Thought/Process
August 26 - September 30, 2022 📍Inez Greenberg Gallery
ARTISTS: Marjorie Fedyszyn, Susan Hensel, S. Catrin Magnusson, and Kim Matthews
RECEPTION: Friday, August 26, 6:00 pm
ARTIST TALK: Tuesday, September 20, 7:00 pm
The artist talk is free and open to the public.
ABOUT THIS EXHIBITION
Artists Marjorie Fedyszyn, Susan Hensel, S. Catrin Magnusson, and Kim Matthews come together to present a combined visual arts exhibit: Thought/Process. Rich in sculpture, textile, embroidery, and mixed-media, each artist contributes powerful individual pieces toward a larger story of intersectionality, movement, tension, and displacement.
About the Artists
Marjorie Fedyszyn
Minneapolis-based artist/educator Marjorie Fedyszyn (she/hers) combines the knowledge of her first career as a scenic artist for theater with a deep reverence for materials and technique. Using traditional craft techniques she creates abstract forms and installations rooted in fiber art. Her studio practice is in the historic Casket Arts Building in NE Minneapolis.
Fedyszyn has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships through the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. Her work has been exhibited and collected both nationally and regionally. She is a founding member of the MN Feltmakers Guild and the artist collective, SD8. Her affiliation with arts organizations includes Artistry, North American Handmade Paper Makers, Surface Design Association, MN Center for Book Arts, and Textile Center of MN.
Marjorie says about her work:
“As an artist I explore universal notions of loss, power and vulnerability through abstract sculpture and installations. My work emerges from the intersection of identity and emotional histories. In my youth, transforming the volatile chaos of my childhood home into worlds I could control was a form of salvation. Interpreting the past through my work makes it bearable.
The tactile, rigorous and meditative physicality of each process helps me remain present. Whether using hand made paper, wet felted wool or a stitching a wide array of fabrics, the forms I create are body+emotional stand-ins of me and often represent significant events from my life as I tackle unspoken subjects such as grief, mental illness and child sexual abuse. I have found that by sharing my stories I give a voice and hope to others.”
SUSAN HENSEL
Susan Hensel received her BFA from the University of Michigan in 1972 with a double major in painting and sculpture and a concentration in ceramics. Her continued study over the subsequent years has included Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Penland, Christies Education, and Praxis Center for Aesthetic studies among others. She has a history, to date, of well over 200 exhibitions, 35 of them solo, twenty + garnering awards. In the coming two years, Susan had 2-person and group exhibitions scheduled with the Howard County Art Council, Ellicot, MD, Artistry, Bloomington, MN, and the Garrett Museum of Art, Garrett, Indiana.
Hensel's artwork is known and collected nationwide, represented in collecting libraries and museums as disparate as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Getty Research Institute with major holdings at Minnesota Center for Book Arts, University of Washington, Baylor University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Archives pertaining to her artist’s books are available for study at the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle.
Her new innovative work that blends commercial embroidery processes with sculptural concerns is gaining attention and awards in the US with inroads into Europe. Susan’s knowledge of materials makes it possible for her to create small to large-scale hard-edge sculptures from soft fabrics that paradoxically keep their crisp form with minimal armatures. Her knowledge of the physics of color allows her to create shape-shifting displays employing the special reflective characteristics of embroidery thread.
In recent years Hensel has been awarded multiple grants and residencies through the Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and Ragdale Foundation.
Hensel's curatorial work began in 2000 in East Lansing, Michigan with the Art Apartment and deepened with ownership of the Susan Hensel Gallery in Minneapolis. The Susan Hensel Gallery continues on Artsy.net as an online project promoting Midwest artists with a particular interest in materiality. Hensel has curated over eighty exhibitions of emerging and mid-career artists from all over the United States and Canada.
S. Catrin Magnusson
S. Catrin Magnusson’s practice involves a constant exploration of new materials and techniques. In her current body of work, she is investigating sculptural forms in clay. Her artistic body includes film, photography, textiles and sculpture with a strong influence of traditional Scandinavian handcrafts. She holds a BFA in photography and sculpture from CU, Boulder, AS degrees in Film Production and Screenwriting from MCTC, and a MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
S. Catrin Magnusson says:
“I am a multi-disciplinary artist currently working with sculptural forms, drawing on the iconography of geology as a starting place. As the earth's tectonic forces separate and compact, it creates stress and pressure to move. While the work appears abstract, it has a specific reference to the physical world. My family emigrated from Sweden when I was young, and I became intensely aware of movement and displacement. I am drawn to the quiet remnants of violent movement and the creation of a landscape from what is left behind, connecting deep time and macro processes to a personal timeline.”
Kim Matthews
Kim Matthews makes nonobjective drawings and sculptures in various media. The frequent use of accretion to develop her works evolved from practical concerns—the need to be productive with little available studio time—and spiritual ones, as repetition is evocative of the mantra meditation that structures her daily life. The recipient of a 2010-2011 Jerome Fiber Artist Project Grant, Ms. Matthews exhibits in nonprofit and commercial venues throughout the U.S. In 2017, she participated in her first international exhibition in Ukraine. Her work is featured in Lark Books’ 500 Paper Objects and Artistry in Fiber, Volume II: Sculpture, published by Schiffer.
Kim says about her work:
“I’m interested in the ineffable qualities of “objectness”—what is sometimes called aura—as well as materiality and process as vehicles for spiritual engagement. My work is rooted in long-term meditation practice; making drawings and sculptures is a complementary discipline of devotion. I use tactility to draw the viewer into the work and toward introspection through the seduction of intense looking. As a meditator-artist, I’m interested in the tension between dualities, as it’s these pairs of opposites that hold the material world together and, in yogic terms, bind us to it. Formally, this manifests in various kinds of contrast: solid and void, textural or surface contrasts, organic and geometric forms, and shapes. Recently I’ve been exploring the duality of fluorescent/neutral palettes as well. In addition to my interest in process and materials, an appreciation of wabi-sabi, which embraces the imperfect and the accidental, has been a constant in my work over the past two decades.”