Jerome Early Career Printmakers Exhibition

Through generous support from the Jerome Foundation, Brandon Chambers, Brian Wagner, and Nicole Soley were awarded this nine-month residency that provided them with access to the Highpoint cooperative printshop, technical support, and professional opportunities to create, learn, and show new work within a supportive studio environment. This 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. Highpoint would like to thank the panelists for the 2022-2023 Residency, Jovan Speller and Jeremy Lundquist, as well as guest visiting critics, Nancy Julia Hicks and Ruthann Godollei.

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 politicalorganizations 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

Image: 2022-23 Jerome Residents: Brandon Chambers, Brian Wagner, and Nicole Soley