Joe Sinness
If Only, 2010
colored pencil on paper
22.5 x 30 inches

Flourish: Jennifer Davis, Erika Olson Gross, Terrence Payne, and Joe Sinness

Friday, October 22, 2010—Sunday, January 2, 2011
Minnesota Artists Exhibition Gallery
Free Exhibition

The Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program presents "Flourish," a group exhibition featuring new work by four Minneapolis artists: Jennifer Davis, Erika Olson Gross, Terrence Payne, and Joe Sinness.

Davis's delicate paintings include a cast of animal, monster, and human characters who all have parts to play in her colorful fantasies. But her charming, Easter-egg palette belies the underlying psychological dramas of introversion and lost innocence.

Olson Gross is a multi-media artist whose sculptures and paintings express the poetry and fecundity of nature. Her most recent bucolic landscapes are intricately painted. The illustrative, woodblock-print flatness of her animal and flora forms resemble collaged scraps of paper attached to the canvas.

Payne's large oil pastels on paper produce a sense of humor tinged with melancholy; the hand-written captions reveal his characters' internal narratives of disappointment, apathy, and resignation.

Rendered in colored pencil with a fastidious, hyper-realistic attention to detail, Sinness' baroque-style drawings are filled with color, pattern, and texture. The work implies sexual double-entendres and employs sly turns of phrase.

The Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program (MAEP) is made possible by a generous grant from the Jerome Foundation.

MAEP Artists Talk
Thursday, November 18, 2010
7—9 p.m.
MAEP Galleries