Yes, and the body has memory brings together the work of four photographers from Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and LA of varying cultural backgrounds to examine the intimacies and traumas that are carried through relationships with family and place. They focus their cameras on themselves, their sisters, mothers, and other female relatives, creating images that are riveting in the vulnerability they capture and the strength they emit. Through self-representation, the images are simultaneously intimate and empowering.&nbsp;

Throughout the works there is loss &mdash; loss of mothers, loss of fathers, loss of homeland, loss of language, loss of things that weren&rsquo;t acknowledged until the emptiness was found. There are also discoveries &mdash; the realization that one has developed the nervous tic of one&rsquo;s mother, seeing one&rsquo;s mother in one&rsquo;s own reflection, or the larger discovery that one is not alone while in a state of seeming isolation, whether emotional or geographic.&nbsp;

While the weight of the images hangs heavy through the spartan gallery, one of the most striking elements of the exhibition is Mara Duvra&rsquo;s curation. The intermingling of the artists and their works creates a narrative dynamic that brings together the works of Leah Edelman-Brier, Carla Alexandra Rodriguez, Rikki&nbsp;Wright,&nbsp;and Lorena Molina in&nbsp;such a way that it was only after a second pass and a long look at the gallery map that I was able to tease apart the four experiences that were woven into the larger arc&nbsp;of love, loss, and personal reflection. The intertwining of the four artists&rsquo; stories (one of a mother and daughter, another of the early loss of one&rsquo;s parents, yet another&nbsp;of attempting to reconcile an identity that spans two countries) creates a larger picture of humanity, of a specifically female relationship to self and family and lineage. Duvra explains her decisions in pairing the works as looking for (and finding) gestures of caring. She points to the pairing of Edelman-Brier&rsquo;s portrait of her mother next to Rodriguez&#39;s portrait of her mother: both women are introspective as they look off into the distance, sunshine playing across their upturned faces.

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMTk3MzAwMDE/full.jpg" />Left: Carla Alexandra&nbsp;Rodriguez, &ldquo;Oh, it&rsquo;s beautiful outside.&rdquo;, 2014; Right: Leah Edelman-Brier,&nbsp;The feeling of one&#39;s mortality, 2012.

This pairing points to another key element of Yes, and the body has memory: the gaze of the women in the photographs. From the tandem nudes in Edelman-Brier&rsquo;s Generation to&nbsp;Wright&rsquo;s portrait of two sisters, one of whom looks out at the viewer while the other stares lovingly at her, the gaze of the subject is a traceable cord throughout the show. The female gaze is leveled at the viewer with a frankness that is, at times, an invitation into a relationship and, at others, a bold statement of raw emotion, such as Rodriguez&rsquo;s self portraits while holding her mother&rsquo;s funeral bouquet, the first fresh, the second wilted. In both images, the artist looks out of tear stained eyes with determination and candor. While our society tells us to control, to hide, to minimize our emotions and put on a &ldquo;brave face,&rdquo; Rodriguez resists and instead presents us with a true image of grief, one that, despite the passage of time, remains. Even when not engaging the viewer, the gaze is nevertheless a present and persistent component to the artists and their work as they grapple with the weight of their experiences, relationships, and the works they inspired.

While approaching this show from the angle of a writer, I noted the difficulty of words to neatly summarize the conviction of the images I was seeing. The earnestness and openness of the works borders on the visceral. The statement that accompanies the show seems to share my struggle in placing words to the images. It is a single, short paragraph with the words &ldquo;deepmemory / tenderroots&rdquo; isolated towards the ending, enigmatic yet poetically clarifying. As the title suggests, the images are rooted in the self, in the physical being, from Rodriguez&#39;s video of a single hair being painstakingly selected and then plucked, to the weight of the stones running the length of Molina&rsquo;s body as she lays amongst the rocky foothills of her native El Salvador.&nbsp;

<img alt="" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/file_container/RmlsZUNvbnRhaW5lch4fMTQ5NDAwMDE/full.jpg" />Installation view.

Duvra explains a conversation she had with Edelman-Brier about viewing the body as an heirloom, &ldquo;There are all things in your lineage that can attach themselves to you that you cannot escape...whether it&rsquo;s genetic or environmental.&rdquo; She selected the artists for the way they use themselves and their bodies in their work and for how the artists&rsquo; bodies become stand-ins for their experiences and for the impact that their relationships and their sense of place, both socially and geographically, have had on them.&nbsp;

The artists of Yes, and the body has memory use the body as a tool for understanding, for relating, for reflecting, for creating a connection with another person or with a feeling. Similarly, the images in the show become tools for this as well. They transmit from one body to another, possibly leaving the viewer with a weight in the stomach or a lump in the throat &mdash; an embodiment of the experience of another.

