, and produced as a play at Pillsbury House Theatre. Her recent projects include the co-design of Saint Paul’s Dale Street Bridge over I-94 and Love Letters for the Midway — a crowdsourced poem printed onto lawn signs.

Instagram: @hawonawrites

Artist Statement

i am the black-white.

the descendant of

the enslaved and

enslavers.

both torn open. let me be

the salve: the thread

that seals these wounds.

The images, performances, and poetry in this work are the result of a journey through dream-conjure,   and acts of divination. According to my dna profile, the blood of more than seventeen nations swirls in my veins. After discovering this I began to ponder who I really am physically, genetically, artistically, and spiritually versus who I might have been had my ancestors lived solely in one of these landscapes. I seek to explore how each of those cultures may manifest itself in me. Using real-altered photos and images from travel to several of my ancestral homelands, I began creating digital collages that seem to be a path to answers. May my journey inform and illuminate the path for any who follow.