BEMIDJI — A free reception for a new exhibit in the Miikanan Gallery at the Watermark Art Center in Bemidji will be 2-4 p.m. Saturday, March 18.
The exhibit — Aanikewaajimowinan gaa-oshkiminwaabajichigaadegin — explores the connecting of stories and bringing things from old to new through emerging artists Joan Kauppi and Shaawan Francis Keahna. It runs through May 20.
“Converging across generations, gender, and media these artists bring their observations about identity and current culture into dynamic visual metaphors,” the art center’s website stated. “Using humor, question, and poignancy, they challenge the viewer to think more deeply about the world they are part of.”
Anishinaabe woman Kauppi said she has experimented in many art forms throughout her six decades, but found collage kept her attention.
“Collage is different. There is the transformation of merging images and the image stories change,” Kauppi stated. “I love putting pieces together from different decades, sizes, photographs, illustrations, paintings, postcards and old worn out papers. This is a new beginning, a new story, a new place of acceptance that was self-created.”
Keahna is a cross-disciplinary artist and musician. His comics have been published in A Howl by Native Realities, Butter Saint by YBI Studios, and the Asian Cyborg and Other Othered Bodies by Ellie Hyojung Lee. His words can be found in R.I.S.E. Indigenous, the Vassar Review’s Fact, Fiction, and Fabrication, and the Indigenous LGBT sci-fi anthology, Love Beyond Body, Space and Time.
Keahna performs with his father as Billy Jackass and by himself as Bogo La$ik. He is a transient twenty-something who currently resides in northern Minnesota.
