In this exhibition, Marks, Porras, and Tejeda Mata consider existence during times of transition and temporary placehood. Individually, each artist catalogs their histories and unique perceptions of the past to make sense of their intersecting present. Together, these memories commingle, creating a substantive collection of new prints, zines, and paper sculptures that define their present moment.

Marks, Porras, and Tejeda Mata are currently studio interns at WSW. This nearly 50-year-old program offers young people interested in a career in art valuable hands-on training and studio access. Interns receive a stipend and housing on WSW’s campus. 

Ruth Marks is a printmaker and illustrator whose work exposes the ways in which people across time and space are entangled and connected. She uses scenes of ordinary situations and everyday life to show how things slowly change over time. She believes that these inevitabilities of change, both small and drastic, are what unite people together. A person is composed of layers of history, human connection, and memories. They are an amalgamation of the past, present, and future. So is a print!

@rruffie

Daniella Porras-Sholes is a multidisciplinary artist who creates sculptures and prints exploring her need to desperately hold onto memories and spaces before they inevitably vanish. By using handmade overbeaten paper to print on while it is wet or to cast over found objects, she attempts to capture a moment using materials that repel the very act of control. The paper decides what details get carried into the final piece, making her confront her own inability to keep something the same. Paper holds memory, but it is malleable, echoing how humans remember. This uncontrollable process of papermaking distorts, shrivels and pulls away, mimicking in a physical form how fickle memory is. By taking objects or photos from her own environment, she creates site-specific work, painstakingly adhering the paper to an object that attempts to do what will never be possible: replicate a moment in time.

@_daniella_porras_

Heidi D. Tejeda Mata is a printmaker from Southern California. Her work documents her life as a young second-generation Mexican-American woman, drawing from cherished yet troubled memories surrounding adolescence and her relationship to womanhood, family, her ethnic home, and food. She joins fragments to create narratives that speak to the perseverance of Mexican immigrant families, underscoring and affirming that value, beauty, and joy are inherently present in otherwise marginalized existences. Her work takes on a modest, delicate appearance with a bittersweet undertone. Through a juxtaposition of loose and rigid mark-making and forms, the use of both warm and cool colors, and consideration of the printed material, she both softens and sharpens the impact of the real stories of personal, socioeconomic, and cultural struggle that shape each image.

@tt.dey

Bingaman-Burt’s long-running daily drawing project approaches consumer culture through steady, intimate documentation. For over twenty years, she has drawn the items she purchases each day in quick, unedited sketches. What began as a gesture of personal accountability has grown into an expansive archive of daily life. Through repetition, small transactions and daily necessities become markers of time and routine. Accumulated over years, the drawings form a quiet but insistent record of being alive in the world. The exhibition will highlight selections from this ongoing project alongside sketchbooks, zines, and a new risograph-printed book that reflects on two decades of daily drawings. 

Saloka’s practice begins with the collection of rocks and rubble, detritus she gathers from the street, construction sites, and other places. Each piece of rubble she selects is both material and metaphor, a fragment separated from a greater whole. In the 1980s, she was one of thousands of South Korean children adopted by Minnesota families. Growing up in a mostly white environment, she often found connection to family and friends through pop culture. As an adult, she is inspired creatively by the American brands and products she grew up with, using them as subjects of her paintings. The surface imagery Saloka paints onto each form, like the culture of her adopted country, is full of bright colors and bold words, artfully composed branding draped over bumpy, imperfect canvases.