Tapestry | Aaron Spangler with Bruce Engebretson

Working across media including bas-relief and freestanding sculpture, printmaking and textile, Aaron Spangler’s work is rooted in labor, iteration and storytelling, with a healthy respect for the absurd. His trajectory – from his hometown in rural northern Minnesota, to New York City, and back to the woods – has attuned him to the ineffable truths and mythologies of the rural ethos and the enigmatic complexities of bucolic life.

Spangler’s work reflects the tension between rural and urban places. Folk traditions, hand-carved patterns and symbolic figures appear alongside structures of modern industry and infrastructure, illustrating the dignity of rural labor and the complicated ways it becomes absorbed into modern systems of production and consumption.

Tapestry centers two aspects of Spangler’s practice, featuring three carved wood sculptures on pedestals, set amongst five hand-woven tapestries made in collaboration with Bruce Engebretson, a fellow northern Minnesotan and celebrated hand weaver who has a deep history in preindustrial weaving, spinning and dyeing techniques.

Working in side-by-side studios, Spangler and Engebretson have discovered that they transmit their rural consciousnesses via a similar process of diligent, incremental hand labor. The wood carvings eventually reveal themselves through reduction, or spatial subtraction. The weavings conversely take their form by a process of slow addition.

In the weaving studio, the loom keeps the time, with the knocking wood mallet driving the beat of production. Combining elements of abstraction, landscape, figuration and narrative, the weavings offer a compelling expansion of Spangler’s practice. They embody his longstanding interest in the contested mythologies, lived histories and expansive landscapes that have come to shape America’s evolving identity.

By placing the weavings alongside the wood sculptures – twisted tree roots, apocalyptic rural ruin, abandoned buildings and delusions – Tapestry peers into a world that both stokes and tolerates conflict, political and otherwise, to reveal the flashpoints and widening schisms in contemporary rural life.

Presented alongside Neighborisms | Julie Buffalohead

Image: Aaron Spangler with Bruce Engebretson, A Face At First Just Ghostly, 2026