The personal, the political, and the unknowable: Three artists at SooVAC explore what it takes to metabolize distress

Banner image: Krista Anderson-Larson, Untitled (detail), 2024. Mirror tiles, bath towel.

 

What kind of visual art should a person spend time with in the final days of the 2024 presidential election? When our government sends weapons across the world again, used for killing tens of thousands of people and destroying their land? When word has come that trees and soil absorbed almost no carbon last year?

Or how about this: What is a person supposed to do with the weight of knowledge like this, of witness? What do you do?

Three artists currently on view at SooVAC (through Sunday, October 27) explore what happens when something has to change but there is uncertainty about how that change will come, though movement of a kind is possible. Here are three examples where art-making is the means of transformation, even if the space the art holds, the space it creates or points to, remains uncertain and unresolved.

 

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Krista Anderson-Larson, Untitled, 2024. Mirror tiles, bath towel. All images courtesy of SooVAC.

 

Fragments of Intimacy, Krista Anderson-Larson's meditation on the privacy of the home bathroom, is installed in the gallery entryway. Anderson-Larson speaks of the show as originating in the experience of closing the door behind you and finding in the bathroom a kind of ambiguous freedom. There is freedom from the perception of others — presumptions about who you are, your identity — and yet you must face, via a mirror, your own self-perception. There is room to breathe, apart from the world and even from your own family, but you cannot know what feeling or question might unsettle you. This is the rich array of experience the show seeks to honor.

A gray bath mat crumpled in a corner is bedazzled with rows and rows of disco ball mirrors. Rig lighting shines down and refracts a familiar speckled gleam onto the walls. This is a deflated disco ball, or perhaps the ball has disrobed and left the party. The piece's humor and playfulness – even its evocation of euphoric dancing in a club – are mixed with sadness and defeat. 

"When you're in distress in the bathroom, you kind of zone out," Anderson-Larson said, speaking of the two black-and-white photographs that document the kind of up-close noticing that happens from the vantage of a toilet. One observes water droplets collecting on wall tile after a shower. The other, the soft curves of a recessed soap dish in a bathroom sink. The exhibition does something like consecrate this familiar space for all it holds of us.

 

Krista Anderson-Larson, Untitled, 2024. Porcelain toilet and dishes.

 

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Ruthann Godollei, My Pillow, 2024. Screen printed pillowcase and bricks.

 

Ruthann Godollei's Fast & Loose begins with a different variety of existential worry — political and social. She has been making what she calls testimonial objects for many years. "This is my job until they stop making war," she said on her walkthrough last Thursday. The work of the exhibition is simple in design, explicit in its statements, and heavy on humor and playful confrontation. Strung from the ceiling are two lengths of orange flag bunting, each pennant printed with a statement such as “Welcome to our town, we pretend we were here first” and “Welcome to our town, we can’t afford to live here either.” A pillowcase filled with bricks sits on the gallery floor; the pillowcase is from MyPillow and the bricks warn of Trump's reelection. 

 

Ruthann Godollei, Bigggly, 2024. Fiberglass and bamboo.

 

The star of Godollei's show, however, is absent from the gallery: an unsettling, ten-plus-foot tall faceless fiberglass Pinocchio figure with a massive bamboo nose — longer than the piece is tall — a red MAGA hat, a suit, and a long red tie. The piece was set up in the SooVAC parking lot the evening I visited. Two men arrived who did not know each other and each took out their phone to take a shot. One man said to the other, "Do we just look at it? I don't know what we’re supposed to do.”

While Anderson-Larson locates the place of transformation as somewhere private and inward, Godollei needs the open world, as far as the art will take her. The giant Trump Pinocchio is named Bigggly, and Bigggly is on the move — to Wisconsin, to rural Minnesota, around town. Godollei was transporting Bigggly on a flatbed trailer when, at a stoplight, a group of teenage girls asked to take a selfie. Godollei created a website for the piece: bigggly.com. She wants conversation in public, among and between strangers.

 

Ruthann Godollei, Pinocchio Transmogrified (detail, at left), 2024. Cardboard, wooden dowel, embroidered cap. At right: Bunting (Welcome to Our Town) (detail), 2023-24. Screen print on plastic pennants.

