Material Language | Jeralyn Victoria Mohr

Material Language | Jeralyn Victoria Mohr

In their first solo gallery exhibition, Mohr explores materiality and texture while challenging notions of painting in 2021

NewStudio Gallery, in the Creative Enterprise Zone of St. Paul, announces Jeralyn Victoria Mohr’s first solo gallery exhibition, “Material Language.” The Minneapolis artist introduces a new body of work utilizing a variety of quotidian materials—including recycled silk, coffee, soil, beads, and thread—to generate “paintings” that reveal or unearth a relic-like presence that challenges and re- contextualizes traditional concepts of domestic “women’s work” and materiality in art. 

The virtual and in-person opening of “Material Language” will take place from 5:00-8:00 p.m. Saturday, May 22, 2021. Watch NewStudio Gallery’s Facebook and Instagram pages for details and access to a curator and artist’s tour of the exhibition and a live artist’s talk. 

The exhibition closes Saturday, July 10, 2021. The exhibition includes more than 15 works (various sizes and price points) on canvas, on paper, and in plaster. In addition to fabric, Mohr uses acrylic, spray paint, text, hand-made dyes, burlap, yarn, and water in her work. “It’s the artist’s job to challenge traditions and systems,” Mohr says. “As a child, I spent most of my time being curious in the natural world; peeling apart bark washed up near the Red River, braiding grasses as if they were my own hair (and experiencing nature as our greater body), and opening up seed pods to examine them from the inside out. The time and space to explore instigated by boredom or loneliness has turned into curiosity and resilience.” 

In “Material Language,” Mohr investigates media and texture to expand the notions of what “painting” means in 2021. In a new series of Earth Paintings, Mohr fabricated an artistic media using red soil from Sedona, Arizona, and Murieta, California. In her Silk Paintings, Mohr explains, she uses silk up- cycled from saris, which she weaves, knots, stretches, and layers so the fibers’ history has a poetic connection to women, craft, ritual, and self-expression through adornment.  2 Similarly, Mohr’s Mended Paintings utilize cross-stitch, which historically is related to traditional, domestic “women’s work.” The stitches in her paintings, Mohr says, “mend and heal, but also bind, tether, and connect. They provide texture, but are buried in fresh paint,” creating a textural topography of memory on the canvas. 


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