At This Point…Three Spaces for Contemplation

Immersive Installations by Jovan Speller, Tia Keobounpheng, and Rebecca Krinke

Virtual opening reception Saturday, October 10th, 5-7 p.m.

On View Saturday, October 10th to Saturday, November 21, 2020

Please watch NewStudio Gallery’s Instagram and Facebook media, and website, for details.

“When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity. May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells—for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained.” – Rebecca Solnit

NewStudio Gallery welcomes visitors to experience, online and in the gallery (by appointment, with safety and cleaning measures in place), three new installations by three Twin Cities women artists addressing the crises of our time. Curated by gallery director Camille LeFevre, “At this Point… Three Spaces for Contemplation” features immersive work by Jovan Speller, Tia Keobounpheng (Tia Keo), and Rebecca Krinke. The exhibition will have a virtual opening Saturday, October 3, from 5 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Details of in-person opening yet to be determined. The exhibition closes Saturday, November 21, 2020.

The artists were selected for the singular ways in which they address, through their personal aesthetic lenses and artistic sensibilities, the crises with which we’re now contending, including racism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and ecological and economic collapse. Their work wasn’t chosen to fit seamlessly together, but rather to resonate with, complement, and add meaning to each other. Exemplars of the “imaginal cells” author Rebecca Solnit references, Speller, Keobounpheng, and Krinke provide ways in which to understand the times in which we’re living and pathways leading to personal and social change.

Speller expands upon her work “Relics of Home” in her NewStudio Gallery installation, “Sounds for Survival.” “Contemporary culture calls me to conjure possibility, rather than reflect realities,” she explains, “to reimagine and make visible scenarios of freedom, conceptualize protection, and reposition power. As a black creator, methods of freedom and survival are always relevant. But amid the overlapping health, racial, and political pandemics, there is a broader audience, and greater interest in the concerns of othered bodies.”

“Sounds for Survival” includes a space enclosed in black high-gloss reflective material that conjures an “otherness.” The installation also includes evocative photography and sounds of Yemaya (the Yorùbá Orisha or Goddess of the living Ocean, and the mother of all). “The space is a spiritual and spatial interruption of the present crises and envisioning of possibility,” Speller explains. “It’s designed for black refuge, respite, and resilience. It is a space of anti-othering of blackness.”

Keobounpheng’s installation “Past Present” advances her iterative works “BLOODLINE” (inspired by epigenetics) and “FORCED/FORCE,” by bringing them into deeper and broader conversation about how our collective inheritance can inform the meaning of change. The circular hanging coils of electrical wire in “BLOODLINE no.6” suggest spiraling DNA or umbilical cords, and symbolize the weight of unacknowledged inheritance distributing itself generationally. “FORCED/FORCE no.4” is a circular array of copper plates that were forced into a mold not made for them, resulting in a collective of female forms resonate with histories of violence, racism, misogyny, injustice, and abuse. A mirror at one end of the installation de-centers the viewer to inspire internal reflection.

“Tia is considering intergenerational trauma—looking back in time to show us something true about the present; Jovan is acutely aware of the past and making a space for Black respite, which opens possibilities for reimagining the future,” says Krinke. “My installation reflects the present moment, led by dreams and intuition; and trusting my body to make, more than my mind to think.”

Krinke’s site-specific “Space Without a Map” conjures a world in flux. Her curtained room-within-the-room includes sculptural cloaks draped to honor past dreams, selves, and ways of being. She’s transformed the windows into hazy portals to mark the fluctuating relationship between inner and outer selves. A desk and chair provide visitors with a place to ponder the unknown territory of selfhood being navigated in 2020. “The installation is an ‘imaginal cell’ where anything is possible, and we don’t know how it’s going to coalesce,” she says.

Check out our Facebook Live Artist Talk from the gallery opening!

For more information or images, to arrange a studio visit, or to schedule an interview with the artists, please contact Camille LeFevre