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<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/yes-and-the-body-has-memory-act-ii" target="_blank">Yes, and the body has memory</a> is on view at Law Warschaw&nbsp;Gallery&nbsp;through January&nbsp;26th. There will be a Closing Reception and discussion Wednesday, Jan.&nbsp;23rd,&nbsp;at 6:30pm. Special January hours:&nbsp;Wednesdays&nbsp;5&ndash;8 pm &amp;&nbsp;Saturdays: 1&ndash;4pm.

Banner image: Lorena Milena, Sick Chicken, 2017. Images courtesy of the gallery.

Curated by Mara Duvra, the show weaves together common threads from four photographers' work about pain, love, and family. 

Personal Provenance: "Yes, and the body has memory" at Law Warschaw Gallery

The Scene

Luisa Fernanda Garcia-Gomez&rsquo;s mixed media works on paper flash and dazzle like invitations to a birthday party, their abstract forms a cacophony of pattern and color. An inattentive viewer might interpret the title of this body of work, and the show itself, Explosion*s, as a reference to a festive fireworks display. However with a bit more diligence they would discover that these explosions are those of a city wracked by violent conflict. Growing up in Medell&iacute;n, Colombia, Garcia-Gomez&rsquo;s statement for the show describes what it was like to grow up with the constant threat of random and inexplicable violence, often in the form of unpredictable explosions.

Garcia-Gomez&rsquo;s ink, marker, and watercolor abstractions rotate around a motif of circles, dots, expanding geometric rays, and Op Art-like checkerboards. Their mixed pastels and hyper-saturated hues at first come across as joyous and playful, reminiscent of the colors impressed upon the eyes after a flash of light or of walking indoors after blinding sunlight. Within the context of the artist&rsquo;s background, it becomes easy to extrapolate that the shapes and colors are the sensory after-effects of one of the explosions that give the works and the exhibition their titles. The majority of the works are around 19 x 15 inches, giving them a personal and intimate feel, each its own isolated experience. The sheer volume of works, however, is daunting &mdash; over thirty in total, they reflect on the fact that the conflict impacted not only individuals but an entire country and culture.

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/luisa1.jpg" /> explosions #1; pen, marker, and watercolor on paper; 21x18&rdquo;

The artist is very aware of the fact that her experience is a shared one. Her color palette, easily taken as festive, is highly intentional in its raucous tones. &ldquo;Due that my artistic work has political bases, it is very important for me that the people involved in the historical context and who were victims of violent events [are not made to] feel like victims again,&rdquo; Garcia-Gomez explained. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s why my work is based on abstraction and not on the representation of the event as such.&rdquo;

It is also no accident that the works have a jubilant air about them or that they could be mistaken for confetti-striken parties. Garcia-Gomez describe daily life in Medell&iacute;n as a constant embrace of the moment where there was nothing more important than spending time with the people you loved, both friends and family. &ldquo;Part of what people, who have never lived in the midst of a civil war don&rsquo;t know is that life does not stop,&rdquo; she emphasized. &ldquo;There were days when you had your friends nearby and the next day they were gone. We all lost someone during that time. That&rsquo;s why during those difficult times we danced all the time, we tried to spend the most time with friends and family. Life was super fun and super sad all the time.&rdquo;

This duality is ever present in Garcia-Gomez&rsquo;s work. Each composition is buzzing with frenetic energy, bouncing between chaos and order, exuberance and disfunction. &ldquo;We lived in a constant party; dark humor was our strong point and we tried to live as intensely as possible. That is why there is intensity in the marks of my drawings; the vivid colors represent these explosions of happiness and sadness,&rdquo; the artist elaborated. &ldquo;It was a long party at the end.&rdquo;

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/luisa2.jpg" /> Installation view.

