Ahmoo Angeconeb

Bockley Gallery is excited to announce its upcoming exhibition of works on paper by Canadian artist Ahmoo Angeconeb. This exhibit marks a chance to see Ahmoo’s work in the U.S. where he has rarely shown. This is his first show at Bockley Gallery.

Ahmoo’s bold and kinetic images arise from traditional indigenous stories and also convey his personal vision. His drawings feature colored pencil on dark paper creating a chiaroscuro effect while his prints make use of colored-paper background and dark pigments resulting in dynamic color contrasts. Known for his use of Anishinaabe iconography, Ahmoo tells personal and spiritual stories through figures and symbols his people have used for a thousand years. Many of his works are offered as a “restorative vision” for healing. Imbedded in the images are family history and biography. Figures depicted include Thunderbirds, water spirits, canoes, and clan animals surrounded by radiating “peckings” to indicate smoke used in ceremonies. The “wide-eyed” humans central to these works are a new and particular innovation specific to Ahmoo’s creations.

January 11 through February 11, 2012

Dietrich Sieling
Aerodynamic Karaoke

Bockley Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition entitled Aerodynamic Karaoke by Dietrich Sieling. The exhibition presents bold works on scratchboard and paper that combine text and form to portray impossibilities such as rhythms printed on air and karaoke to wordless music, alongside wished-for improbabilities such as grape-flavored Oreos and other refreshingly original treats. Dietrich Sieling’s many works presented in Aerodynamic Karaoke draw the viewer into a deeply interior world rendered with humor and intensity.

December 3, 2011 through January 7, 2012

Jim Denomie
Works on Paper

Bockley Gallery announces its upcoming exhibition of new works on paper by Minnesota-based artist Jim Denomie. Bright and playful, these works open unexpected dimensions and point to new directions while they continue Denomie’s characteristic humor and serious social commentary.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto appear in one series, while a couple canoes alongside a grinning duck in another series. The exhibit includes a number of prints, both etchings and monoprints, as well as paintings created in acrylic on paper that introduce new Denomie characters in colorful portraits. These works on paper, mostly created since May of 2011, suggest just some of Denomie’s recent creative outpour. During a two-week residency in Oregon, Denomie created a body of over 72 new monotypes and monoprints. He has since reworked dozens of those prints in oil stick, which results in dramatic texture and wonderful clarity of color.

The exhibition presents dozens of images unframed in order to reveal the intimate nature of works on paper and to bring into focus how the artist’s materials influence his creative outcome. The result of this presentation of unframed works creates a feel as informal and as deeply informative as a studio visit. The installation allows us a close-up view as Denomie encounters “the unexpected” within his own new work.

October 22 through November 19, 2011

Andrea Carlson
VORE

Bockley Gallery is proud to announce its upcoming exhibition of a selection of works by Twin Cities-based artist Andrea Carslon.  Recently expanded, the VORE series was originally mounted at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo in 2010 and acquired, in part, by the National Gallery of Canada earlier this year. These mixed media works on paper, several presented on four panels to create single large-scale images, both startle and attract the viewer.

September 17 through October 15, 2011

Pot Luck

Time again for our annual summer pot luck. Grills will be provided, so bring something to throw on, and, a side-dish if you are so inclined, refreshments will also be available.

Artists this year will include: Carolyn Anderson, Ahmoo Angeconeb, Frank Big Bear ,Stuart Brings Plenty, Julie Buffalohead, Jim Denomie, Glen Hanson, Pat and Gage Kruse, Stuart Nielsen, Jim Proctor, John Ratzloff, Wendy Red Star, Elizabeth Simonson, John Snyder, Brian Sobaski, David Sollie, Francis Yellow, Star Wallowing Bull.

July 30 through August 27, 2011

Zoran Mojsilov
Grandma's Magic

Bockley Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition of sculpture and drawings by Twin Cities-based artist Zoran Mojsilov. Titled Grandma’s Magic the show features work inspired by his native Serbia, the former Yugoslavia, and by the life and spirit of his Serbian grandmother who lived in the ancient village of Vlasi. Raised in Belgrade before moving to Minneapolis in the mid-1980s, Mojsilov is known for his powerful, rough-hewn sculptures, large and small, made from stone, wood and metal.

June 17 through July 23, 2011

George Morrison
New York School

Bockley Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of more than a dozen paintings and works on paper by Minnesota artist George Morrison (1919-2000) that were created during the time when he largely lived and worked in New York City from the mid -1940s until the early 1960s.

Morrison’s work reveals a unique fusion of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist ideas, elements and techniques. His often paint-laden canvases and complex drawings were populated by bold abstract shapes, grid-like patterns of color and disembodied floating forms. They sometimes hinted at landscapes. A sophisticated colorist, Morrison understood how vivid and uncommon hues combined with the tactility of a gestural brush stroke could make even the most abstract of paintings dynamic. “I like the so-called magical surface of a painting, the marks that a painter makes,” he once explained.“…I am interested in the phenomenon of paint and the act of painting. Using Surrealist ideas and techniques, I let images emerge from masses of paint. So there are hidden associations that become real for me in the final mark.“

May 14 through June 11, 2011

Wendy Red Star
American Spirit

Bockley Gallery is pleased to announce our second exhibition with Portland based artist Wendy Red Star.

