Banner image: THREADS no16 (detail), 2024. Thread on panel, 24 x 18&quot;.&nbsp;Image courtesy of the <a href="https://www.tiakeobounpheng.com" target="_blank">artist&#39;s website</a>.

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How do we reconcile what we don&rsquo;t know? How do we unearth familial history without undoing ourselves completely? As Tia Keobounpheng asks, &ldquo;What would it look and feel like to exist knowing the things that have been buried?&rdquo; Not to perpetuate narratives, but to expand from what is learned? Why do we wait until it&rsquo;s too late to ask questions?&nbsp;

These are the questions that animate Keobounpheng&rsquo;s exhibition <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/events/three-rooms" target="_blank">Gas&rsquo;kal (In the Space Between)</a>. In the uncharted territory of reconciling ancestral truth, Keobounpheng weaves and unweaves tapestries. Maps. Portraits. Call them what you may, each piece is a unique combination of colored pencil drawn on wood and thread interlacing drilled holes. With work that perplexes the human eye, and emanates an &ldquo;auric,&rdquo; from-the-body quality, Keobounpheng familiarizes herself with lost relatives and seeks understanding in the space between grief, examination, and reimagination.

With past exhibitions following Keobounpheng&rsquo;s maternal line into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sápmi" target="_blank">S&aacute;pmi</a> and northern Sweden, Norway, and Finland, this body of work sits closer generationally, attentive to her paternal immediate family. Keobounpheng cared for her aunt in the process of dying. The overall family relationship to her aunt was strained, leading Keobounpheng to visit her while in hospice, help process her belongings after she passed, and plan her&nbsp;funeral. Every piece in the show was at some stage of completion within that time frame. This burdensome reality set the conditions for creating, and it shaped Keobounpheng&rsquo;s exhibition at Weinstein Hammons&rsquo; Three Rooms, a concurrent grouping of three solo exhibitions on view through February 8. For Keobounpheng, coming home to the work amidst nursing home visits and funeral arrangements made the tapestries a place to drop in. &ldquo;Coming from design, I have access to tools &mdash; I could be mapping all of this out on a computer and have a machine cut all of the holes precisely &mdash;&nbsp;but instead I do it all with my body,&quot; she says. &quot;I believe women have been working with their hands and with their bodies to process their lot in life for millennia.&quot;&nbsp;

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<img alt="Abstract geometric artworks in an art gallery" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/949febe7-4a2c-435f-a8c4-8af74c22f67b/949febe7-4a2c-435f-a8c4-8af74c22f67b.full.jpg" />Gas&#39;kal&nbsp;(In the Space Between)&nbsp;(detail), installation view. Image courtesy of the gallery.

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She engages with both the visceral and somatic aspects of her work, completing the stress cycle in a way.&nbsp;Employing muscle, skin, and bones to drill, color, and thread repetitively, Keobounpheng is somatically, physically in the work. But from an emotional sense the work is wholly visceral, given the heart-, brain-, and gut-centered processing taking place. &ldquo;It taps into the multiple ways of knowing &mdash;&nbsp;epigenetically or through blood memory or whatever you want to call it &mdash;&nbsp;what I&rsquo;m trying to support in my practice is allowing myself to acknowledge what my body knows.&rdquo; Together the elements of Keobounpheng&rsquo;s work support a reconciliation with this place of knowable and unknowable family truths. Speaking about the family matters behind the work is delicate, given the tensions and falling-outs of the past. &ldquo;I think what I&rsquo;m doing in my work, in general, is I am processing unresolved issues in my lineage.&rdquo; The physical process of making the work aided her emotional metabolism, and given the intensity of relating to the work in that way, the clarity of the exhibition&rsquo;s meaning came to her only with some distance.&nbsp;

Keobounpheng began utilizing geometry as a visual language after being exposed to her son&rsquo;s 4th grade distance learning curriculum during the pandemic. &ldquo;Geometry felt like a perfect order,&rdquo; she says, and thinking about geometry as a reflection of the earth was eye-opening. &ldquo;For me it felt like I had been existing in that linear plane, and geometry helps me drop down into the circular plane, which is a very different way of existing. You can liken it to more indigenous ways of thinking versus colonial ways of thinking.&rdquo; Embracing the &ldquo;expansive,&rdquo; &ldquo;transformative,&rdquo; and &ldquo;inclusive&rdquo; expressions of geometry, Keobounpheng is able to explore interwoven relationships, connectivity, and diversity in her practice.