Floating in a line down the center of the gallery are three large inflated spheres of vibrant digital pattern. These sculptural elements draw on the circular elements present in each mixed media explosion and are particularly reminiscent of explosions #31 and #4, which resemble tests for color blindness. These three pieces mark a new way of thinking for the artist, whose interest both as an artist and as a designer has been focused on handmade techniques and traditions. They&rsquo;ve also impacted how her works interact with her viewer. &ldquo;With the inflatables I want the viewer to feel in one way or another immersed in the experience of negative and positive space existing within the drawings,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Through them, I try to reflect the tension that can exist in the artifact of a bomb.&rdquo;

The artist&rsquo;s intentions for Explosions Inflatables is palpable in the gallery, but the installation&rsquo;s layout seems to be actively fighting the three sculptures. A more impactful height for these works would seem to me to be around chest height or eye level, somewhere where they would necessitate movement on behalf of their audience, forcing the onlooker to change their course in accordance to the object &mdash; the explosion dictating the habits of those around it. Instead they are hung at a height that suggests they are a mere inconvenience, high enough to walk under, but also so as not to interfere with several large works by other artists that remain on the gallery floor.

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/luisa3.jpg" /> explosions #11; pen, marker, and watercolor on paper; 21x15.25&rdquo;

Similarly, all of the wall-mounted works are hung along the same line of sight across all three of the gallery&rsquo;s walls, creating a metronome-like repetition that undermines the work&rsquo;s content and concept. If the works had been hung more sporadically, clustered and dissipating, the installation might better highlight the themes of random violence in an urban conflict zone and move the abstractions away from planned party and toward their more disruptive and disturbing content.

Despite the shortcomings of the installation, Garcia-Gomez&rsquo;s body of work demonstrates a keen and empathic awareness of both personal and cultural trauma. Her ink, marker, and watercolor abstractions walk a thin line between happy-go-lucky and post-traumatic. Works like explosions #22 reflect an immediacy of both the work&rsquo;s creation and of raw emotion, drawing an experience from the past into the present. The works embody a way of living many of Garcia-Gomez&rsquo;s viewers can only imagine. Hopefully after experiencing her work, they will be able to close their eyes and imagine more vividly, as light traces impressions of color across the inside of their eyelids, the aftereffects of a nearby explosion.

<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/luisa4.jpg" /> Explosions Inflatable, digital print on inflated form. Photo by the author.

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<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/explosions-luisa-fernanda-garcia-gomez">Explosion*s</a> is on view at Burnet Fine Art &amp; Advisory through November 3rd. Gallery hours are Tuesday&ndash;Saturday 11&ndash;5pm and by appointment.

All images courtesy of the gallery, unless otherwise noted. Banner image: explosions #4; pen, marker, &amp; watercolor on paper; 21 x 18&rdquo;

Luisa Fernanda Garcia-Gomez’s 2-D and 3-D works explode with color and meaning, on view through November 3rd

Violence and Joy: Explosion*s at Burnet Fine Art & Advisory

2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project

Local artist Natalia Berglund&rsquo;s painting and mixed media collages sit at a crossroads, culturally and personally. For her solo exhibition at the Museum of Russian Art &mdash; on view now through September 23rd &mdash; Berglund fills the museum&rsquo;s lower level gallery with images of women undergoing varying levels of empowerment and transformation. Her images combine iconography from both contemporary American fashion and Russian religious art as a way to grapple with the conflicting concepts and roles that women encounter and use to form their identities.

While Berglund&rsquo;s collage works use the stoic faces of fashion models, her latest series of paintings are portraits, titled after her models. Many of these works are similarly titled, referencing warriors. &ldquo;At first, I was seeing each piece as a reflection of a single person, fighting her own daily battles and navigating through life with determination.&rdquo; Berglund says of the earlier images which, while balanced in composition, feel frenetic and show the artist&rsquo;s hand and energy in larger brush strokes and water stains. These warriors come across as almost masked by their own sensuality, the ubiquity of their makeup and conformity to a contemporary standard of beauty. They are on the defensive, their struggle elegantly abstracted by ink and gold leaf. These works, while full and complete, feel like warm-ups for the direction Berglund took next.

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/natalia1.jpg" /> Natalia Berglund, from the Warrior Series, mixed media on paper, 24 x 18&rdquo;

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The artist drew inspiration from a previous show at the Museum titled Russian Sacred Art: Connecting Heaven and Earth. The exhibition was not only an artistic inspiration but a reminder of the artist&rsquo;s personal experiences growing up in the former Soviet Union where religion was effectively outlawed as the &ldquo;opium of the people.&rdquo; Berglund&rsquo;s most memorable experience of the intoxicating aesthetics of religious art was during art school while studying plein air painting and wandering into the church her class was painting. &ldquo;I remember its opulent interior with icons, gold embellishments, dim lighting, and candles,&rdquo; the artist recounts. &ldquo;I have always admired icons as an art form for their stylized representation of people, powerful symbolism, and ornate beauty.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s no surprise then that she is also drawn to the world of fashion, which use those same tools and can be just as enticing.