“For more than a century outsiders captivated by the perceived stereotypes of American Indian cultures have appropriated and distorted elements of those cultures for their own purposes. These people often ignored the impact of this colonizing process on the Indians themselves. The work in this exhibition examines the commercialization and appropriation of American Indian cultures and images. These persistent co-optations by western society constitute a form of cultural imperialism that contributes to the destruction of American Indian culture and identity.

American Spirit is both a comment on historical and popular culture’s revision of Native American culture, and my personal perspective on current Native customs as a biracial Crow Indian woman. The work in this series walks a fine line in attempting to blur or blend these two perceptions into a re-imagined approach to Native American imagery.”

Wendy Red Star

April 9 through May 7, 2011

Private Worlds

Bockley Gallery is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition Private Worlds that features assemblages and works on paper by 13 self-taught artists. The work, which has been culled from private collections and Todd Bockley’s personal inventory, demonstrates the personal inventiveness of self-taught artists and their keen disinterest in artistic or cultural norms. As the term ‘self-taught’ suggests, none had any specific art training. The artists, most of whom have passed away, lived and worked in Europe and the United States from the mid-19th to 21st centuries.

Artists include: Therésè Bonnelabay, James Castle, Henry Darger, Clementine Hunter, Frank Jones, Franz Kernbeis, Johann Korec, Raphaël Lonné, Otto Prinz, Josef Karl Rädler, A.G. Rizzoli, Simon Sparrow, Scottie Wilson.

March 5 through April 2, 2011

John Ratzloff
Portraits

Bockley Gallery is pleased to announce its second exhibition with Twin Cities photographer John Ratzloff. The exhibition, entitled “Portraits," will display a selection of work from Ratzloff’s twenty-year career. 

In 1991, after the first bombing of Baghdad, Ratzloff began photographing peaceful people. The work began with portraits and interviews of peaceful activist women, including Meridel Le Sueur and Winona La Duke. This experience inspired his sixteen years of making portraits and landscapes on The White Earth Indian Reservation.

The 10 portraits in the exhibit span 20 years of photography. Five are from his early years. The balance of portraits in the exhibit are made on his most recent path of seeking and photographing local gardeners, sculptors, authors, musicians, explorers and morel mushrooms. In their essence, they are about potentials for noble existence life on this planet has to offer. As such, the portraits are honest, straight, respectful and hopeful. 

January 14 through February 19, 2011

Pat and Gage Kruse
Jim Proctor

Bockley Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Pat and Gage Kruse and Jim Proctor.

Pat and Gage Kruse create exquisitely crafted tableaus from Birch bark, a material which has a traditional meaning in the historical art and artifacts of Native American image-making and story-telling. Usually associated with narrative conventions (these being historically associated with the winter months, making their showing a fitting tribute to the emergence of winter), Pat and Gage Cruz have translated Birch bark into a contemporary and innovative mode of presentation. The tableaus which they create are not dependent upon traditional examples, but rather a translation and abstraction of these precedents in the aim of formal innovation and artistic re-imagining.

Jim Proctor is similarly interested in historical example and natural material. His work generally reproduces the established presentation of the scientific specimen, but he aims to introduce a newly unnatural and fabricated object into the natural world. Using discovered and disparate natural materials in order to create a hybrid and complex “reality,” Procter knowingly complicates our notion of the “real” and the “fabricated." With twinned activist and aesthetic imperatives, Procter forces us into a consideration of both natural wonder and imaginative innovation.

December 3 through January 8, 2011

T.L. Solien
Bogusville

The exhibition, entitled “Bogusville," will display a representative selection of paintings and works on paper from the artist. Created over the last five years, these works are unified in their exploration of 19th Century American Western expansion as this relates to the practice of painting, and Solein’s central belief that both are fundamentally the products of myth and deception. In Solien’s words:

“The title refers to mis-information provided to potential land speculators by the railroad, prior to building a bridge over the Red River of the North, near Fargo-Moorhead, in the late 19th century. Speculators bought land adjacent to the presumed railroad's right-of-way and built the 'foundation' of a domestic and retail community…The railroad undermined land speculators by relocating the bridging plan to their advantage. The soon-to-be-abandoned initial development site was named 'Bogusville' by the locals…Metaphorically, I connect 'Bogusville' to the fictive 'theatricality' implicit in Painting, as well as to the 'bait-and-switch' process that has affected or, altered the constructs that suggest our personal, societal, political, ethical, and historical 'reality.'” T.L. Solien

These concerns — historical, conceptual, and painterly — are propelled in these works by the fictive protagonist of Ahab’s widow (as  appearing in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” and Sena Jeter Naslund’s “Ahab’s Wife)," creating a heterogeneous and complex narrative of shifting (and often unreliable) effects.

October 23 through November 20, 2010

Julie Buffalohead

Bockley Gallery is pleased to begin its 25th season with an exhibition of new work by Julie Buffalohead. In these fantastic tableaux animal and human reality are the same, and in these drawings, she introduces new players in this hermetic world, cartoon characters like Sponge Bob and Snoopy (perhaps a nod to motherhood).

Some drawings are disconcerting and make us smile, others are quite dark, but dark with a purpose like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Her strange world has an incredible internal consistency, though we may not understand its logic, we also don’t doubt it.

September 11 through October 16, 2010