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<img alt="Abstract geometric art made of circles of thread on plywood" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/8a96b851-1d2e-4aeb-b907-3238cff73cb3/8a96b851-1d2e-4aeb-b907-3238cff73cb3.full.jpg" />THREADS no17, 2024. Thread on panel, 20 x 16&quot;.&nbsp;Image courtesy of the <a href="https://www.tiakeobounpheng.com" target="_blank">artist&#39;s website</a>.

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There are three series present in Gas&rsquo;kal, with each piece falling under the groupings of STUDY, THREADS, or WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE. The STUDY trilogy explores the relationship between colored pencil and thread on wood, and the transparency that gets caught in the middle. Sometimes blurring her own categorical lines, Keobounpheng brings threads to pieces that originally didn&#39;t have any. Each THREADS piece tends to &ldquo;explore and practice holding multiple patterns together&rdquo; with overlapping circles and channels, growing in complexity from piece to piece. THREADS no17, THREADS no20, and THREADS no16 show that progression.

Meanwhile WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE (WDYTYA) is a series of abstract portraits. Embodying an individual or a relationship between multiple individuals, each piece is enveloped by black and white capsule-shaped forms. The largest piece in the show, WDYTYA no13, represents Keobounpheng&rsquo;s aunt, and the experience of being alongside her and helping her pass. At the top of this piece, there is a &ldquo;release valve&rdquo; as she puts it, a space without threading or color but pencil marks indicating there was meant to be. Allowing that space to breathe, to switch course, can allow for a shift in her perspective of the ancestor being studied. Something Keobounpheng did differently with this show, specifically with the WDYTYA pieces, is expanding the threads beyond the capsule form, reaching them across the wood. The negative space created at the edges of each panel provides a contrast to the concentrated color within the capsule. &ldquo;And it becomes almost like lace, or some sort of draping over,&rdquo; she says. &ldquo;I finished the colored pencil layer just a few hours before she passed&hellip; So the process of threading was literally like laying things to rest in a physical way.&rdquo; In WDYTYA no14 there is a similar laciness, and Keobounpheng says this piece reflects her grandma, who died when she was one.

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<img alt="Abstract geometric art made of colorful threads on plywood" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/31089d2a-ad2d-48bc-a88e-ac1f3509be13/31089d2a-ad2d-48bc-a88e-ac1f3509be13.full.jpg" />WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE no13, 2024. Colored pencil and thread on panel, 96 x 48&quot;. Image courtesy of the <a href="https://www.tiakeobounpheng.com" target="_blank">artist&#39;s website</a>.

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The S&aacute;mi word gas&rsquo;kal speaks to what exists between the threads. It speaks to Keobounpheng&rsquo;s &ldquo;between, in, and among&rdquo; relationship to her work, and the cellular memory that stretches, bridging her to her aunt. The artist explains how she sees &ldquo;the warp as threads of time and lineage, and the weft as our learned behaviors that are held in place by the warp.&rdquo; With the criss-crossed nature of warp and weft, one cannot be loosened without the other. Careful not to displace her own self while weaving through time and lineage, she made an adjustment. &ldquo;When I started using geometry, I began to remove myself by removing this weft in a way. Thinking of the tapestries as foundations of warp that are telling me stories about who and where I come from, and it&#39;s then in between these threads where the emotion, nuance, and maybe even the visceral knowing exists.&rdquo;&nbsp;

One of the pieces in the show, WDYTYA no12, contains a dark blue cloud that hovers above the capsule form. Keobounpheng came to see this tapestry as her own portrait, and the weighty ray of responsibility she carried through her aunt&rsquo;s death, as well as the holding of both collective and individual grief. Recalling a hospice visit near the end of her aunt&rsquo;s life, she said, &ldquo;It was very clear that her brain was swirling around time and mixing things together, and at the same time would say things that were strange but powerfully poetic&hellip;she was clearly in an in-between space.&rdquo;&nbsp;

There&rsquo;s a natural, tragic abstraction there, like pulling on a thread and unmaking a garment. Keobounpheng&rsquo;s exhibition reveals what remains when grief unravels:&nbsp;the concurrent feelings of ending and endlessness; the often uncomfortable, lengthened range of perception and memory;&nbsp;and the changed terrain of lived, corporeal experience, all bound by that unnamed immensity.&nbsp;◼︎&nbsp;

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<img alt="Abstract artwork of color-blocked capsule shape" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/7c7afee5-261e-438f-9927-578a698689cd/7c7afee5-261e-438f-9927-578a698689cd.full.jpg" />

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE no12, 2024. Colored pencil and thread on panel,&nbsp;24 x 18&quot;. Image courtesy of the <a href="https://www.tiakeobounpheng.com" target="_blank">artist&#39;s website</a>.