In the wall text for the show, the work is described as seeking a harmony between the two types of icons &mdash; fashion and religion. Three of the paintings go about this in a direct and assertive manner, collaging images of traditional Russian religious icons with the black and white faces of female models aggressively splashed across the face of the original figure. Other paintings, such as the Shielded Warrior series, combine modern portraiture with the classic aesthetics of red and blue drapery and gilded embossment. Here Berglund&rsquo;s interests in religious art and fashion imagery begin combine in more subtle and intricate ways. No longer are the warrior women fixing us with their steely gaze, nor are they entangled in the painterly battles.

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/natalia2.jpg" /> Natalia Berglund; Shielded Warrior - Natalie; oil, acrylic, cold wax, modeling paste, gold leaf on canvas; 48x40&quot;

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&ldquo;With this series, I am exploring how we can rationalize or come to terms with some of the conflicting aspects of our personalities, such as strength and fragility, femininity and masculinity, or deeply caring about certain issues and being blind to others,&rdquo; Berglund explains. &ldquo;All of these conflicting identities make us who we are.&rdquo; In these portraits, the battles are no longer with an outward opponent: voting rights, equal opportunity, the wage gap&hellip; The battles are now internalized. The Shielded Warriors turn their gaze away from us, perhaps at some looming conflict on the horizon. Those who might otherwise stare back at us are blindfolded or capped by intricate gilding and slash-like brush strokes. Only Nina looks out toward her audience, but it is clear that her attention is elsewhere, her gaze distant and unfocused. These warriors are shielded from their viewers and from the rest of the works in the exhibition as though the content were too much to take in. Even as they sit seemingly self-composed, there is a tension created by Berglund&rsquo;s use of both color and grayscale, dripping and aggressive brush stokes, and colorful graphic elements which often allude to halos.

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/natalia3.jpg" /> Natalia Berglund; The Witness; oil, acrylic, collage, gold leaf&nbsp;on wood panel; 24 x 24&rdquo;

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The exhibition is rounded out by a soundtrack composed by the artist&rsquo;s husband, Alexander Berglund, specifically for these works. The music combines the familiar chants and church bells of religious music with the echoing sounds of high-heeled footsteps. The resonating soundscape builds with techno beats and synth swells that mingle with the choral vocals and chirps of crickets. It seamlessly brings together the artist&rsquo;s old plein air sensibilities with her new contemporary voice, knitting together her early themes from sensual fashion figures with the power of the religious paintings that inspired her.

Overall the exhibition, while themed around warriors and empowerment, feels like a vulnerable look into the artist&rsquo;s growing understanding of herself. No piece expresses this more than a small watercolor titled Gasp. A female head rises as if out of inky waters, her gold leafed lips part just above the dark surface. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve spent the past few years experimenting with different styles and mediums, trying to find my voice as an artist,&rdquo; Berglund says. &ldquo;I feel that this body of work unifies a lot of different aspects of my own individual identity; the artistic traditions of my ancestral past, the constructivist elements of my Soviet childhood, and the omnipresent fashion imagery of contemporary America.&rdquo; Perhaps it is too simplified to see the gasping figure as a kind of self portrait. Nonetheless, it is satisfying to see her as Berglund coming up for air with new works, the compilation of much thought and personal artistic contemplation and growth.

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/natalia4.jpg" /> Natalia Berglund, Gasp, gold leaf and ink on paper

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<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/faces-of-change-natalia-berglund">Faces of Change: Artistic Expressions by Natalia Berglund</a> is on view at the Museum of Russian Art through September 23rd. The Museum is open daily: M-F, 10am - 5pm; Sat, 10am - 4pm; Sun, 1 - 5pm. 

Admission is: Adults, $10; Children 13 &amp; under, Free; Children 14+ &amp; Students with ID, $5; Seniors 65+, $8; and free to members.

The iconography of Christian orthodoxy and western fashion collide in a show of mixed media portraits of women.

Russian Unorthodox: Natalia Berglund’s Portraits at the Museum of Russian Art

Today&rsquo;s media-saturated culture always seems to be promoting the idea that our bodies need to change and conform; size, shape, nutrition, mental health, flexibility, ability&hellip; the list seems never-ending. It&rsquo;s to the point where most of us try to ignore the fact that we inhabit a body altogether. Kate Casanova&rsquo;s abstract sculptures at Public Functionary swim against this current in an undulating wave of pastels reminiscent of Medieval medicine&rsquo;s four humours.

