Tokens of Belonging

Banner Image: Installation view of Untitled 20 at SooVAC. Courtesy of Cory Eull. 

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How does the relationship to place and body mutate over time? How does identity collide with story and from what position does it extrapolate? While calling on the dynamic link to place and perception, the elements of texture, shape, and material hold peculiar prominence in SooVAC’s 20th juried exhibition. There are a few moments where the biological grotesque enters the frame, with pieces in the gallery bearing resemblance to flesh or simple organic forms. Untitled 20 being a fairly interactive show, it is both a remembering of origin story as well as a reckoning with what exists now, and a bending of the psyche as it approaches interpretation.

There is a remarkable range in scale between the pieces that demand eyes with their sheer size, like Aja Bond’s Food Prep and Genie Hien Tran’s To Look At Passionately, and the more soft-spoken, intimate 2D works, like Carley Schmidt’s Quiet, like a footstep in soft snow. This year’s curator, Tamara Khasanova, sees a relationship to land as a throughline between the works. “There are quite a few works on paper that challenge your relationship to horizon. They’re evocative of the landscape but at the same time play with perspective and form”, says Khasanova. This perception of land and place comes through in Delaney Keshena’s work, Heading West i. This piece consists of three clay masses, each pierced by one or more railroad spikes. A rope of leather hangs between two of the textured mounds. The sculpture tells a story of fragmentation and displacement, and grounds itself in the raw, chosen materials. 

 

Image: Installation view of Heading West i, by Delaney Keshena. Courtesy of Cory Eull. 

Mapping roots through a different medium, Hien Tran’s installation work, To Look At Passionately, employs archive as an act of loving memory. Assembling a robust paper trail, she explores familial and cultural lineage by combining embroidery thread, photographs, and script. This piece exudes both the tenderness of collage and the powerful pursuit of belonging.

 

Top image: Detail of To Look at Passionately, by Genie Hein Tran. Bottom Image: Installation view of To Look at Passionately. Both images courtesy of Cory Eull. 

As Khasanova began curating the exhibition, she noticed a theme emerge around the connection to place. “All of a sudden there were these traces of place showing up in the work, and I found it to be very precious, because so many of the artists who are part of the show are from diaspora, in a very transnational understanding of the word, but at the same time they call Minneapolis their home. I found it beautiful that there are so many stories carried through, and in some ways they give homage to this home while remembering the stories from other places”, she says.

 

Image: Installation view of Post-Organism, Pre-Self by Isabella Covert, Untitled 20 at SooVAC. Courtesy of Cory Eull. 

Another theme that arises in this show is the biological grotesque. Upon arrival into the gallery, I spot Post-Organism, Pre-Self by Isabella Covert. It is this cloud of tissue constructed from nylon and latex, suspended by something that resembles an umbilical cord, and strands of brown hair cling to the chord. It’s amorphous and uncanny, but also visually familiar. Elea Besse’s ceramic piece, In The Yard, similarly takes on forms of a body. With this piece however, the feet and bulbous body resemble the hooves and stout physique of a hog, or perhaps a bloated fungus peeking through the soil after a hard rain. Organ (ic) s by Emma Ming Kayhart has a lighter, sinewy presence, and jogs my memory of the dissection unit from 8th grade biology.

 

Image: In the Yard, by Elea Besse. Courtesy of Cory Eull. 

Untitled 20 illustrates the many means to perceive and return to the land around oneself, whether that landscape is rooted in place, body, culture, or something else. Through material and form, through “images consuming images”, and through texture and scale, echoes of rich, lived experience take root in the gallery.◼︎ 

Untitled 20 runs February 21 - March 29, 2026. Gallery hours are Thursday-Friday, 10am-5pm, and Saturday-Sunday 11am-5pm. Keep up with SooVAC on their website www.soovac.org and follow on instagram @soovac.