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<a href="https://www.weinsteinhammons.com/exhibitions-2" target="_blank">Three Rooms</a>, which includes Gas&#39;kal&nbsp;(In the Space Between), is on view at Weinstein Hammons Gallery through February 8. This is the first of three articles about the exhibitions on display. Follow the gallery on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/weinsteinhammons/" target="_blank">@weinsteinhammons</a>.

To see more of Tia Keobounpheng&#39;s work, visit <a href="https://www.tiakeobounpheng.com" target="_blank">her website</a> or follow her on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/tiakeo.art/" target="_blank">@tiakeo.art</a>.

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Keobounpheng's 'Gas’kal' is the first of three concurrent exhibitions comprising ‘Three Rooms’ at Weinstein Hammons Gallery

The Making in the Unraveling: Tia Keobounpheng on the visceral, the familial, and the somatic 

<hr />
&quot;Worth a Look&quot; is a series of semi-regular&nbsp;essays&nbsp;about excellent art, interesting ideas, and&nbsp;whatever other cool stuff&nbsp;we find around town. Go see art;&nbsp;<a href="https://ourculturemag.com/2022/02/16/the-beneficial-effect-of-art-on-our-brain/" target="_blank">it&#39;s good for you</a>.

<hr />
Banner image:&nbsp;<a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/29/rhiannon-davis/" target="_blank">Rhiannon Davis</a>, Be good! (detail), 2024. Magazines, recycled material, 11 x 8.5&quot;. All images courtesy of <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/north-star-3-online/" target="_blank">Twin Cities Collage Collective</a>, unless otherwise noted.

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There&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-Ktg9juTT9/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==" target="_blank">a reel</a> going around on Instagram right now (shout-out to MPLSART head honcho Blaine Garrett for sending it my way)&nbsp;about a Depression-era photo editor, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Stryker">Roy Stryker</a>.&nbsp;Stryker worked for the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and hired photographers to document the lives of rural Americans. During his time at the FSA, the agency produced some 77,000 photos for distribution to the press and public, telling the story of Dust Bowl poverty and the need for New Deal policy.&nbsp;He is also the man who, armed with only a hole punch, personally destroyed thousands&nbsp;of his photographers&#39; images.

&quot;Destroyed&quot; is not exactly the right word (unless you ask those photographers), but he certainly rendered them unpublishable, punching big black holes out of candid shots of smiling farm children, unassuming bricklayers, barren landscapes, and a thousand other scenes of everyday American life. According to photographer Zach Dobson, who created the Instagram reel, Stryker&rsquo;s purpose was to carefully curate the images put out by the FSA so that only the ones calculated to inspire pity and pathos made their way into print. (Think Dorothea Lange&rsquo;s famous shot of a worried mother, for example.) With his hole punch, he sought to compromise all of the film negatives that appeared subpar or off-message. It&rsquo;s a shame nobody bothered to suggest he just use a grease pencil, and&nbsp;by the time he heeded the complaints of his outraged photographers, it was too late.

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<img alt="Elderly couple obscured by big black dot standing over wooden crate" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/40b5b79c-03a7-4377-bede-56f47516452f/40b5b79c-03a7-4377-bede-56f47516452f.full.jpg" /><img alt="Bricklayer holding a skid of bricks over his shoulder in the sun" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/7304b6c0-f1d5-41ae-a52c-bc866465ed2e/7304b6c0-f1d5-41ae-a52c-bc866465ed2e.full.jpg" /><img alt="Smiling woman with big black dot over her face" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/a145ad61-9141-4ee6-b919-4a1329badb8d/a145ad61-9141-4ee6-b919-4a1329badb8d.full.jpg" />Images from the Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection at the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/photos/?fa=partof:farm+security+administration/office+of+war+information+black-and-white+negatives&amp;q=hole+punch" target="_blank">Library of Congress</a>.

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In the destruction, he added another layer of historical narrative to the images, forever marrying these real life scenes with the art direction of their government. It&rsquo;s a form of propaganda that tells on itself, telegraphing its values both through what it shows and what it hides. And with the intervention of one man &mdash; Stryker, a hapless black-and-white <a href="http://www.baldessari.org/unique/ost8u8axq9pc60pro02ojimycj4lry">Baldessari</a> of sorts &mdash; some of the images now hum at an even higher frequency. Such is the power of the cut picture.

