what moves between

For immediate release
Contact Teréz Iacovino, Assistant Curator, Katherine E. Nash Gallery
612-624-7900, iaco0030@umn.edu
nash.umn.edu

what moves between
April 5 - 23, 2022

Public Program & Reception
Thursday, April 21 | 6:00 - 8:30 PM
Join us in person or via YouTube Live from 6:00 - 6:30 PM for a few words from the Department of Art faculty and the MFA 2022 cohort, followed by a reception with light refreshments from 6:30 - 8:30 PM in the Regis East Lobby.

(Minneapolis) — The Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota presents what moves between, a group exhibition of seven 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 Prerna, Cody Hilleboe, Taylor Johnson, Stephanie A. Lindquist, Julia Maiuri, Lela Pierce, and Hayden Teachout. 

By examining the handwriting of her mother, grandmother, and herself, Prerna reflects on the relationship between legibility and legitimacy—documenting how we become molded by intimate and bureaucratic systems of replication. Hilleboe’s use of ceramics and photography often juxtaposes precarity and comfort as a lens for understanding addiction and its effects on mental health. Through a combined practice of printmaking and installation, Johnson reanimates a series of creatures and their environments that exist somewhere between life and death. Using site-specific soils, Lindquist abstracts people and places to engage with the complexity of individual and collective representation. Maiuri’s paintings recast depictions of the ordinary and familiar into premonitions of the unknown. While every work begins in the corporeal, Pierce’s studio practice generates constant transformation across painting, sculpture, and video. Informed by his background in commercial photography, Teachout investigates our constant need for self-surveillance and the physicality of what it takes to curate our daily lives for digital consumption.

Prerna
Artist Statement and Bio
Originally born and raised in Mumbai, I grew up learning four languages simultaneously: English, Hindi, Marathi, and my mother tongue, Tamil. Now living and working in the United States as a non-resident alien with no last name, my temporary status informs my interest in the contradictions of legitimacy and legibility within America. Drawing from the aesthetics of bureaucracy, my work considers the erasure that occurs when one’s value is translated through a stack of papers. I engage with the materials and language found in government buildings, airports, classrooms, and other spaces, where the body undergoes categorization and evaluation. Through actions and objects, I examine my ongoing relationship with bureaucracy, blurring the lines between the domestic and the institutional, the intimate and the formal, the hand and the machine. How does bureaucracy know me, even at my most vulnerable?

Prerna is a Minneapolis-based multidisciplinary artist, born in Mumbai, India. She is currently an MFA student at the University of Minnesota. Prerna is interested in evaluating her relationship to being the subject and being subjected. She has been awarded global opportunities like Artists for Artists Edition 4: Language is Never on the Ground and a residency at the Center for the Periphery in Germany. Prerna has exhibited nationally at venues such as The White Page, Swedish Bank Building, Casket Art Center, LUMP Gallery and SNAG Gallery. She recently had a solo show at Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis. Her work has been published in The Other Way Around, a catalogue of artists at the University of Minnesota and Weißensee Academy of Art in Berlin, and in the visual art magazine, FAKE. Her work is held in various collections including the University of Minnesota Libraries, Kansas City Art Institute, Southeast Missouri State University, Kent State University, Montana State University, Utah State University, and the Zuckerman Art Museum. 

Cody Hilleboe
Artist Statement and Bio
Desolation inhabits the mind, while refusal procures in the everyday. Refusal 

to accept prognosis only adds kindling to anxiety.  Severe anoxic encephalopathy: cessation

of cerebral blood flow to brain tissue, brain damage, 

endlessly in search of the life I once had. Strategically refusing to

accept certain restraints and ideas, due to this addiction.

Incompleteness, adorned with precarious images, completeness, 

with a tinge of vibrant gross

goopy spots. 

Soft and squishy comforts confronted with rigid and firm 

fragments. I am aiming

to create an environment/a work/an object that is at ease while being tenuously 

uncomfortable.

Artwork that I create is linear, I can understand and 

conceptualize the work that came before, but 

I cannot make sense of the work that is destined to come after.

Cody Hilleboe is an artist working in sculptural ceramics and photography. His works often embody a desolate and bleak aesthetic as a reference to addiction and mental health. Hilleboe grew up in Missoula, Montana, and holds a BFA from the University of Montana. Before relocating to the Twin Cities, he participated in residencies in Virginia and New Mexico. Hilleboe has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, including Canada and Norway. His works are held in the collections of the Montana Museum of Art and Culture, Taos Ceramics Center, and Cub Creek Foundation.

