The M and Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts present In Our Minds, an exhibition celebrating art making as a form of research, improvisation, and play. In Our Minds features recent works by Beatrix*Jar, Bill Crane, Kramer Hegenbarth, HML, Mary Johnson, Ashlea Karkula, Don Porcella, Mark Schoening, Andrew Seymour, Briana Shelstad, Dietrich Sieling, and Victor Van—artists who revel in the process of creation as an opportunity to test ideas and see how they will play out in material form.
Trusting their intuition to make material and aesthetic decisions as they go, these artists transform and enliven everyday materials and themes into prompts for curiosity, enjoyment, and an occasional bit of humor. In Kramer Hegenbarth’s hands, functional ceramics solidify into monster mouths. HML sews together humble scraps of fabric to create a one-of-a-kind muscle suit. In Mary Johnson’s Nightingale Rug, an assemblage of squeaky dog toys forms a vibrant, playful abstraction. Don Porcella uses humble pipe cleaners to create whimsical, immersive landscapes. Andrew Seymour’s brightly colored parades of circular forms exude the warm, sunny, invincible spirit of summer.
Balms for anxious and uncertain times, the artworks represent the self-trust and resourcefulness of their makers, along with their openness to different artistic outcomes and to having fun along the way. In Our Minds extends visitors an invitation to engage in multisensory play from the sidewalks and skyways of downtown St. Paul. These are serious reflections on the human condition, to be sure, but they also ask if art needs to be “serious” to be important.
In Our Minds is organized in collaboration with Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, a progressive visual arts studio and theater company committed to artistic excellence and radical inclusion. At Interact, artists with and without disabilities work side by side every day as peer creators to challenge perceptions of disability as an experience of profound fullness rather than lack. In Our Minds features artists from inside and outside the Interact studio community. Taking cues from Interact, In Our Minds seeks to advance frameworks for understanding creativity that move away from myths of independence towards recognition and celebration of interdependence.
On a sunny summer Tuesday, Interact was abuzz with artists painting, creating, drawing, discussing, rehearsing, and sculpting. Among them were some artists whose work is featured in In Our Minds. Communications Specialist Meredith Heneghan spoke with two of them, Kramer Hegenbarth and HML, about their art, their inspiration, and how Interact changed the course of their lives. Click here to read their interviews!
Beatrix*Jar
Beatrix*Jar
The Beatrix*Jar Show presents Edible Flower Arrangement, 2022
Mixed media
Courtesy of the artists
From the artists:
Bianca Janine Pettis and Jacob Aaron Roske are bonded cats collaborating as artist collective Beatrix*Jar. The duo has created work together for nearly nineteen years. They find their inspiration in play. Together they have performed live concerts, hands-on circuit bending workshops, and DJ sets. They’ve created murals, videos, and public art events. The pair has also released five albums and creates fabric cats, birds, and sculptures.
Our artwork features an episode from our show, “The Beatrix*Jar Show,” with special guest “Edible Flower Arrangement.” The video was performed and edited by Beatrix*Jar, including an original soundtrack.
Surrounding our video is an explosion of sound and color. We created an imaginary Audio Playground with our favorite musical instruments. We also hand-sewed a crowd of fabric heads, a crew of fabric cats, and a few birds to play on the machines. We also included large-scale oil paintings and screen-printed works on canvas, wood, and sparkle paper.
Image description: Bianca and Jacob dressed as the band “Fancy Dance Explosion” with several Fancy Dancers (also played by Bianca and Jacob) in the background.
William Crane
William Crane
Untitled, 2019
Mixed media on fabric
Courtesy of the artist and Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts
In the last twenty-plus years, William (Bill) Crane has developed a massive body of work composed largely of ink drawings and acrylic paintings. In densely filled pages, explosive fields of color, and loosely rendered figures, Crane expresses his love of nature, animals, and friends—often referencing scenes from the Interact studio, where he has long found inspiration. An avid observer of the everyday, Crane is a visual historian, recording the people and places that move him.
From the artist:
I am an artist. I make drawings.
Image description: A square painting has a black border that blends into a scribbly light blue, tan, and reddish interior with line drawings of figures in black.