This week a lot of you may not be able to make it out to see any art in person &mdash; maybe you&#39;re&nbsp;out of town for the holidays, maybe you&#39;re too busy &quot;entertaining&quot;&nbsp;family, or maybe, at the end of a long year,&nbsp;you&#39;re&nbsp;just not in the mood&nbsp;to put&nbsp;on pants and look for parking. Thankfully, Twin Cities Collage Collective has you covered with an online exhibition you can enjoy right from the couch.

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<img alt="Abstract collage of flowers and strawberries" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/efa2f4b7-4453-4451-8c17-0e065da7409a/efa2f4b7-4453-4451-8c17-0e065da7409a.full.jpg" />allison anne,&nbsp;spring is coming with a strawberry in the mouth, 2024. &nbsp;Handcut paper collage on cardstock, 7 x 5&quot;

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TCCC is spearheaded by artist&nbsp;<a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/24/allison-anne/">allison anne</a>, who has worked hard over the past few years to foster and platform the collage community, including by producing a series of gorgeous books called <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/north-star-3-online/" target="_blank">North Star Collage</a>.&nbsp;North Star Collage&#39;s&nbsp;third iteration, fittingly, takes three forms: (1) as a printed&nbsp;book&nbsp;<a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.bigcartel.com/product/north-star-collage-3" target="_blank">available to order</a>, (2)&nbsp;as an in-person exhibition at <a href="https://www.boilerroom.coffee" target="_blank">The Boiler Room Coffee Co.</a>&nbsp;in Stevens Square through December 31, and (3)&nbsp;as an <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/north-star-3-online/" target="_blank">online exhibition</a>, featuring almost entirely&nbsp;different works&nbsp;from what&#39;s&nbsp;in the print edition, along with pieces from a few extra artists to boot. That&#39;s three distinctly different celebrations of Minnesota-based&nbsp;collage&nbsp;that, it should be noted, were&nbsp;organized, built, and published with polish entirely by allison anne, whose passion for this project shines through in the care with which it is presented.&nbsp;I recommend seeking out the show and the&nbsp;book (I had the honor of having work in their first and second issues), but&nbsp;for now, hunkered down for the holidays,&nbsp;we&rsquo;re gonna&nbsp;stick with the jpegs.

The online gallery is set up so you can experience each image individually alongside the artist&rsquo;s statement and social media links, smartly allowing you to get more insight immediately on works you respond to. The first one that stops my cursor from clicking is <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/24/ben-dinino/" target="_blank">Ben DiNino</a>&rsquo;s Contort Yourself, a hand-cut portrait of a seven-limbed model perched impossibly on two chairs at once. Removing one figure&rsquo;s face &mdash; unlike with&nbsp;Stryker&rsquo;s empty voids &mdash; reveals another neck underneath, while mirrored and tangled torsos and legs are made all the more confusing by the empty, unaltered backdrop of a dirty white wall and scuffed up floorboards. It&#39;s a simple, complicated image that invites deciphering.

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<img alt="Surreal collage of multi-limbed woman sitting in an empty room" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/5a6cb7b3-99f2-422d-b716-fe0529a8f785/5a6cb7b3-99f2-422d-b716-fe0529a8f785.full.jpg" />Ben DiNino, Contort Yourself, 2024. Collaged paper, 10.5 x 8.75&quot;

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But don&#39;t stop there; keep clicking. There are lots to get through, with&nbsp;over 150 works in the gallery. Collage artists (in my experience being one) are hoarders at heart, and the breadth of source material that has been sliced, scissored, glued, lassoed, and pasted in this collection goes to show just how much source material there is in the world. I remember the surprise of going through my own stack of National Geographics looking for photos to cut up and actually recognizing&nbsp;elements&nbsp;that had already&nbsp;appeared in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.winstonsmith.com" target="_blank">Winston Smith</a>&#39;s&nbsp;collages in the 1980s, discovering them suddenly&nbsp;in their original state. The question then&nbsp;became, &quot;but&nbsp;what could&nbsp;I do with it?&quot; Just as with tubes of paint or a set of pencils, no two artists, given the same stack of magazines, would ever produce the same collage.

Some aesthetic genres do emerge within the North Star Collage collection, most notably abstraction, usually formulated with odd snippets of texture and color, and surrealism, which of course develops quite naturally when images start mashing and melding with one another. Mark Twain is supposed to have said that of course truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense. But collage is under no such obligation.

