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This collection features the work of the four recipients of the 2004-05 MCAD/McKnight Foundation Fellowships for Visual Artists. These four Minnesota artists—Ana Lois-Borzi, Rollin Marquette, Erika Olson, and Joe Smith—were chosen from a pool of approximately 200 applicants in spring 2004 by a jury of three national arts professionals. These outstanding artists utilized the fellowship year to plumb the depths of their ideas regarding art and art-making, challenging preconceptions, testing new theories and materials, and broadening their perspectives through travel and research. They all made new, intriguing works that take them in new directions and yet hone their own distinctive voices and concerns.

Minneapolis-based Argentinean artist Ana Lois-Borzi uses drawing as her medium, a fundamental relation to mark making and space that defines her entire oeuvre. Based in images of childhood, stuffed animals, and macabre humor, her work seeks to explore the intersection between our objects and our selves, dark memories and active desires. Lois-Borzi received an MFA in drawing and painting at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 1996.

Minneapolis College of Art and Design graduate Erika Olson (MFA ’02) weaves plants, flowers and stylized arabesques into lush and colorful paintings on plywood and felt objects. In her work, she creates alternative worlds, using the language of decoration and artificiality to limn the stillness and fecundity of nature.

Alternative worlds are also important to Rollin Marquette, an artist originally from New Jersey, who received his MFA in sculpture from the State University of New York-Albany in 1995. Marquette’s worlds are wrought from man-made and incendiary materials of stainless steel and sulfur, anti-freeze and improvised ballistic gelatin. These powerful materials interact with the observer through walk-in containers or familiar objects that are at once unyielding and commanding and yet strangely sensuous, resilient and compelling.

Joe Smith’s objects and installations take time to work on the viewer confronted by subversive juxtapositions, shapes, materials and references. With common materials like cardboard, duct tape, spit balls and Mylar, he investigates the spaces and corners we ignore or neglect, featuring them in a perverse and seductive dance with our fears, our expectations and our desires. Smith graduated with an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 1998.

New work by each of these four artists will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition “MCAD/McKnight Artists 2005” at the MCADGallery from July 1 to August 7, 2005. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essays on each artist by New York art critic Johanna Burton.

July 1 – August 7, 2005
MCADGallery

Opening reception: Friday, July 1, 6-8 p.m.
Artists’ panel discussion: Wednesday, July 6, 6 p.m.

MCADGallery
Minneapolis College of Art and Design
2501 Stevens Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55404

(612) 874-3700
http://www.mcad.edu

Gallery hours
Monday-Friday 9 am – 8 pm
Saturday 9 am – 5 pm
Sunday noon – 5 pm

This exhibition is made possible through a grant from The McKnight Foundation.

Regional, Unclassified

• Untitled (I Beg to Differ), Ana Lois-Borzi
• Shed, Rollin Marquette
• Terrarium 3, Erika Olson Gross
• Pile, Joe Smith
• Turtle Head Was Only Joking, Ana Lois-Borzi
• Untitled, Rollin Marquette
• Untitled (Platform), Joe Smith
• A Certain Satisfaction from Unsubstantiated Worry, Erika Olson Gross
• Advantage, Joe Smith
• You're Killing Me, Ana Lois-Borzi