Watershed: River Arts Alliance Juried Exhibition

Second Prize

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Acrylic

Year Created: 2023
Medium: Mixed

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

People's Choice

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Porcelain

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: 2024
Medium: Acrylic paint on stretched canvas

Year Created: 2023
Medium: Monotype

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: Acrylic

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.

Third Prize

Year Created: 2023
Medium: Digital photograph, inkjet print

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

Year Created: 2023
Medium: Giclee-printed photograph with archival inks on 100% cotton paper in a reclaimed-wood frame
Optional Brief Statement: The old wood swing shapes the air. A parabola grows. A tree branch begins to bud, a hand pushes, another reaches back, and shadows give chase. There is loss, rooted in every detail, as the swing reaches for its vertex, its zenith, its apogee and apex, vertiginous all the while, these words rare enough in a life refusing to be smaller, constrained, predetermined. What is the turning point? Still, let this loss be your strength. Still, let this splintering become a vector pointing the way. Warm your feet. Hold watermelon on your tongue. Breathe deeply. Truly see the color blue, its possibilities, a bridge from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Repeat. Repeat. These smooth grief’s sharp points, the before and after. Divide your grief, let it flow from your body. Captured impermanence -- futurity at play -- is the tension of a line running from heedless headlong girlhood into womanhood.

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Oil

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Ink Drawing

First Prize

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Colored pencil

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Printmaking - Relief print

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: 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.

Year Created: 2024
Medium: Analog Collage
Optional Brief Statement: Vintage Audubon prints from The Birds of North America, (c. 1941), cut and woven on an original mono-print. The birds, when combined and taken out of the context of Audubon’s serene backgrounds have so much movement and seem to be crashing into each other. Their expressions seem anxious, confused and sometimes humorous and I love playing with their variety of textures, shapes and colors.