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<img alt="Abstract collage on a polaroid" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/ef6ed9aa-0a95-4205-aa95-ee5f367fb6e0/ef6ed9aa-0a95-4205-aa95-ee5f367fb6e0.full.jpg" /><img alt="Abstract black and white artwork" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/203ef2bb-6aaa-4534-8010-bbe14472b5ce/203ef2bb-6aaa-4534-8010-bbe14472b5ce.full.jpg" /><img alt="Collage of a smiling woman's face" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/1c7ed745-4e13-4066-b5fb-58277f5da816/1c7ed745-4e13-4066-b5fb-58277f5da816.full.jpg" />Top: Derek Meier, In Memoriam, 2023.&nbsp;Mixed media collage on analog photograph, 4 x 4&quot;. Middle:&nbsp;Aedric Donovan &amp;&nbsp;Rachel Robison, Home Movies, 2024. Paper &amp; digital collage, 7 x 3&quot;. Bottom: Nell Pierce, The Whole Truth (detail), 2022.&nbsp;Cut-up magazine on acrylic-painted wood, 48 x 60&quot;

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The abstractionists here include some real stand-outs, like <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/26/derek-meier/">Derek Meier</a>&rsquo;s mixed media polaroid; <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/27/jen-shaffer/">Jen Shaffer</a>&rsquo;s attention to rich, vintage colors; and <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/29/michael-schmidt/">Michael Smith</a>&rsquo;s almost geological layering of weathered, hand-painted paper. Some folks go beyond paper and scissors to achieve surprising results through unconventional methods, like <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/29/rachel-robison-aedric-donovan/" target="_blank">Rachel Robinson &amp; Aedric Donovan</a>&rsquo;s collaborative piece channeling electrical current through pieces of film in a darkroom. The result is a strange sort of hairy geometry, inky and spooky against jagged blocks of hard white nothingness.

A variety of other studio practices show up, as well. <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/28/mac-jones/">Mac Jones</a>&rsquo;s double-exposure gives us a seemingly in-camera collage of Kubrickian interiors. <a href="https://www.emilywalley.com">Emily Walley</a>&rsquo;s acrylic painting contains no physical collage at all, opting instead to chop up only the image of a precariously stacked rock, pinecone, and glass dish. And <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/26/e-holt/" target="_blank">E Holt</a>&rsquo;s source material sits in low relief like an assemblage, creating a little devotional offering of twisted text and scraps of leather binding from a 250-year-old book. On the other end of the size spectrum, <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/27/jessica-kitzman/">Jessica Kitzman</a> offers up a three foot by four foot curved quilt as her entry, and here the difference between online and in-person exhibitions becomes most prominent: the scales are all equalized. <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/29/nell-pierce/">Nell Pierce</a>&rsquo;s piece in the show clocks in at four by five feet, but it is shown at the same size as Meier&#39;s 4 x 4&quot; polaroid. If you zoom in on your browser, though, you can start to make out the astounding amount of detail that Pierce&nbsp;has packed into every square inch. (As you might expect, they&rsquo;re even better <a href="https://www.mplsart.com/written/2023/06/worth-a-look-meticulous-flora-at-public-functionary-and-night-club">in person</a>.)

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<img alt="Double exposed photo of red institutional interior" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/c2cb3ca7-4763-4473-b740-47bbb9a92147/c2cb3ca7-4763-4473-b740-47bbb9a92147.full.jpg" /><img alt="Black and white digital abstract art" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/a92af288-86fd-4b1d-80cb-fc62c8ae9a6a/a92af288-86fd-4b1d-80cb-fc62c8ae9a6a.full.jpg" /><img alt="Black and white photos of hands collaged into red and yellow painting" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/ef861aec-d834-4f07-82bd-316293aa1456/ef861aec-d834-4f07-82bd-316293aa1456.full.jpg" />Top: Mac Jones, Hall, 2023. Mixed media, 20 x 16&quot;. Middle: Matt Schuster, The Price of Hope, 2024. Digital collage, 12 x 9&quot;. Bottom: Genie Hien Tran, Am Phu, 2023. Mixed media, 30 x 22&quot;

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You&rsquo;ll find great examples of visual storytelling (<a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/27/genie-hien-tran/">Genie Hien Tran</a> and <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/27/juan-diego-perez-la-cruz/">Juan Diego Perez la Cruz</a> stand out in this regard) and digital experimentation (<a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/26/emily-mcbride/">Emily McBride</a> and <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/2024/10/28/matt-schuster/">Matt Schuster</a>, who relates Photoshop filters to classic Xerox zine-making) and scads of work crashing every kind of image you can imagine together: hot dogs, pornography, old fiddlers, high fashion. You name it, we&rsquo;ve cut it. It&rsquo;s this archival recycling that gives collage its charge, whether in the service of social criticism, mystical exploration, analog nostalgia, or simply the pursuit of a pleasing image, no matter how many other images faced destruction to get there.

