Join Me At Calendula Gallery Tonight!
I am so pleased to announce the debut of a new body of work called Queericana - a diary of sorts of my time in rural Otter Tail County.
I have had a week of artist adventures that I can’t wait to tell you more about in subsequent newsletter missives, but for now I’ll share that I met new people at the Urban Art Village in Minneapolis and sold some zines!
The next day I installed the show!
And then Vaimo and I headed to Lower Sioux Community for a quilt residency where I learned how to use a long arm quilt machine (dreams do come true!) I was working on my duo show pieces that will be up in November in Fergus and made significant progress!
And now, I’m back in St. Paul preparing for the opening of Queericana at Calendula Gallery Tonight! I hope you can join us! The party starts at 6pm and will continue until 8:30. It’s also First Friday and some of the Calendula artists will be exhibiting in the hall! I’ve got an art cake and curated beverages coming too, I know it will be a good time!
I hope to see you there! If you can’t make the opening tonight, the paintings will be on view through September 20th on weekends (see image above).
Special thanks to my Ko-Fi Klub members who have been sustaining members of the Art of KCF enterprise - I SO appreciate you all!
Queericana
ARTIST STATEMENT
Queericana is a series of acrylic paintings capturing the unique yet quotidian sights of rural Minnesota. As an artist based in rural Otter Tail County, living on twenty acres with my wife tending goats and chickens, I spend a lot of time driving over 15 miles to the closest town in any direction. As I log a lot of hours on the road, I am constantly engaging a process of deep looking at the world around me. My curiosity is often piqued by the unique choices my neighbors make while interacting with the natural environment of rural Minnesota.
While what I notice in rural places — small towns, on the end of others’ property or on the side of county highways — are not inherently queer in the ways that term has been firmly associated with sexuality, they are queer in the sense of queer theory which simply reflects that which is non-normative. Rural living comes with a depth of freedom, there are no HOA rules or as many laws enacted (or perhaps less enforced) for junk piles amassing in yards. Additionally without urban infrastructure for trash removal rural residents can become creative in repurposing that which is difficult to discard. Access to wide open spaces of the mixed-grass prairie or wooded forests of rural Minnesota enables people to cultivate unique displays reflected in my paintings. Through painting what intrigues me, I reckon with the natural and manufactured environments in which I am currently embedded in hopes of destabilizing the separation of humans from nature.
As an out queer person living in rural Minnesota this series explores moments of wonder, awe, and curiosity as I go about my country life. The small scale paintings serve as my way to feel kinship in a space where I don’t always feel safe. In painting these absurd yet everyday scenes in vivid acrylic, latex and spray paint alongside natural mediums I do so not to make fun of, but rather join in on the camp and kitsch of rural Minnesota life with appreciation for the possibility of forging what José Esteban Muñoz notes as queer utopic possibility. Where the non-normative exists, the Midwestern mirage of the countryside through my eyes may just be big enough for all of us.
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KCF