Collection: Feeling and Knowing

Interact is delighted to present Feeling and Knowing, an exhibition curated by Kristen Sanders at Interact Gallery. The exhibition is part of our guest curator program, which invites scholars and artists to organize exhibitions that draw from Interact's extensive, ever-growing archive, which dates back to 1996.

Sanders writes:

Feeling and Knowing is an exhibition that centers on relationships: between pieces, between artists, and between what we perceive and what we imagine. The works of twenty six artists are paired and grouped together based on the conversations that form between them. Together, these works beckon us to know something new about each of them, prompted by the feelings cultivated within their connections.

In one arrangement, the palpable energy of Cal Nesbitt’s color analysis is juxtaposed against the quiet stillness of Devin Wildes’s interior scene. Positioned together, the pair makes you feel something different than you might viewing each piece separately. Other relationships highlight similarities in the color, shape, gesture and mark-making between pieces. Subtle orange structures in Matt Zimdar’s tornado piece, for example, create a dialogue with the alternating orange and gray forms within Carl Clark’s reflective landscape.

Moving through the exhibition, you find yourself transported between various terrains, weather phenomena, interior architectures, and abstractions. Each encounter along the way shifts how we experience what comes before and after it. Humans, animals, and aliens alike inhabit these shifting worlds. Dichotomies between movement and stillness, angst and joy, and internal and external realms start to reveal themselves.

All together, the artists in Feeling and Knowing make something intangible visible, if only just for a glimpse. Individual paintings, works on paper, ceramics, and textile pieces come together to invite curiosity and reflection. Viewed in relation to one another, subtle details are brought into focus. Compositions vibrate together on new frequencies. New narratives arise. Feeling becomes a way of knowing.

About the Curator

Kristen Sanders is a visual artist based in St. Paul. Her work explores the ambiguous boundaries between consciousness and the body, self and the environment, life and death, and past and future. For the past decade, Sanders has worked primarily in painting, but she’s recently rediscovered her love for ceramics and is especially excited about the growing dialogue between these two practices. Originally from California, Sanders received a BA from the University of California Davis, and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. She currently teaches in the Art Department at the University of Minnesota. 

EXHIBITING ARTISTS

Kaia Burg, Annemarie Burns, Carl Clark, Bill Crane, Michael Engebretson, Janice Essick, Claire Falleni, Jesse Ferdinand, Kate Gillespie, Ingrid Hansen, Teazu Juah, Ashlea Karkula, Maria Keleher, Cyrus M., Chris Mason, Cal Nesbitt, Rosemary Perronteau, Lucy Picasso, Thomas Robinson, Dan Schlaag, Andrew Seymour, Bonnie Thorne, Victor Van, Ang Weller, Devin Wildes, Matt Zimdars.