William Crane
Untitled, 2019
Marker on paper
Courtesy of the artist and Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts
In the last twenty-plus years, William (Bill) Crane has developed a massive body of work composed largely of ink drawings and acrylic paintings. In densely filled pages, explosive fields of color, and loosely rendered figures, Crane expresses his love of nature, animals, and friends—often referencing scenes from the Interact studio, where he has long found inspiration. An avid observer of the everyday, Crane is a visual historian, recording the people and places that move him.
From the artist:
I am an artist. I make drawings.
Image description: A group of figures drawn in a wide array of bright yellow, pink, green, blue, black, and red shades of marker.
Kramer Hegenbarth
Photo credit: Xavier Tavera
Kramer Hegenbarth
Rock Creatures, 2020–2022
Ceramic
Courtesy of the artist and Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts
From the artist:
These are very imaginative rock creatures. I was thinking about nature, like plants and animals, when I made them, and a little bit about Little Shop of Horrors (1986). They’re creepy-cute, and each one has its own personality. I like bright colors, the textures, and hardness and softness at the same time—like, the teeth and stuff are really pointy, but the rocks are smooth. I will continue adding to this series until some new concept sparks my imagination.
Image description:A series of coloful, fantastical clay mouths, some with teeth, tongues, and appendages, all wide open.
HML
Photo credit: Xavier Tavera
HML
Schwarzenegger, 2022
Mixed fiber
Courtesy of the artist and Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts
From the artist:
My work is heavily influenced by growing up in the 80s and 90s, especially the colors and the fabric. The muscle suit series explores sexuality, gender, and disability. The suits break down the body into a form that you can see from the inside out, which is a huge part of disability. If it’s not seeable, people don’t recognize it. And if it is seeable, it comes with being ostracized. With the suits, I’m thinking: ‘Here’s a body that someone will treat me better in.’ I make them androgynous so they’re usable by all people—anyone who is disabled or trying on a new body type.
Image description: A floral, stuffed, 3D collar and bodice atop a brown stuffed ribcage. Behind the ribcage is a red triangle, and attached to the bodice are two sleeves of light pink and neon green with yellow stuff hands sticking out of the bottom.
Mary Johnson
Mary Johnson
Riding Luck, 2022
Mixed media (synthetic fur, vinyl, rag rug scraps, sequins, found objects)
Courtesy of the artist
Image description: A stuffed horse made of various shiny, iridescent, colorful, and fuzzy materials.
Mary Johnson
Nightingale Rug, 2007/2011
Mixed media (dog tog pelts, squeakers)
Courtesy of the artist
From the artist:
My work presents a gathering of cast-off materials reassembled intuitively and crafted with their material history in mind. In the case of Nightingale Rug, dog toys distressed by my pets are the starting point for my process. This collaboration results in new and transcendent life for materials that would otherwise be discarded.
Image description: A large rug is made up of sewn-together dog squeakers and stuffed toys in all sorts of bright colors.
Ashlea Karkula
Ashlea Karkula
Shark Bite, 2018
Acrylic on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts
From the artist:
I like it when my art makes people smile. That’s why it’s quirky and has a lot of personality to it. There’s a sense of humor in my paintings. My personality is on the canvas. I don’t pick the colors, they pick me. I like under the sea things and animals in general.
I became an artist when I started working at Interact in 2014. In addition to being an artist, I’m very active in about ten sports. Basketball, tennis, skiing, and softball are my favorites. I have two dogs: Tallulah and Bear. I’m a very active person, and art is a part of my entire life.
Image description: Ashlea Karkula, Sharkbite, 2018, acrylic on stretched canvas, 36 x 36 inches. An exciting crowd of animals covers the canvas in vibrant colors. A tangerine shark with blue eyes, grey shark with tongue sticking out, and green alligator-like creature are featured more prominently in the chaotic array. Smaller creatures fill spaces throughout the scene, their eyes large and circular. Some animals play basketball, intermingle, and smile. The whole composition is covered with bright hues. Aquatic blue fills the background..