 

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Lela Pierce, Bead body soul travel time vortex 2 (detail, at left), 2024. Acrylic pony beads, wax thread, synthetic hair, painted ceramics, glass trade beads. At right: Untitled 4,2024. Gouache, pen, and black gesso on paper.

 

The Unknown Thing that Frees You, the largest of the three exhibitions, is rich in mood and undercurrents of grief and yearning. Appropriate to the show's title, Lela Pierce was hesitant to put too many words to the work in their artist walkthrough, which I found refreshing. Existential feelings of great depth are being explored here. What's required for Pierce to encounter what cannot be spoken is not a move inward to the domestic or outward to the public, but the creation of new spaces — abstract spaces, ones that are cosmic and geometric, ones that refer to ancestral lineage. Something will do the freeing in Pierce’s work, but it will not be familiar as a home bathroom or recognizable as campaign iconography.

Pierce is a seasoned dancer, and there is a strong sense of scene-setting in the show, which is arranged in three sections. In the main corridor, black and blue beaded columnal bodies hang from the ceiling, each with an opening in which can be seen, floating in the hollow center, an arrangement of geometric and orbital ceramics. These cosmic dioramas are painted in bright pinks and purples and oranges, an intense contrast to the depth of blues and blacks used in the painted works that surround the beaded bodies. Braided hair extensions blend with the beadwork.

In the second section, a narrative plays out in multiple media. In gouache on paper, a woman is on her knees, torso bent all the way back, with an expressionless face. A snake has just burst from her midsection. On the wall surrounding the painting are black half domes with strands of black material dangling in streaks, evoking tears or a mourning shroud. The snake has winded around the image until, where the page ends, numerous glazed black ceramic snakes trail down the wall, across the floor, and to a piece that hangs from the ceiling like an elongated ceremonial bell. The object the snakes have come to, with a broken rusted thick-metal chain at its base, is not a bell. Inside where the ringing mechanism would be is instead a bed of bright red powdered pigment with dentures wide open in a scream. 

 

Lela Pierce, Catatonic Scream (life force navel trap). Gouache and pen on paper, ceramics, papier-mâché, seeds, thread, powder, dentures, rusty chain.

 

The third section is a tonal break from the deep blues of the corridor and the drama of Catatonic Scream (life force navel trap). In the bay at the far end of the gallery, in another invented space, is a quiet, peaceful room with two radiant colorful sun pieces, gouache on paper, framing an altar to the Hindu sun god Surya. Branches lean against the wall, and brightly colored ceramic triangle rays are mounted among them. A bench sits in the space facing the altar. 

 

Lela Pierce, left to right: Sun, 2024. Gouache. Blackgold of the Sun (Conjuring Surya), 2021. Gouache and pen on paper, painted and glazed ceramics, wood, powder, seeds. Sun II, 2024. 

 

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In Anderson-Larson's work, one's own bathroom should be honored and even revered, for the way that it frees you. You may meet dread and worry there, or shifts in self-perception. Whatever you find, the space itself must not be overlooked. For Godollei, one must be playfully confronted with facts of a political and social nature. Whether or not this spurs action, prompts dread or agitation or nothing at all, is left open; what's important is the moment of confrontation. And for Pierce, it is the disappearing of language, the abstracting out of meaning, that creates spacious new locations for holding — and potentially moving — of private distresses and mysteries. 

Change and movement are a promise in each of these exhibitions. What this change will be — what it will look like, how it will feel, when it will come — will not and cannot be prescribed. ◼︎ 

 

The three exhibitions are on view at SooVAC through October 27. Gallery hours: Thursday & Friday, 11am – 6pm; Saturday & Sunday, 11am – 5pm. Follow the gallery on Instagram @soovac.

To see more of Krista Anderson-Larson's work, visit the artist's website or follow them on Instagram @kristaandersonlarson.

To see more of Ruthann Godollei's work, visit the artist's website or follow them on Instagram @ragodollei.

To see more of Lela Pierce's work, visit the artist's website or follow them on Instagram @lela.pierce.