This exhibition presents exciting new work by cutting-edge Irish artists, created with critical intelligence, a keen sense of history, compositional vigor, and lively humor still deeply embedded in place. Each artist grapples with the challenge of visually defining a landscape that retains many features of Ireland’s agrarian past, even its sectarian conflict, as well as more modern concerns of turbulent economic forces, farming methods, European Union regulations, real estate development, and lifestyle choices which effect Ireland’s rural experience and urban challenges.

Tracee Vetting Wolf is an artist and mother who has an extensive background in design and architecture. Her art practice consists of 30 minutes of art making every morning, resulting in a finished piece each day. Her disciplined art practice was borne in 2011 when her son entered kindergarten. She began tucking a small piece of art (with a message on the back) in with his lunches each day. Her art targets the interests of her young son and evolves as he gets older and her practice matures. To date, she has made over 1,000 pieces of small format art. Many recent pieces feature animals, reflections on life, whimsical story bits and invented portraits, but will often shift from day to day in unplanned ways. She also participates in the local Rochester artist community. You can follow her daily lunchnote practice on Instagram: tracee_vetting_wolf

Maps have many purposes; providing guidance in our travels, visualizing complicated demographics, or recording important patterns and political transitions. In his new exhibition, Cameron Jarvis focuses on the site specificity of aerial views, Google maps, and other sources to present, share and investigate autobiographic relationships based on important personal places. A first generation American, Jarvis uses maps as a source of inspiration to connect his current home in Cottage Grove, MN, with his Grandmother’s in Antiqua. Through the print making process, Jarvis presents the audience with an intimacy of the local that is both personal as well as universal.

Bergh does not stick close to the center of either abstraction or representation, but instead hovers and crosses the dotted line between them with regularity. She may draw on exercises in formal composition common in paint and gesture, but the result separates from the expected because the subject of her study is often found in the everyday. She marries these everyday objects with formal language but the beauty, or even just insistence, of the daily thing wins out.

"Locavore: Southeastern MN Juried Exhibition" was a fall exhibition presented in the Burton and Judy Onofrio Galleries at Rochester Art Center. The exhibition featured a diverse selection of artwork by artists who were rarely exhibited together. Adjacent to Locavore was "Homegrown: 2’ x 2’," an exhibition open to everyone. Anyone who created a work on a Rochester Art Center-provided 2’ x 2’ board was included in the exhibition. Together, these concurrent exhibitions of local and regional artwork reflected the broad range of artistic talent throughout southeastern Minnesota. Jurors for Locavore were Kathleen Hawkes, Faculty at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, and Andrew Nordin, Art Instructor at Ridgewater College.

Alyssa Baguss’s practice explores mediated natural environments through drawing processes. She is a visual artist and arts program director, who works out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Alyssa is a 2015 recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and her work has been exhibited in the Twin Cities and regionally, including Burnet Gallery, Soo Visual Arts Center, Minnesota Museum of American Art, Rosalux Gallery and Augsburg College Christensen Center Art Gallery. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Bell Museum of Natural History and Rochester Art Center as a part of the 3rd Floor emerging artist series in 2016.

"For the past three years I have been painting with watercolor on paper, creating dense and detailed organic formations. Vibrant and colorful, they contain clusters of meticulously drawn geometric shapes, rhythmically twisting and expanding, moving forward and away, revealing depth as they overlap."

Stephanie Lynn Rogers' exhibition "Make Yourself at Home" is an installation of photography and fiber-
based work; fungi, worms and ants take their places alongside flowers, foliage
and butterflies. The imagery touches on wide-ranging themes, including seasonal cycles, ecology, and the inevitability of decay, while remaining grounded in the landscapes of the upper Midwest. "Make Yourself at Home" transforms the second floor gallery into a domestic space, with artist-designed and altered furnishings
including throw pillows, curtains, and a brocade couch.

"Andy Warhol: Minnesota Goes Pop" is a regional reflection and reconstitution of how popular culture manifests itself in the works of contemporary artists in Minnesota. Their work engages in meaningful dialogue not only with the ever changing world around them but also with Warhol’s original pop art.

In today’s world, it is not uncommon for masculinity to be placed on a spectrum, a label-less position on a gradient between two ends. This system allows individuals to establish their own identity, be it simple or complex. However, it is common for those extreme positions to be enforced upon an individual by those holding on to archetypes at either ends of this spectrum. Specific subsets of gay male cultures have rigorous ideals of body and beauty attained through strict diet and exercise and can be isolating for those who don’t measure up. In the sporting world, homophobia can be used to sublimate the physical intimacy between players, isolating some in a similar manner. In the digital era of endless and available information we can quickly forget and take for granted what growing up as a member of a closeted society can feel like. From this closeted place, cultural references from television characters and eroticized fiction can begin to distort perceptions and a new parafiction begins to take shape as a way to express oppressed desires.