Left: Kathryn Nobbe, mother, her mother, me, (Hybrid Portrait 7), 2022-2023, inkjet print on Moab Somerset velvet paper, 12”hx9”
Right: Kathryn Nobbe, Indelible Vestiges (skirt 3), 2023, mixed media: recycled clothing, textiles. acrylic and latex paint, rhoplex gel mediums, Golden GAC, wax (encaustic and cold) 3D piece: 21”h x 32w x 32d”

An Installation-Based Exhibition Of New Work By Kathryn Nobbe

Form+Content Gallery presents an installation-based exhibition of new work by Kathryn Nobbe. In her series of mixed media artworks, Indelible Vestiges: mother, her mother, me, Nobbe recontextualizes family photographs, items of clothing, and other keepsakes culled from personal belongings she has collected over the past 21 years when family members passed on. As a subset of a larger body of her work with these themes, this exhibition focuses on and utilizes items from her collection of relics that belonged to her mother's side of the family.

Nobbe’s collection ranges from everyday objects to deeply personal curios that have little monetary value but hold profound personal meaning. These items serve as both inspiration and the actual medium for this body of work. Nobbe's strategies to incorporate painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and digital technologies provide fertile ground to explore family history and autobiography, simultaneously asserting a broader cultural context of shared issues of identity, death, loss, remembrance, determinism, archetypal mythology, and collective memory. .

Left: Kathryn Nobbe, mother, her mother, me, (Hybrid Portrait 27), 2022-2023, inkjet print on Moab Somerset velvet paper, 12”hx9”
Right: Kathryn Nobbe, Indelible Vestiges (casual top 3), 2023, mixed media: recycled clothing, textiles, acrylic & latex paint, rhoplex gel mediums, Golden GAC, wax (encaustic and cold), 3D piece: 22”h x 24w x 16d”

Exhibition Dates:

August 3 – September 9, 2023

Opening Reception / Meet the artist and listen to captivating, original sound and music:

Saturday, August 5, 2023

5:00 – 8:00 pm

This event will include music and sound art by local musicians and composers.

Additional Gallery Events:

Inspired by Gertrude Stein's legendary Paris Salon, Kathryn Nobbe is pleased to present a series of events showcasing a wide range of talent, approaches, and dialogue in art, music, spoken word, creative theory, and beyond.

Saturday, August 5, 2023, 5:00 – 8:00 pm: Gallery Opening Reception
This event will include music and sound art by local musicians and composers.

Saturday, August 12, 2023, 4:00 – 5:30 pm, Salon #1: Dialogue and Presentation on the subject of Olfactory Response in Art. This event will involve an opening introduction and conversation between artist Kathryn Nobbe and her long-time friend and inspiration, renowned composer Mary Ellen Childs. Childs, a multi-disciplinary artist who combines music and olfaction in her most recent work, will present a survey of her art over the past decades. The salon will also involve a fascinating interactive visual, sound, and scent experience with audience members.

Saturday, August 19, 2023, 5:00 p.m.
Salon #2: Poetry, Spoken Word Performances, Presentations and dialogue among the Twin Cities top poets and spoken word artists.

CANCELED- Saturday, August 26, 2023, 5:00 p.m. Salon #3 will be merged with the CLOSING RECEPTION on Friday, September 8, 6:00–8:30 pm (see below)

EXHIBITION CLOSING* Reception + Artist Salon #3 Friday, September 8, 2023, 5:00 – 8:30 pm With poetry, spoken word, music, and visual art, this event will both celebrate and close* Kathryn Nobbe's exhibition. Throughout the evening, there will be performances and salon-style dialogue among the participating artists about the creative process, inspiration, and larger themes of Nobbe's exhibition. Visitors are welcome and encouraged to join in the discussion. *The actual last day of the exhibition is Saturday, September 9, noon–6 p.m.

Indelible Vestiges: mother, her mother, me a mixed media installation-based exhibition by Kathryn Nobbe.

Guest Artists:

Music Composition/Pianist: Maura Bosch

Poetry &Spoken Word; Irene Alderson, DraLandra Larkins SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE, Barry MacDonald (aka “Tekkan”)

Artist/host Kathryn Nobbe

LINE-UP/TIME LINE

5:00-6pm:

View the exhibition and engage in casual conversation with artist Kathryn Nobbe about her work

Live original music by virtuoso composer and pianist Maura Bosch

6:00-8:00 pm

Salon #3

The Salon will begin with a short artist talk by Kathryn Nobbe

Guest artists begin with their first series of performances and will continue with successive rounds as time permits.

Each round of performances is followed by intellectual group discussion and free exchange of issues related to the creative process, inspiration, philosophy, role of the artist in society, etc.

Previous participants, composers and interdisciplinary artists Philip Blackburn and Mary Ellen Childs (from Salon #1 and 2) will also take part.

Audience members are encouraged to participate with their own thoughts and questions.