Taylor Johnson
Artist Statement and Bio
My work touches on magical realism, transmogrification, folklore, and personal discovery. Stemming from a curiosity towards natural history museums and their use of dioramas to tell stories, I employ realism through drawing and the use of seemingly familiar objects such as wool, beeswax, and animal remains. My prints and sculptures create subtle shifts into more speculative spaces. This is where I imagine new creatures that exist in the in-between—beings who resist classification.

Taylor Johnson is an artist working in printmaking and installation who also maintains a curatorial practice that explores non-traditional spaces of viewing. She is a 2022 Master of Fine Art Candidate in Studio Art minoring in Museum Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Recent exhibitions include her solo show entitled The Memory Of at Brue Bar in Honolulu and Formations—a two-person exhibit at the Honolulu Museum of Art - First Hawaiian Center. Johnson was a 2019 resident at the Vermont Studio Center.

Stepahnie A. Lindquist
Artist Statement and Bio
Along my travels, I am continually learning among plants, gardeners, farmers, soil scientists, artists, and writers. I am deeply grateful to the individuals and organizations from Mni Sota Makoce to Sierra Leone who have shared their knowledge, resources, experiences, and soil with me. Soil science, critical Indigenous theories, and material experimentation with soil and analog photography–all influence this new body of work, Seeking Entanglements.

Stephanie A. Lindquist is from Los Angeles and moved to Minneapolis by way of New York. In collaboration with Growing North Minneapolis, she received a Visual Arts Fund in 2020. Her work has been exhibited at Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum, the New Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Google, the New York Public Library, Allen Hospital, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NXTHVN, and North Dakota State University. Lindquist received a BA in Visual Arts and Urban Studies from Columbia University.

Julia Maiuri
Artist Statement and Bio
I reinterpret private narratives through uncanny phenomena such as dream worlds, shadow selves, and doppelgängers. Symbols that are at once personal and common recur throughout the work—an innocuous daisy, a cellar spider, or perhaps a house from my past. These projections of the self can never fully materialize as me, but are nevertheless tethered to me, following me—an embedded reminder when I'd really rather forget. Through painting, these once familiar symbols become tinged by something hauntingly unfamiliar. They are harbingers of deception, death, resurrection; but when they come back, they are never quite the same.

Julia Maiuri (b. 1991, Michigan) received a BFA from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI) in 2013 and has been living and working in the Twin Cities ever since. She has been included in multiple solo and group exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Atlanta. Her work has been featured in Floorr Magazine, Monopol, NUT, WOPOZI, and Art Maze Mag. Maiuri is a 2018 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Lela Pierce
Artist Statement and Bio
The persistent practice of imagining transformation is vital for seekers of freedom. My work imagines an existence beyond the corporeal. Beginning with the body and the memories it holds, I search for an interconnected existence within and beyond materiality. I am interested in letting condensed places of in-betweenness hold more space in pursuit of freedom. Diving deep into ancestral specificity, displacement, and genealogical shapes of estrangement, my process seeks to transform and transition to vast futures of possibility. 

Lela Pierce is a visual artist and dancer born and raised in rural Minnesota Makoce. She maintains artistic practices in painting, performance, and installation. Pierce has danced extensively with Ananya Dance Theatre as a founding member (2004-2016), as well as Rosy Simas Danse (2015-present), and Pramila Vasudevan of Anichha Arts (2015-present). In 2018 she was awarded a Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship for visual art. Her work has been exhibited internationally in both Sweden and India, as well as at several Twin Cities venues. She holds a BA in Studio Art with Honors from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. 

Hayden Teachout
Artist Statement and Bio
In my work, I investigate meaning-making, memory creation, and technology in the context of a changing sociopolitical landscape, with a specific focus on the intersection of surveillance and our cultural impulse to publicly self-curate. More recently, I have become interested in non-physical barriers as they are actualized in cultural production. I have a background in commercial photography and have produced images around endurance athletics. This experience of working with athletes further informs the importance of physicality within my practice. I often create spaces that ask the viewer to investigate by means of tools—physical or otherwise.

Hayden Teachout is an interdisciplinary artist, a friend of dogs, a long-distance runner, and a lover of banter. He grew up in a Pacific Northwest rainforest—forty-five minutes east of Seattle, the Snoqualmie Valley to be exact. Teachout completed his undergraduate studies in Ashland, Oregon, and is currently based in Minneapolis, MN. Although he is most familiar working in photography, his practice is often installation-based and draws on the tension and liminal space between light and dark. He often uses light, or lack thereof, as a way to activate his work.