L to R: Brandon Chambers, Brian Wagner, Nicole Soley
Exhibition opening reception: friday, June 9; 6:30-9pm
Artist remarks at 7pm
Exhibition on view through July 22
Please join us at Highpoint for the culminating exhibition of the 2022- 2023 Jerome Early Career Printmakers. Through the generous support of the Jerome Foundation, resident artists Brandon Chambers, Brian Wagner, and Nicole Soley have been working industriously toward this exhibition since their residency began in September of 2022.
The nine-month residency provided the artists with access to the Highpoint cooperative printshop, technical support, and professional opportunities to create, learn, and show new work within a supportive studio environment. The exhibition includes images created using foundational printmaking techniques such as lithography and woodcut but also features less conventional print work like stop motion animation and transfer monotypes made with alcohol-based ink. The common thread binding the work of these three artists is the significance of thought informing it. The exhibition is conceptually charged; the founding thoughts, ideas, and feelings are poetically expressed through figures, text, scenes, and material.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS AND WORK:
Brian Wagner (they/them) was educated at the University of Minnesota Moorhead and shortly thereafter completed the professional printer program at the Tamarind Institute of Fine Art Lithography in Albuquerque. They draw upon their experience of growing up as a queer person in rural America and how that has been formative to their sexuality, identity, and transness as a non-binary individual.
I have spent this residency rendering densely-layered lithographs that explore the tenderness, loneliness, acceptance, and gentle anger of queerness and healing. These prints and writings consider the physical and emotional spaces of love, hurt, trauma, and remembrance of relationships in the forms of drawn landscapes and queer symbolism of the day-to-day life of a queer person. I view many of the scenes I draw as places of transition; shifting and ever-changing. Something that is cohesive with my own queerness. I spent most of this residency fighting the healing that was needed of me –– I think it’s easy for queer people to get used to resilience and ignore the trauma that we face every day, even from our own community and partners. In the laborious nature of lithography, I think it was only natural to have a bit of a breakdown and face the physical and emotional trauma that was being echoed and start to heal and it’s my hope that these spaces can offer solace to someone who has faced the same. – Brian Wagner
Nicole Soley (she/her) is an area artist and educator who studied at Minnesota State University Mankato. Using a novel approach along with a touch of sardonicism, Nicole’s traditional and sculptural prints tell stories that critique the culture of ‘American Dissonance’ we are collectively living in. She synthesizes lived experience and research to comment on education, gun culture, individual freedoms, and the harrowing upholding of the patriarchy.
Contemporary strife has moved me to create in order to process, distribute, and hopefully motivate political organizations to cause change. My personal experiences this year heavily influenced the trajectory of this work in newer experimental directions. I think that’s where the best art lives, though: in the fluidity and uncertainty of the human experience, propagating and releasing new truths to orbit an ever-moving molten core. Thank god for woodcut printmaking: carving was possibly the only gravity I felt while I was both lost and searching, grasping and letting go, disillusioned and fully standing in my own truth. – Nicole Soley
Brandon Chambers (he/him) completed his MFA at the University of Minnesota in 2021. A multidisciplinary artist, Brandon’s current research is into virtual reality as both a philosophical concept and a creative tool. His recent works employ geometry and grids to illustrate systems and visually establish a sense of clarity about the world. He states, “I am interested in merging nostalgia for the distant past with fantasies of the distant future as a way of conceptualizing the present.”
Semantic satiation is a phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to lose meaning for the listener. It becomes a meaningless sound. I wonder at the routines and archetypes we are inundated with throughout our lives. Was there an idea so important that it was repeated and repeated and repeated until it was lost?” His response as an artist is seen in the lithographs, monotypes, and drawings that contemplate this question. – Brandon Chambers
Highpoint would like to thank our panelists Jovan Speller and Jeremy Lundquist for their intensive review and evaluation of the submitted applications as well as the Jerome Foundation for their continued support of this important program. As well as Ruthann Godollei and Nancy Julia Hicks for visiting with the residents to conduct in-progress critiques.
About the panelists:
Jovan C. Speller is a Minnesota-based artist originally from Los Angeles. Her work interprets historic narratives through contemporary discourse. Her research-based practice is centered around elevating, complicating and inventing stories that explore ancestry, identity, and spatial memory. Speller is a recipient of a 2018 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship and a 2016 Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship. She completed a residency at Second Shift Studio Space in St. Paul, and was awarded the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize in 2021. She holds a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago, and studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Speller's work has been acquired by national and international private collections and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Jeremy Lundquist was born in California, grew up in the Chicago area, and currently lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. He works in print, drawing, photography, video, installation, and cut and collaged paper. He has been an artist-in-residence at Ox-Bow, Harold Arts, Spudnik Press, Kala Art Institute and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been awarded the Grant Wood, Jerome and McKnight Fellowships. His work has been exhibited at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, the Chicago Cultural Center, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois – Chicago, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and additional venues nationally and internationally. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Iowa, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Currently he teaches at the Perpich Center for Arts Education, an arts high school run by the state of Minnesota.