Don Porcella
Don Porcella
Natural Selection, 2022
Mixed media (pipe cleaners)
Courtesy of the artist
From the artist:
Inspired by nature, consumer culture, and science fiction, my work is highly reflective of my upbringing. Growing up in the country without much at my disposal I learned to use what I could. That resourcefulness is reflected in the art I make today, which celebrates craft, the handmade, and folk/outsider art. By creating paintings, sculpture, drawings, and installations from lowbrow materials, I seek to transform and elevate the materials, while simultaneously presenting a unique world that is shamelessly awkward and unabashedly comical. My work often references the art world, art history, America’s rampant consumerism, and alien conspiracy theories, allowing the subjective and strange to penetrate humorous representations of a wildly imaginative reality
This installation is made by hand weaving pipe cleaners together to make three dimensional forms. The material invites us in for a deeper understanding and allows everyone to enjoy the transformation of a common art making material.
Image description:
Mark Schoening
Mark Schoening
The System, 2018
Laser cut wood, latex, steel fasteners
Courtesy of the artist
From the artist:
The System is an ongoing collection of individual sculptures presented as a whole. The arrangement of intricate structures embraces a visually playful design language in an evolving, generative process simulating an algorithm. Oscillating between active and static imagery, the sculptures visually vibrate and imply depth, movement, or function, while shifting between both two- and three-dimensional illusion. The primary color palette unifies the individual sculptures while conceptually connecting to design exercises in form, symmetry, perspective, repetition, balance, and sequential order. Although rigid and immaculate in construction, my process engages an imaginative form of systematic creativity to invent and play.
Image description: Four shelves hold sixteen different playful-looking, geometric, patterned sculptures, all made of red, yellow, and blue materials.
Andrew Seymour
Photo credit: Xavier Tavera
Andrew Seymour
Summer, 2018
Mixed media on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts
Almost every piece that Andrew Seymour has created in the last decade is titled Summer—a reference to summers at his mother’s lake cabin in northern Minnesota. Seymour describes the circular forms throughout his work as people, and they appear in every piece. In some cases, they represent family at the lake or artists in the studio. Seymour begins each piece by drawing a circle in the top left corner of the paper or canvas, working across the page in a way that echoes the process of writing.
Image description:A green, yellow, red, blue, and brown background and a multicolored series of dots flowing through the center of the painting, some circled in white.
Briana Shelstad
Photo credit: Xavier Tavera
Briana Shelstad
Wonder Woman Dress, 2019
Mixed fiber
Courtesy of the artist and Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts
From the artist:
I designed the dress from the Wonder Woman movie I have. I made it for the kids at Frasier Hospital to wear for Halloween. I worked with kids at my old job at a preschool. The feeling of the costume is, you have to feel the fabric. It’s really stretchable. My work is really important to me. It’s incredible being an artist. I’ve been an artist my whole life.
Image description: A Wonder Woman dress with a yellow skirt, blue, red and gold accents, a blue, yellow, and red bodice with “W”s on the chest, and gold shoulder straps with red dots.
Dietrich Sieling
Dietrich Sieling
Sunny Outside, 2020
Color pencil and photo collage on acrylic
Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery
From the artist:
Hello, my name is Dietrich Sieling. My mom Shelli is helping me write this. I have complex autism and talking and writing language is difficult. Sentences are hard, but I like words very much.
For the drawings, I like the white Bristol paper, 11 X 14, and prismacolor pencils. Espresso and black grape color pencils are my favorites. My drawings right now are buildings that I walk by every day. Apartments and houses. I am in some of the drawings and people that I love and see and want to see are in some of the drawings. It is a different time with these drawings. Wearing masks and having coffee outside and walking and thinking about the streets and my neighborhood. And looking at my photo albums, at the people that I love and wish to see. I put them in my drawings. These drawings are about this time.
Image description: Drawn figures stand in front of a bus, muted color blocks make up the sky. “ESPRESSO” is written up the left side, and other words are smashed together up the right side.
Victor Van
Photo credit: Xavier Tavera
Victor Van
KS95 Best Variety Songs 2017–2018, 2019
Ink on paper
Courtesy of the artist and Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts
From the artist:
They’re pictures. Made while listening to KS95. Like the pop songs. Bruno Mars. The writing is the song lyrics. The images are random, based on Google search images. They’re fan fiction books. Making them since 2013. I love the Fonz. Make fonts small so that people can’t read it. I’ve been drawing since 1993.
Image description: A yellow-tan background with stylized test that reads “KS95 Best Variety Songs 2317-18”
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