801 Gallery Artist Talk

Featuring Artists
Mary Johnson, Mark Hirte, Ellen Thomson

Come to enjoy an conversation about their art and complimentary wine, beverages and chocolate.

Exhibition up through Sunday, December 14th, 2025

Artists:
Mary Johnson
Mary Johnson is a Minnesota sculptor, whose work transforms and reassembles found materials, considering their material histories and narrative potentials. Following a recent injury, she has adapted her sculptural aesthetics to painting, utilizing repurposed industrial foam as both surface and form. By investing time, labor, and personal reflection into the handling of this seemingly disposable material, she re-animates our intimate relationship with the aesthetics, natural and industrial processes, and objecthood of our culture’s cast-offs, honoring the complexities which go hand-in-hand with our consumption.
MaryJohnsonart.com

Mark Hirte
Mark makes compositions to be visually arresting.  They are painted to be graphic and dynamic as they are traversed as they need to compete in our flooded visual environment. The subject matter, color, and texture can be the reflection of the floor of a well used paint booth, or the glossy flash of a fluorescent fishing lure, or an ocean pacific tshirt from his childhood, or a direct homage to a western mesa landscape. Or all of it at once. 
@hirtemark

Ellen Thomson
Ellen Thomson’s paintings draw on memory, intuition, and emotion, unfolding through layered patterns, shifting forms, and recurring imagery. Moving fluidly between the figurative and the landscape, her work resists fixed meaning and instead embraces openness and transformation. This ambiguity invites viewers to bring their own interpretations, creating a dialogue between artist and audience.
ellenart.com