ARTIST SALON #3 INFORMATION AND FORMAT:

Over the past six weeks, artist Kathryn Nobbe assembled a series of artist salon-style events in conjunction with her mixed media, installation-based exhibition, Indelible Vestiges: mother, her mother, me, at F+C Gallery. Showcasing the work of Minnesota artists from a variety disciplines, including musicians, interdisciplinary artists, poets + spoken word artists, the format has involved successive rounds where each artist presents their work, followed by intellectual group discussion and free exchange of issues related to the creative process, inspiration, philosophy, role of the artist in society, etc. The conversation is allowed to take its own direction, sparking new ideas collectively and individually, while audience members are encouraged to participate with their own thoughts and questions.

The extraordinary artist-participants in the Salon series over the past 6 weeks:

Music Composition/Interdisciplinary: Philip Blackburn,Maura Bosch,Mary Ellen Childs

Poetry & Spoken Word; Irene Alderson, DraLandra Larkins,SEE MORE PERSPECTIVE

Barry MacDonald (aka “Tekkan”), Peter vvvStein; with visual artist/host Kathryn Nobbe

The gallery is open to the public during regular hours, Thursday–Saturday, noon–6 p.m. Please email or text the artist (k.nobbe777@gmail.com, phone 651-231-5339) if you would like to arrange a visit outside of regular hours, and Kathryn will do her best to accommodate you.

Gallery events are free and open to the public.

Artist's Statement

Over the past 10 years, I have been making art inspired by and composed from my extensive collection of family relics I acquired when my aunt, father, and most recently, my mother, passed on. Recent 2D pieces for this exhibition evolved into “hybrid portraits,” involving digitally manipulated, reconfigured photographs of my mother, her mother, and me. I consider this ongoing work an autobiographical “mother-triad”—the three of us as simultaneously separate and as one.

In many ways, I feel like an archivist, organizing and documenting a vast array of photographs, keepsakes, curios, mementos, newspaper clippings, old letters and notes, everyday clothing, and cherished accessories. I am interested in examining and recontextualizing the construction of the things that hold meaning and memory, re-presenting them in ways that go beyond the personal, in order to reveal, challenge, and obscure their origins, utility, and sentimentality. My process is non-linear, where method and material alternatively serve as armature, metaphor, experiment, and chance. When I work outside, I embrace the serendipity of nature’s effect on my materials and approach. When my workspace transitions from the walls of my studio to the great outdoors, I embrace the serendipity of natures effect on my materials and approach. Elements of rain, sun, wind, dirt, insects, and nibbling creatures have the propensity to create intricate and unexpected beautiful effects on materials, form, texture, and color (etc) that often surpass human imagination and creativity.

In my sculptural work, stiffening agents, paint, pastes, waxes, glazes, and other media, are used in my process of dismantling and reconstructing garments and the raw materials/textiles they are made of. My analysis and recontextualization can feel forensic at times, like doing an autopsy backwards, as I work with materials that were originally used to beautify, encase, protect, and identify the owner. As the work develops, I imagine the materials' surfaces and interleaved layers as a second skin, infused with a scent-mixture of perspiration, microbes, and perfumes from the skin they touched.

The French novelist Marcel Proust, who was particularly interested in understanding the mechanics of his own being and the role memory played within it, wrote that the olfactory sense triggers the most vivid and powerful of all “involuntary autobiographical sensations and memories”. In his novel, Remembrance of Things Past, he asserted that the corrosive effects of time naturally obscure history and the essence of lost lives, loves, and sensations. My body of work in this exhibition embraces Proust’s belief that memory, imagination, and, most of all, artistic form can work together to counter the slippage of our personal and collective histories.

Artist's Biography

Kathryn Nobbe earned her MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Minnesota and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture with Connie Fox, Leon Golub, Jacob Lawrence, Judy Rifka, and Terry Winters.

Nobbe has created a number of public artworks, including a large-scale outdoor mural for the Pillsbury House in Minneapolis, which involved a creative collaboration with the community it celebrated. Other projects include: a set design for the New Music Opera Mirabell’s Book of Numbers, by composer Marjorie Hess, Corn Palace Productions, and writer James Merrill; a "painting performance" created for composer Homer Lambrecht and the Ancia Quartet; and a series of 27 paintings for Eugene Garber's award-winning novel The Historian, commissioned and published by independent small press Milkweed Editions. Nobbe’s experimental video, Recapitulation, was awarded and selected for broadcast on public television by a jury representing the Walker Art Center, International Filmmaker Project USA, TPT, and Intermedia Arts.

Over the past 40+ years of dedicating her life to making art, Nobbe has received numerous fellowships, awards, and commissions from local and international organizations. Selections from this list include: Forecast Public Artworks; Jerome Foundation; McKnight Artist Fellowship (2001 winner and 2015, 2021 finalist); Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; and Artists Fellowship. She is also a recipient of two Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants, the Capelli d’Angeli Foundation Grant, and two Pollock-Krasner Fellowships.

Nobbe’s work has been represented by Dolly Fiterman Fine Arts and, currently, Form+Content Gallery, both in Minneapolis. Her paintings and drawings are also in numerous public and private collections in the United States and abroad.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 12:00 – 6:00 pm

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