This August join Rosalux in celebrating the work of four local artists with our latest exhibition Holding Up / Holding With
Rosalux Gallery presents:
Holding Up / Holding With
Rethinking Resilience
Artists: Rajine Williams, AK Garski, Talulah R.M., Nikki McComb
Curated by Betsy Alwin
August 5th – August 27th
Opening reception August 5th 7pm-10pm
Open hours: Saturdays and Sundays 12-4pm
Resilience! Resilience held an outsized space in our psyche during the past three years. The word itself, with respect to a world situation well outside of personal control, embodies the ideas of strength and grit along with perseverance and health. It also became a fraught word worth questioning. At once bandied as a light inspirational idea, the word became heavily laden with the unevenness and imbalance of circumstance. It’s a word that conjures the image of pulling oneself up by their bootstraps. Inevitably, resilience defines those who can survive or thrive within the confines of a situation: “in spite of.” We are obsessed with the individual’s ability to endure. While we value resilience as a sign of strength, resilience is ultimately a marker of privilege.
Could resilience, however, reside in giving up or letting go? Can new ways of being emerge from seeing and accepting vulnerabilities? Perhaps resilience is embodied in less defined terms as the space between one way of being and another.
The artists in this exhibition rethink what it means to endure. They question ableist systems, disrupt structures, and challenge the status quo measures of success. Resilience is both a coping mechanism and a word to be redefined. The works presented in this exhibition offer alternative ways of being.
Rajine Williams is a visual multimedia artist, teaching artist, and educator in the Twin Cities. Her work centers around Black women's femininity, body, and identity. She's a Minnesota native who graduated from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in May of 2020 with a B.A. in Art. She is attending Augsburg University in the fall to obtain her master’s in visual arts/ k-12 licensure. Rajine's work encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, and (some) filmmaking. She incorporates 3D elements and found/recycled objects. Besides being a practicing artist, Rajine teaches art to all ages, creeds, and all walks of life.
AK Garski (they/them/theirs) is a nonbinary transgender artist whose multidisciplinary artwork deconstructs the gender binary and confronts social injustice. Garski is known for incorporating elements of realism, figuration, still-life, found object, and text into their highly detailed artworks. As an artist who is also an educator, they specialize in creating arts curriculum and programs that tackle LGBTQIA+ discrimination, unpack white privilege, support anti-racism, while addressing ableism. Garski holds a BA from St. Catherine University, an MFA in painting and an MA in history and theory of contemporary art from San Francisco Art Institute. They have received multiple grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and were a 2020-21 artist in residence at Second Shift Studio Space of St. Paul.
Garski has artworks from two bodies of work featured in this exhibition at Rosalux: The Redated Collection, a series of still-life drawings depicting the fragments leftover when a subject is forced to conceal their desire for gender fluidity; and a new group of experimental sculptures that address Garski's ongoing experience advocating for medical care as a person living with multiple rare chronic health conditions.
Talulah R.M. (b.1999) lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their practice attempts to engage with the ways in which reality is constructed through sculptural intervention. They work across media, engaging the layered geographic, political, and historical contexts of sites and objects. Talulah's first solo exhibition, Quicksilver, opened in July as a part of the 2023 Waiting Room exhibition season, funded by Midway Contemporary's Visual Arts Fund.
Talulah R.M.’s work attempts to pull forward layered geographic, historic, and political contexts. Attentive to material, They cast objects mimetically, an elemental transformation parallel to the experience of shifting between identities, resistant to dogma. They are fascinated by the impossibility of empirical history, the fallibility of memory, and the power and pitfalls in a collective deciding of truth.
Nikki McComb takes on the trenchant problem of illegal firearms, using photographs and video to reach people from the street level to the legislative arena and to help provide communities an outlet where they feel safe enough to seek help, empowered enough to give help, provoked enough to work harder to unify, and unified enough to make change collectively through art. For seventeen years, McComb has applied her artistic interests and skills to working relentlessly in North Minneapolis and surrounding communities in youth and family achievement. In addition to being an art educator, she has organized exhibitions, including Art Is My Weapon, a program whereby local artists select decommissioned guns to then create new work for display. McComb is a 2017 recipient of The Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, a 2016 recipient of a Micro Grant for photography and a 2014 and 2015 recipient of several community leadership awards. She is currently the executive Director of Art is My Weapon, a 501 C3 that aims to use art and creativity to spark social change.
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