I always wondered what the Nat Geo photographers would think of the butchery their pictures suffered at my scissors, just as Roy Stryker&rsquo;s colleagues&nbsp;bemoaned the accidental Dada inflicted by his hole punch. It&rsquo;s something to consider as social media platforms feed our own precious content straight into their AI learning models &mdash; what does ownership and authorship of an image actually look like? Is a slice or a rip or a punch transformative enough to make something your own? And what does the way we cut and paste old culture reveal about the context of here and now? Too many questions for a holiday break, I know; this was just supposed to be a fun read for Christmas. My advice is pull up the exhibition, give it a look, and see what grabs you. If you&#39;re still feeling adventurous, head over to the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/photos/?c=150&amp;fa=partof:farm+security+administration/office+of+war+information+black-and-white+negatives&amp;q=hole+punch&amp;sp=1&amp;st=list" target="_blank">Library of Congress</a>, and watch Stryker&#39;s spooky black dot jump from picture to picture (just search for &quot;hole punch&quot; to find them). Or better yet:&nbsp;everybody grab a gluestick and&nbsp;start chopping up that stack of&nbsp;Christmas cards.&nbsp;◼︎&nbsp;

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<img alt="Surreal collage of people and fish" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/383ef35f-bb86-444d-90a7-845ca86ae1b2/383ef35f-bb86-444d-90a7-845ca86ae1b2.full.jpg" />Denise Clemen, Motherhood #1, 2023.&nbsp;Analog collage with handmade paper, magazine and catalog pages, produce netting, and gel pen on wooden panel, 10 x 8&quot;

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<a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.com/north-star-3-online/" target="_blank">North Star Collage 3</a> is on view online via Twin Cities Collage Collective. The printed book is <a href="https://twincitiescollagecollective.bigcartel.com/product/north-star-collage-3" target="_blank">available to order&nbsp;online </a>and to buy at Burl Gallery, Love Token Vintage &amp; Handmade, and The Boiler Room Coffee Co, where an exhibition of works is on view through December 31.

You can follow TCCC on Instagram <a href="https://instagram.com/twincitiescollagecollective" target="_blank">@twincitiescollagecollective</a>.

The Twin Cities Collage Collective’s online show lets you enjoy the work of over 150 artists from the comfort of your computer

Worth A Look: North Star Collage 3

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&quot;Worth a Look&quot; is a series of semi-regular&nbsp;essays&nbsp;about excellent art, interesting ideas, and&nbsp;whatever other cool stuff&nbsp;we find around town. Go see art;&nbsp;<a href="https://ourculturemag.com/2022/02/16/the-beneficial-effect-of-art-on-our-brain/" target="_blank">it&#39;s good for you</a>.

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I&rsquo;ve never been wild about those lines of tape that museums put on the floor, the ones that mark off the&nbsp;artworks. I get their necessity, I respect their boundaries, and I value their vigilance in dissuading an overeager public from damaging the goods. You can certainly see a painting&nbsp;just fine from a foot or two away. But still, I always want to get right up on the thing. To make a work of art is to be&nbsp;intimately engaged with its surface, leaving only a matter of&nbsp;inches &mdash; if that &mdash; between the artwork and the artist. That&rsquo;s where I want to be as a viewer: nose to nose, inspecting all the drips and bumps and brushstrokes that make a piece come alive or, sometimes,&nbsp;allow it to fall flat.

My first impression of Stanley Whitney&rsquo;s work, however, came on Instagram, which is the equivalent of standing at the other end of the room. Since his retrospective&nbsp;<a href="https://walkerart.org/calendar/2024/stanley-whitney-how-high-the-moon/" target="_blank">How High the Moon</a> opened at the Walker Art Center last month, people have been sharing photos of the work, reducing his six foot or larger canvases down to the two and a half inch scale of my phone screen. Even from that great and digital distance, I was immediately transfixed. Whitney&rsquo;s gorgeous, sumptuous, saturated blocks of color convey a profound liveliness in spite of their simplicity. There&rsquo;s no reason these paintings should be this good, but I couldn&rsquo;t get them out of my head. I was eager to visit the work in person to see if it held up.

