Hardly Soft

Featured Artists:
Krista Anderson-Larson
Julie Buffalohead
Coulter Fussell
Lisa Kill
Ludi Leiva
Raquel Mullins
Wendy Murray
Anna Madeleine Raupach

In the wake of the 2024 election more and more raw edges are highlighted within the culture, but this exhibition is an elevation of a different strength of voice and vision. Sometimes literally or figuratively softer, these works expose angles of our society, humanity, the body, despair, connectedness and daily life, as a reinforcement to other-than-male perspectives. Perhaps challenging or curious, these artists inform such relationships through intensely creative and skillful processes and materiality which is hardly accidental, nor hardly obvious.

For Krista Anderson-Larson, the bathroom is often the only place in many homes where a person can experience the true privacy needed for physical self-examination or orientation to one's own ever-changing body. Particularly for queer and gender nonconforming people who grow up in conservative households, these experiences play a role in how our body and gender identity are intertwined. The work questions what it means to have the architectural space of the bathroom intrinsically tied to development of identity.

Julie Buffalohead debuts a new sculptural artistic direction with a wall piece composed of various Native American traditional material: rawhide, leather, lane-stitched beadwork and quillwork. Her sculpture engenders female power referencing Native mythologies of emergence and birth. The womb-like piece is experimental for Buffalohead, and incorporates many art and craft techniques from the artist's practice in this abstract form. Both Buffalohead and Anderson-Larson have studios based in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Located in rural Mississippi, Coulter Fussell's artistic practice spans quilting, upholstery and mixed media. In this exhibition her work is from her War Quilt series. Drawing stylistically from a childhood spent reading comic books and watching nature shows in her hometown near Fort Moore Military Base in southwest Georgia, she relied on narratives of familial power plays that speak to a universal violent dynamic. The title of her piece, Graft and Stealth references an excerpt of Langston Hughes’ poem Let America Be America Again.

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers...

For Lisa Kill, her drawings are "about when the music is over, and the record continues to play along the wax seal and you hear the dust and the space". It references liminal space between music and silence. This work incorporates sleeves from vinyl records which contain a center void filled with another material element, representing a deeper space, images of water, hazy seas and dead oceans.

Ludi Leiva, working from Stockholm, Sweden offers three mixed-media works which are poetic explorations of ancestral connection and spiritual protection. Dream-like atmospheres and abstract figures become vehicles for preserving heritage and connection across geographical and temporal borders. These mixed media monotypes are visual meditations. Cultural touchstones and memories, such as a Guatemalan childhood bedtime prayer, are transformed with the artist's intuitively expressed marks.

Raquel Mullins works in Tennessee to create autobiographical work that archives the passage of time, documents coming-of-age, and portrays rites of passage and life transitions. Her practice revolves around a searching for moments of wonder by highlighting small and everyday occurrences and phenomena. She utilizes a house as a structure and symbol for the body, to portray both mothering and being mothered.

Wendy Murray is a visual artist who works in Los Angeles and Sydney, Australia. Murray’s work addresses social and political issues through drawings, collaborative poster making and public art works. Her piece in this exhibition, created with Anna Madeleine Raupach was designed, printed and disseminated on the streets of Los Angeles in one day. That's how Murray likes to work - with speed. She comments "No time to second-guess, just getting the message out there as fast as possible". Armed with only paper stencils, a screen, ink, and a squeegee, her printing process/workshop is analog and mobile.

Gallery Hours:
Thursday, Friday, Saturday from 12-5pm and by appointment