Opening Reception: Alexa Horochowski
Date and Time for this Past Event
- Saturday, Feb 2, 2019 5 - 7 PM
Location
Rochester Art Center
30 Civic Center Dr SE
Event Cost
Free
Details
Alexa Horochowski is one of the top artists working in Minnesota due to her multi-layered art practice that weaves together sculpture, video, printmaking in dramatic forms and epic displays. Using such things as Styrofoam cups or coir logs that line rivers to shore up their banks or kelp from the sea, Horochowski’s work always surprises and sustains further looking and thinking. In design and material, the objects are intended to broach the uneasy relationship between ecological sustainability and the market forces driving industry, farm production, and the politics of environmental stewardship. Using sculpture and video she helps us look more closely at our physical relationship to the materials used in ecological preservation, the seemingly futile attempts to keep nature from changing due to the Anthropocene era in which we live. Beautiful Sky takes land based materials that are used in soil and water preservation and transforms them into abstract but somehow knowable forms. The effect is that the viewer experiences these functional materials in a new way, bringing that perspective then back to the land. The sculptural forms she creates are eerie in how they both mask and reveal at the same time. A type of land art in the gallery that responds, reflects and acts on the contemporary issues around land use in our time, taking into consideration wider scope of global trade, post-colonial ethnic relations that takes land and water to supply a system that craves this resource rather than needs it. Born and raised in Argentina, Horochowski, the daughter of an Argentinian born doctor of Ukranian heritage, moved to America’s Heartland as a young girl with her family. Splitting an identity between South and North America, her work never lets the things most of us take for granted in America to sit still, but to radiate with new meaning. Horochowski is currently Professor of Art at St. Cloud State University and has received numerous grants and awards. Most recently she participated in the Forest Island Project artist residency in Mammoth Lakes, CA, that placed her within a dramatic landscape explored by land artists Nacy Holt, Robert Smithson, and Michael Heizer, and photographer Ansel Adams. Considerable funding was made possible through an Efroymson Family Fund fellowship awarded to Horochowski for this exhibition.
