Sites of Exhaust: Works by MALFLOR & Nancy Julia Hicks in the Quarter Gallery

Sites of Exhaust:

Works by MALFLOR & Nancy Julia Hicks

February 21 - March 18, 2023

Public Reception
Friday, March 17 | 6 - 8 PM | Quarter Gallery

The Department of Art at the University of Minnesota presents Sites of Exhaust, the Regis Center for Art (RCA) Emerging Artist Program exhibition featuring the work of MALFLOR  and Nancy Julia Hicks. These artists unite their individual practices encompassing sculpture, installation, and printmaking to investigate the parallels between the environment, built structures and trans bodies. The RCA Emerging Artist Program seeks to support a diverse range of artistic practices within the visual arts, providing artists with opportunities to broaden their professional connections, build lasting relationships with their artistic peers, and gain wider exposure to the arts community in the Twin Cities. 

MALFLOR, HOOKED, 2022, Serrous fluid on stonehenge paper, 15 x 22 in.

MALFLOR (AKA Kieran Myles-Andrés Tverbakk) (they/them) is a first-generation Mexican-Norwegian-American and non-binary trans artist from Houston, Texas based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. They received their BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2016 and have since participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Blue Mountain Center, and The Medium Arts. Solo exhibitions include A Complex Desire at Sure Space, But The Skin Of The Earth Is Seamless at Hair + Nails, In Tending To at the pH Gallery, and HULDRA at The Medium Arts.

Artist Statement

MALFLOR (b. 1994 Houston TX) is a transdisciplinary conceptual artist working primarily in sculpture and installations. They are interested in how we separate ourselves into legible categories and how this legibility fails us by reinforcing otherness. Informed by personal experience and the poetics of material culture, MALFLOR creates artwork that addresses themes of separation, reconnection, humanity, nature, queerness, multiplicity, becoming, and returning.

Nancy Julia Hicks, She does not mourn the cycle of death at such a vast scale, 2022, Asphaltum and screenprint on woven latex sheeting, liquid latex, 16 x18 in.

Nancy Julia Hicks (they/them) is a non-binary print and installation artist and educator from Houston, TX now based in Minneapolis, MN. Through visualizing the body as object and machine they illustrate and negotiate infliction of pain on the environment, space, and othered bodies. They’ve exhibited work at Dreamsong, Nightclub at Night, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the Concourse Gallery, the Soap Factory, the Highpoint Center for printmaking, the Soo visual arts Center, and other locations. 

Artist Statement

Nancy Julia Hicks’s work visualizes human relationships to natural and built space through printmaking, sculpture, and video. Pairing materials that rest between resilient and gentle with seemingly precarious forms and structures, they implicate the body’s relationship to the social environment. Through materials like human hair and latex, building materials like chain and stone, and natural materials like dirt and wood shavings, they create visual narratives that visually layer the entanglement between the body, constructed space, and land.