Like her forms, which ooze, drip, contort, and waver, it is difficult to pinpoint what it means, or even feels like, to inhabit a body. It is precarious and messy, impossible to explain and nearly as impossible to contain. Throughout Underbelly, Casanova playfully nudges her viewer to reframe their understanding of themselves as an organism. The color palette points toward the mammalian: pinks and mauves with accents of purple, black, and yellow. But they are also the colors of mold and sometimes even the colors of industry, a happy accident of silicone and styrofoam. The adept transformation of found objects plays a role in Casanova&rsquo;s materiality as well. While silicone, resin, and plastic ebb and flow organically and call to mind corporeal structures like cilia or membranes, carpet and small items of furniture such as a table and desk lamp are oddly comfortable members of the ensemble, referencing our bodies and their architectures.

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/body1.jpg" />Dribble spawn

Casanova&rsquo;s sculptural embrace of the body goes beyond the affectionate, as if each piece had swallowed you whole and engulfed you in its intestinal pinks, liver purples, bile greens, and phlegm yellows. Her fascination is contagious. Our biological understanding of the body, both human and non-human, has developed dramatically over the past decade. From scientists untangling the connection between microorganisms and the very basics of human health to thinkers like Donna Haraway positing that each of us has crossed the line from organic being to cyborg because of our addiction-like reliance on technology, simply existing has become much more complicated.

Walking amongst the abstract sculptures, it becomes difficult to place the sense of scale: Are these bodies like ours, human in size? Or are they components of some larger being scaled up for us to examine more closely? It&rsquo;s easy to visualize pieces like Hindgut softride, in perpetuity as an oversized model of the large intestine. Likewise, Hardware&nbsp;disease, a hanging fabric and resin structure, resembles a stomach&nbsp;digesting an unknown object hypnotically rotating on a screen immersed in its fleshy folds.

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/body2.jpg" />No-show blister breath

While these two works feel like abject parts of a larger being, other pieces feel like whole beings. No-show blister breath stands astride two tall cinder blocks resembling stocky legs, and Plush ply propriocept; subgenre bivalvia looks like it is about to surge forward like a sea creature or a bacterium on its tentacle-like appendages. This work in particular suggests a human connection,&nbsp;its cupped form offering up cascades of braided hair and found objects like jewelry and shoe stretchers.

It is tempting to think of the show in its entirety as a body of its own: a body of work in the traditional sense. Both as individual pieces&nbsp;and as a whole, the works resist this tidy classification just as they resist binaries of scale or human/nonhuman, beautiful or grotesque. Like the organisms and experiences they represent, there is no clean way to parse or organize these objects. Our bodies are not just a single organism but hosts to colonies of bacteria and parasites, much like we are colonies of organisms populating the ecological body we call Earth. From macro to micro, organic to plastic, these bizarre bodies refuse to sit still.

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<img class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.mplsart.com/written/temp/body3.jpg" />Lipid study

Casanova&rsquo;s work is a link in the evolutionary chain that brought us Eva Hesse&rsquo;s latex and resin works and Lynda Benglis&rsquo;s foaming waves of polyurethane and rippling waxwork. The world of Underbelly nods to its Feminist ancestors and embraces the body as something beyond gender and even beyond human. While our understanding of self as a species is expanding to see ourselves as colonies of organisms and even as cyborgs augmented by smartphones, some have even been heard murmuring the term &ldquo;Post-Human&rdquo; lately. Casanova urges us to recognize that despite new conceptual leaps in self-understanding, we are nowhere near ready to become Post-Body. Whether through art or science, our culture has a long way to go before we fully understand who we are and perhaps even further to go before we are comfortable in our own multi-organismal skin.

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<a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/underbelly">Underbelly</a> opens Friday, August 10th from 7pm-12am at <a href="https://publicfunctionary.org/calendar/underbelly-kate-casanova">Public Functionary</a> and is on view through August 26th. Gallery hours are Tuesdays &amp; Thursdays, 12-6pm; Fridays, 3-7pm; and Saturdays 12-5pm.

All photos courtesy Public Functionary.

"Underbelly" explores our evolving concept of the body using materials that reflect our own organic, synthetic, and ecosystemic nature.

Written by Raina BelleauWebsite

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