The Periphery of Power Artist Talk
C4W:2023 Artists Talk Features: CL Martin, Henry Tyson, Perci Chester, Jessica Eckerstorfer
In alignment with the concepts of The Periphery of Power, guest curator, Esther Callahan will be sparking conversation with four featured artists in a moderated panel discussion. These conversations provide the artists a platform where they have the opportunity to speak on their artistic processes and current inspirations within contemporary contexts. Accompany us in welcoming CL Martin, Henry Tyson, Jessica Eckerstorfer, and Perci Chester as they share the role they and their art play in our collective history.
Making their return to Gamut are CL Martin and Perci Chester. CL’s use of traditional media like charcoal, graphite, and acrylic creates mysterious characters with their own unique identity and presence. Her portrait, The Snake, is enigmatic and rebellious, but more colorful than many of the past works she has shown at Gamut Gallery over the years. Perci Chester has made her return to the gallery after 7 years with her sculpture, Tore So Glow. Her use of non-traditional materials such as an aluminum glass door, wire, steel filings, rusted nails, paper cups, a plastic torso, and metal springs create her featured sculpture. Perci’s work may be cold to the touch, but her abstract style is warm with human emotion, rooted in human and animal forms, often expressing motion, tension, and balance.
We are delighted to welcome newcomers Henry Tyson and Jessica Eckerstorfer. Henry’s hand-built and wheel-thrown ceramic sculptures investigate the functions, associations, and assumptions of the body, pottery, and the points at which they overlap. Tyson’s sculpture, Inreflection, posits queer intimacy as a counter to normative views of sex, gender, and tenderness. While Jessica Eckerstorfer book and paper project, The Matriarch is part of a larger collection, entitled Voices in a Room. The project, which includes 12 pieces, uses short story, letterpress, handmade paper, and sculpture to bring voices to male-made, female forms in the art world. Each piece is soft in nature with her use of cotton pulp, thread, and natural foliage inserts creating this handbound book in its deconstructed form as it spills from the walls onto the gallery floor.
C4W:2023 The Periphery of Power ARTIST TALK
Thursday, August 3rd // 7pm
• $5 pre-sale available
• $10 day of the event
• FREE for members
Esther Callahan was inspired by the importance of creating a space that originates from a need to delve into all sorts of wide-ranging, hot-topic issues, through the works she chose in her curation of this open call for work, C4W:2023. This exhibition references The Periphery of Power through love, social mores, gender, intimacy, beauty, materiality, maternity, and more. The pieces Callahan chose convey her vision of art as a vehicle of agency and power. Join us as we learn about each artist’s processes, perspectives on their bodies of work, and the role of art in contemporary society as a whole.
FREE GALLERY & GIFT SHOP OPEN HOURS
Wednesday – Friday, 11am – 6pm and
Saturday 11am – 4pm. We are available by appointment, please request an appointment 48 hours in advance.
ABOUT THE CURATOR & MODERATOR
Esther Callahan is an African American curator, arts organizer, and feminist scholar. Over the past 20+ years in the Twin Cities, she has created and co-created various platforms for cultural production rooted in interrogating the impact of racial and gender equity. She is the former Co-Director of the Emerging Curator Institute (ECI), a Minnesota based nonprofit designed to build the individual practices of emerging curators from diverse backgrounds. In addition to ECI, Callahan was a Curatorial Fellow at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), where she co-founded the Curatorial Advisory Committee as a model to help inform Diversity, Equity, Accessibility and Inclusion practice in curatorial work. She is also the Co-Artistic Director for Arts & Rec US, a design and development company in Mpls.
ABOUT THE PANELIST
Henry Tyson’s (they, them) work consists of hand-built and wheel-thrown ceramic sculptures that investigate the functions, associations, and assumptions of the body, pottery, and the points at which they overlap. Henry posit’s queer intimacy as a counter to traditional views of sex, gender, and tenderness. Is it not a basic function of the body to hold another? To love? By blending the human form with functional pottery, they ask: “if we are indeed vessels, may we choose what we were made to carry? What does my body hold and why?”
CL Martin (she, they) is a queer figurative artist who uses traditional media like charcoal, graphite and acrylic to experiment with enigmatic characters and their own unique identity and presence. She has studied art all her life and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She is continually inspired by history, graphic & digital design and the performing arts. In 2007, she received an Artist Initiative Grant from the MN State Arts Board and the National Endowment for The Arts. She has exhibited internationally from London to Italy and her work resides in private collections in London, Italy, Paris, Ukraine, Berlin, Los Angeles and New York.
Perci Chester (she, her) is an American visual artist working across disciplines including sculpture, painting, photography, and printmaking. Her work is abstract in style but rooted in human and animal forms, often expressing motion, tension, and balance in vivid color through imaginative invention. Created variously from metal, glass, wood, found objects, and industrial artifacts, Perci Chester’s work ranges in scale from intimate pedestal pieces to large public art installations, reflecting her sense of humor with the depth and complexities of memory and the human experience. She is best known for large-scale anthropomorphic installations that appear to defy gravity in suspended equilibrium and elicit an emotional connection as dialogue between spirit and matter.
Perci Chester’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and is represented in private and public collections internationally. With an extensive background in art education, she has taught in Boston, New York, San Francisco and the Twin Cities and, for many years, served on the advisory board for College of Visual Arts in St. Paul. She holds an MFA as well as a Master of Arts in Teaching from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. Perci lives and practices in Minneapolis.
Jessica Eckerstorfer (she, her) is a 2nd generation, Filipina-American who grew up all over the Midwest, but settled in Minneapolis in 2012. She is a strong feminist, who believes in the intersectionality of social justice and the necessity of empathetic creativity. In addition, she is the Co-Founder and Artistic Community Director of Paranoid Tree Press. Her background is solidly based in arts nonprofit programming. She has dual Bachelor’s degrees in English and philosophy with a focus of civic life and engagement from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and a Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Fiction from Columbia College Chicago. She is a two time recipient of the Albert P. Weisman Award, and her work can be found in The Ivory Tower, Pilcrow & Dagger, and Paper Darts Lit + Art Magazine.Her day is split between co-directing The Southeast Asian Diaspora Project (SEAD) and art directing Paranoid Tree Press.