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<img alt="Large abstract painting of a colorful grid" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/a1cbef30-b52b-42e1-b588-c4977a0e69e7/a1cbef30-b52b-42e1-b588-c4977a0e69e7.full.jpg" />Stanley Whitney, That&#39;s Rome, 2019. Oil on linen. Collection of Kelly and Gerry Pasciucco. All photos by Russ White.

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By accident, I took the show in backwards, though I don&rsquo;t think it makes much difference. The first and final rooms are filled with Whitney&rsquo;s signature abstract oils &mdash;&nbsp;large, haphazardly painted colors stacked within each composition like a wall of opaque windows. You see them first from the doorway, at Instagram distance, and&nbsp;the colors stare&nbsp;right back at you with a confident, joyful clarity.

Try this when you go: lock eyes with one of the paintings and slowly move towards it. Pay attention to how the work changes as the distance narrows. The closer you get, the more Whitney&rsquo;s firm blocks of color dissolve in spots into discernible, fluid brushstrokes. The solidity of his lines start to shake. The sturdy architecture of each composition grows a little flimsy, and his ice cream colors drip and sag and wobble as they rub up against each other. At a certain point, the edges of each section start to crackle with energy. When you get all the way up to that gray line on the floor, as face to face as we&rsquo;re allowed to be, you can see the man&rsquo;s decisions and his confidence and, oddly, his humor. There&rsquo;s something funny about these paintings. In a segment on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrVSermpUHQ">CBS This Morning</a> about the show&rsquo;s first iteration at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, reporter Alino Cho asks the artist, &ldquo;What do you hope people will feel when they look at your work?&rdquo;

&ldquo;Better,&rdquo; he says, with a chuckle.

<a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220711-piet-mondrian-and-the-six-lines-that-made-a-masterpiece" target="_blank">Mondrian</a> is&nbsp;the most obvious stylistic precedent here,&nbsp;even down to the way some of Whitney&#39;s&nbsp;lines halt abruptly before reaching the canvas&#39;s edge.&nbsp;&ldquo;I always wanted my work to be like Mondrian, you know, step by step,&rdquo; he says in one of the&nbsp;audio snippets linked on the wall labels, describing how he builds up layers of paint. One small black and white drawing in the show&nbsp;even reads as a direct reference to Mondrian&#39;s famous series of trees, painted more and more abstractly&nbsp;on his way towards clean geometry.&nbsp;You&rsquo;ll likely also catch hints of Mark Rothko&rsquo;s sublime color fields or Sean Scully&rsquo;s ominous stripes and grids, although Whitney&rsquo;s work feels more buoyantly alive than either. You might get a little Wayne Thiebaud, too, particularly in the rapturous creams and blues of a painting like Undestructable Hymn.

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<img alt="Large abstract painting of a grid of bright colors" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/bd5254fa-236d-4b68-9794-c7a6abe00b26/bd5254fa-236d-4b68-9794-c7a6abe00b26.full.jpg" /><img alt="Black dotted lines drawn on white paper in a maple frame" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/789fe94a-7203-4893-ad98-444c34fb46a2/789fe94a-7203-4893-ad98-444c34fb46a2.full.jpg" />Top: Stanley Whitney, Undestructable Hymn, 2001. Oil on linen. Private collection. Bottom: Stanley Whitney,&nbsp;Untitled, 1978. Ink on paper, private collection.

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But to me, the closest cousin to these paintings might be Philip Guston&nbsp;for the paint-handling alone. Whitney had&nbsp;Guston as a mentor in the late &lsquo;60s, and the same sort of thick fussiness with which Guston painted both his abstractions and his Klansmen has a kinship to the messy borders of Whitney&rsquo;s beautiful blocks. They&#39;re a little cartoony, a little rumpled, almost like a worn suit.&nbsp;Nothing too perfect, but balanced just right. These paintings are so good.

In the middle of the exhibition, the show expands into a trove of smaller studies and sketchbook pages, and you get a sense of an artist obsessed with his craft, working out how to contain all of life within a rectangle. Containment itself seems to be a driving element &mdash;&nbsp;even his earlier, free-floating blobs of the 1980s respect the canvas&rsquo;s boundaries.

