Watershed: River Arts Alliance Juried Exhibition

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Ink Drawing

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Digital Photograph
Optional Brief Statement: I met Hien in 1994 when she came to Winona from Vietnam after the Amerasian Homecoming Act was passed in 1987. I am fortunate that she likes to be in front of the camera as much as I enjoy being behind it.

Year Created: 2023
Medium: Monotype

Year Created: 2023
Medium: Mixed

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Wood, Leather, Brass, Bone, and Hair
Optional Brief Statement: Fishing lures as fine art.

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Acrylic paint on stretched canvas

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Watercolor on paper
Optional Brief Statement: Native to Minnesota, Nelumbo lutea, or the lotus plant, grows most commonly in the backwaters of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. The lotus plant is treasured by various religions, symbolizing the ability to overcome adversity and challenges and rebirth. (Minnesota Wildflowers.org; Bouqs.com/blog/lotus-flower-meaning-and-symbolism) During the summer of 2015, a year of personal loss, I learned to kayak in the quiet backwaters of the Mississippi River. The Upper Mississippi Wildlife Refuge, home to the lotus, is where I photographed this especially beautiful plant during the summer of 2023. This is my first attempt to share my experience of the lotus through a painting. Michelle Cochran, August 2024

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Printmaking - Relief print

Honorable Mention

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Cotton crochet
Optional Brief Statement: I stretched out untiring hands, and I would not be comforted explores the role of a fragmented body navigating multiple realities through an on-going durational performance that involves counting, handwork, postures, rhythms, and gestures of tying knots and weaving. Peggy Phalen proposed that performance’s essence is in the memory that remains, its trace, its absence, but Bradford Styrbicki’s performance created a presence, an artifact, a mark that carries the personal and political resonance that Phalen sought. The work illustrates how embodied resistance can serve as a form of dance, transcending conventional boundaries of performance. By capturing the choreography inscribed on the body, the work offers a unique perspective on the intersection of movement, discourse, and expression.

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Oil

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Wood and Copper
Optional Brief Statement: Fishing lures as fine art.

First Prize

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Colored pencil

Year Created: 2022
Medium: Ceramic
Optional Brief Statement: This explores love and loss, the knowledge and power of Wu Wei, the beauty of rot, and feeling helpless. And contrapasto of course.

Year Created: 2023
Medium: ceramics, found sticks
Optional Brief Statement: This piece was inspired by my alcoholic brother who resisted help in dealing with his disease and was lost to us.

Year Created: 2023
Medium: Silver gelatin print, toned in tea

Third Prize

Year Created: 2023
Medium: Digital photograph, inkjet print

Year Created: 2024
Medium: fabric
Optional Brief Statement: I found a passion for re-purposing fabric! I collect fabric samples, upholstery remnants, jeans and other unwanted items which I up-cycle to create one-of-a-kind pieces. Each item is crafted with the utmost attention to detail, making them truly unique. This basket was created using upcycled jeans inseams.

Year Created: 2023
Medium: Pastel
Optional Brief Statement: The Driftless area of Wisconsin/Southeast Minnesota where I live and find inspiration: the region’s bluffs, rivers and roads and roads inform my work. When I travel, I find parallels with these landscape forms, as Norwegian fjords echo Mississippi River bluffs. Painting and drawing serve as vehicles for connecting more deeply with the self and with nature, through its process and physicality. Like nature itself, I view the process of painting as transformative (both physically and philosophically) as light shifts and colors blend, creating new perceptions and experiences. Conceptually I am interested in the way we as individuals and as a society identify with and define notions of landscape through travel, place-specificity, and ecological imperatives.

People's Choice

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Porcelain

Honorable Mention

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Ink on Paper
Optional Brief Statement: The all-female Library Club supported the creation and development of the Robbinsdale Public Library. The library was housed in various businesses around Robbinsdale until 1917, when the Club purchased a small bakery building, moved it to 4915 -42nd Avenue North, and converted it into a little library. In 1925, the bakery building was replaced by the existing building. Costs of construction were funded by local citizens and the Library Club. The library was much loved by the community, but by 1976, the library was consolidated into a new Rockford Road library two miles away.