2021 Year in Rear View
As we drive into 2022, with all its new unknowns, we at Moberg Gallery are hopeful that the road ahead will be more-smoothly paved, more open, and with a horizon on which many electric and mesmerizing things take place. But since we have just crossed the calendrical threshold, let’s take a quick look back at where we’ve been and what art we showed in our new space (yes, we moved!) in 2021.
During the first year of pandemic, 2020, we were exhibiting virtually, and the show that led us into 2021 was SWAY, curated by Jason Woodside. This gathering of art from street to studio, outdoor to indoor walls, included familiar lines and color from Woodside, Adam Lucas, It’s A Living, Maser, Pref, Adele Renault, Ruben Sánchez, and Swoon; as well as new vision, with artists Evoca1, Elliott Routledge, and Gary Stranger. Swoon’s earth-ereal portraits, Woodside and Maser’s colorcopias, Sánchez’ abstract still lifes and sculpture, and Lucas’ city- and townscapes, all coalesced with the typographic wonderlands of Pref, It’s A Living, and Stranger, to form the exhibit that warmed our new space with the poignant and vibrant.
The next exhibit, Contemporary Women Paint: Abstract Expressions, offered up the stunning paintings of many of painters— Johanne Brouillette, Dana James, Conn Ryder, Daniela Schweinsberg, and Alayne Spafford—all of whom had new works included. In addition, Denver-based artist, Alyson Khan, then showing with Moberg Gallery for the first time, had seven new works in the show. These six artists master the expressive work and play of a/morphousness—making marks in orderto sometimes loosen and lose shape. Their forms draw and shatter boundary, and with that, also explode physical and psychical elements and energies.
And because the calendar felt so achronological back then (and still?), we opened our Winter Group Show 2021 in February. Knowing that art can change environment— cultural, political, and social climates—and that it can help us embrace the unfamiliar, we welcomed new people, nationally renowned public and studio artist, David B. Dahlquist, and Kansas-City passed artist, Dean Kube, to the gallery stable. Also included in this exhibit, with new works, was Andrew Abbott, Wendell Arneson, Derrick Breidenthal, Annick Ibsen, Thomas C. Jackson, Anita Jung, Larassa Kabel, Thérèse Murdza, Teo Nguyen, and Scott Charles Ross.
As the world started to open a little in 2021, our first in-person opening was for the spring exhibit, Chris Vance: Timeline. Chris Vance wanted us to experience some relief and release—some light in and at an end of our visioning. He wanted us to have calm and relaxation, maybe even find a little peace of mind and heart—to stop enduring for a minute, and instead, enjoy. With these paintings, made during COVID-19, 2020, in mixed media and panel, Vance offered us a resort. He said color and line had never been so informed by ‘needing a view [and] some peace.”
Following Vance, came Contemporary Women Artists: Figure and Form, which included artists from around the globe. From Belgium to New York, Colombia to Colorado, these four artists painted and plucked, portraited, photographed, planted, and mathematically abstracted. Swoon, Adele Renault, Alyson Khan, and Goizane Esain each shared with us their lens, their world, their creation of critical and massive exploratory work. By magnifying feathers, referencing art deco as a mode of operation, and by the witnessing of plant and human as modus vivendi, they gathered palette and subject for an individual and collective tour de force.
Mary Jones’ The Map Room installation was lit by northern light at the back of the gallery. With a focus on the urban land and mindscape, as well as a collaborative artist book project with poet Michaela Mullin about the geography of dementia, these works compelled one to read maps, space, and our time in the world with a changed eye. A map room is a space to ‘read’ the maps as the stories of their authors. Thus, Jones walled off space within space to create an intimate room for searching and researching movements she has imagined and created.
A Ghost at the Feast was the echo or shadow of Larassa Kabel’s ongoing art manifesto, indicated through her many mediums. There was a thread (or twine, perhaps) through each sculpture, performance, painting, and drawing. For Kabel, it is not about the morbid, but about human processes and ritual—the how of living with love, loss, and survival. And key in how we live is how we experience death. This often interspecific (or inter-special) is not about the taxonomical distance of species but how despite this, the dis/connection is deeply felt and affective. With Kabel’s exhibit, an artist talk and poetry reading were held, giving Kabel, Mary Jones, Michaela Mullin, and Jennifer L. Knox, an opportunity to engage the public further with ideas of movement, memory, living, and dying.
August in Iowa is known for its humidity, high temperatures, State Fair crowds, and long lines for food on a stick. We at Moberg Gallery also know that summer in Iowa also means a gathering of favorite artists, exhibited together in one (new) space. The Iowa State Fair was back in 2021, and we were happy to be able to show Summer Group Show 2021. Here, the lines were long, some short, some contoured, and some broken. This re-emergence (of openings, in person exhibits, and time spent in front of the actual art, not the art on screen) held work by a wonderfully motley and magnificent crew of Moberg artists you may know: Andrew Abbott, Heather Brammeier, Johanne Brouilette, Tibi Chelcea, David Dahlquist, Sarah Grant, Frank Hansen Alyson Khan, Bart Vargas, Robert Schulte Jr, Daniela Schweinsberg, Aaron Wilson & Time Dooley, Larassa Kabel, , Scott Charles Ross, and Dennis Wojkiewicz; as well as new-to-Moberg artists: William Downs, Kathranne Knight, and Alexandre Shiffer.
The Fall brought Chuck Hipsher’s exhibit of mixed-media paintings (aka a collection of short stories), The Healing. The words of the title often lend themselves to thoughts of incident and aftermath, but what we don’t always acknowledge is that life is more like a continuance of healing. A thing we do, interiorly and externally, always; and these new large-scale works, like Hipsher’s entire oeuvre, took this into account. Using tactile media, such as faux rabbit fur, tablecloths and runners, and textiles of recognizable and time-period-specific patterns, Hipsher managed to comfort the viewer by offering identifiable historical, collective memories.
To lead us into the Winter season, we exhibited Full Circle: David B Dahlquist and Wendell Arneson. Having studied at the prestigious New York School of Ceramics at Alfred University, he works with a custom kiln from Alfred these days. These new works were forms holding forms, circles of lines and lines carrying circles and incorporated many leaf forms, which symbolize, for him, “a recurring memory.” These memories were in conversation with the paintings of Dahlquist’s mentor and longtime friend, artist Wendell Arneson, whose vibrant paintings also focused on the circle, in its nuanced imperfections, and the lines that divide and make boundary, threshold, and compose space.
Closing the circle is often what the approaching of a New Year feels like—we can pick up the pen, or ourselves, and start a new round of drawing up plans and enacting them. 2022 is now our present, and we are doing our best to be ‘in it.’ But future always whistles, like a kettle waiting to be taken off the heat and tilted. 2022 will have an outpouring of new art, by familiar artists, as well as many new artists to Moberg Gallery. We are looking forward to seeing you throughout this new cycle.
You can start by coming in to see Winter Group Show ’21 / ’22, up through the last week of January, and then join us for the first solo exhibit of 2022, Kathranne Knight: Shapespace—the opening is Friday, February 4, from 5 to 7 pm. See you then!