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<img alt="Two people look at a wall of framed artwork in a white gallery" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/af52d927-3a0c-4d42-9b73-17432c662916/af52d927-3a0c-4d42-9b73-17432c662916.full.jpg" /><img alt="Blobs of color inside a blue crayon grid framed on a wall" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/5767ca73-c31e-4bed-9e33-0e7c5d319d51/5767ca73-c31e-4bed-9e33-0e7c5d319d51.full.jpg" /><img alt="Abstract painting of blobs of color floating in a field of gray" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/012f367b-9f51-4d97-8b0f-b9228f46fe36/012f367b-9f51-4d97-8b0f-b9228f46fe36.full.jpg" />Top: Installation view. Middle: Stanley Whitney,&nbsp;Untitled, 2020. Monotype in watercolor and crayon on Lanaquarelle paper. Bottom: Stanley Whitney, Portrait of a Dream, 1983. Oil on canvas. Collection of Jay Ptashek and Karen Elizaga, courtesy Front Desk Apparatus.

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I&rsquo;m reminded of the&nbsp;<a href="https://walkerart.org/calendar/2024/keith-haring-art-is-for-everybody/">Keith Haring retrospective</a>&nbsp;the Walker hosted earlier this year. The great tragedy of that exhibition, despite its expansiveness, was its brevity &mdash; Haring was only able to work for about twelve years before we lost him to AIDS. The main question I walked out of that show with was how he was able to paint the same imagery over and over and over again &mdash; the dancer, the dog, the UFO, and all the rest of his iconography&nbsp;&mdash; without getting bored. And here, in Stanley Whitney, we have another artist who has kept himself interested in a very specific line of inquiry for 40+ years. That he found enough room to move inside these blocks&nbsp;for that length of time is amazing. But then again, nobody wonders why portraitists spend a lifetime painting faces.&nbsp;&ldquo;The whole thing,&rdquo; Whitney says in another audio clip, &ldquo;was how to make color a subject matter.&rdquo;

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<img alt="Framed crayon drawing of text &quot;Hey Jimmy, ain't you heard? Race and art are far apart&quot;" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/8fe9ba15-c3b1-485a-be47-499eb16e7883/8fe9ba15-c3b1-485a-be47-499eb16e7883.full.jpg" />Stanley Whitney, Untitled (Hey Jimmy), 1990. Crayon on paper.

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On one wall, mixed in with a bunch of other sketches and small works is a framed page torn from a sketchbook colorfully recreating a postcard Langston Hughes sent to James Baldwin in 1962: &ldquo;Hey Jimmy, Ain&rsquo;t you heard? Race and art are far apart.&rdquo; This is not an artist who hid inside abstraction to avoid the world outside; this is an artist who listens to that world and speaks back in color. Stacked stone antiquities, Gee&rsquo;s Bend quilts, the loose rhythms and wild depths of jazz, soul, and blues &mdash; all are evident in these big, simple, complicated pictures.

As with the tape on the floor, I&rsquo;m not a huge fan of year-end best-of lists either. I see their purpose, but&nbsp;they always leave so much out, particularly when the big venues overshadow smaller galleries that deserve just as much recognition. But I have to say that&nbsp;How High the Moon is one of the best shows I&rsquo;ve seen in a long time. Go in with your eyes open, get as close as you can, and see if those colors and lines and big wobbly blocks don&rsquo;t come to life for you as well.&nbsp;◼︎&nbsp;

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<img alt="Abstract painting of colors in a grid" class="img-responsive" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/mplsart-cdn-central/FileContainers/70b8249a-404d-42cc-a52d-99986bfe14b3/70b8249a-404d-42cc-a52d-99986bfe14b3.full.jpg" />Stanley Whitney, James Brown Sacrifices to Apollo, 2008. Oil on linen. Private collection.

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<a href="https://walkerart.org/calendar/2024/stanley-whitney-how-high-the-moon/" target="_blank">Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon</a> is on view at the Walker Art Center through March 16, 2025. The exhibition was curated by&nbsp;Cathleen Chaffee, the Charles Balbach Chief Curator at the&nbsp;Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Walker Coordinating Curators: Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy, Walker Art Center; with Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts.

To see more work and learn more about the artist, visit <a href="https://gagosian.com/artists/stanley-whitney/" target="_blank">gagosian.com</a> or follow him on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/stanley.whitney/" target="_blank">@stanley.whitney</a>.

Forty years of paintings, prints, and drawings come together in 'How High the Moon', on view through March 16

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