Artist's Statement

In my recent work, I have been thinking about what it means to be part of a community that is stretched thin -- across distance, across time, across culture -- and how ideas are shared across that expanse. Throughout my career, much of my work has been about how we understand the world: how we patch together a comprehension of time, or space, or the shape of things, and the strategies we use to try to communicate these ideas. The visual and conceptual sources for this work have, mostly, been books. Trying to understand (4th spatial dimension), for example, draws from Charles Howard Hinton's The Fourth Dimension (1904), in which he published a series of illustrations to enable readers to visualize a fourth spatial dimension.

More recently, I began making a series of prints, stencils, and gouaches drawn from images of books and journals held in library and museum collections, including the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The experience of browsing the magazines there happens at a meeting point between preservation and access: when the nearly century-old publications are delivered to your study space, you’re privileged to leaf through the volumes, but aware that each time you open a cover, or flip past a page, you both participate in the community of sharing inherent to the idea of an artist’s publication, and contribute to the magazine’s inevitable decay. To preserve the pages in my memory, I scan the images on the LOC’s special book scanner -— another process, that while providing ongoing access to the content via digital images, contributes to the decay of the materials. These digital images are bound up in other types of decay as well: the loss of image quality, the loss of materiality of the original. These images, then, are bound up in both connection and loss, immediacy and distance. For the installation Circulation(images 1a-1c) I worked with digitized images of books from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection at the LOC. The tables (inspired by the design of the study tables in Rosenwald’s original library) are sites of production: images of the books --at 1:1 scale --are carved into the tops of the tables, creating blocks for the production of prints.

The most recent gouaches (images 10-15) were made mostly during the past year of COVID quarantine. Cut off from libraries and museums, from friends, from a community of artists, my archive of library images became ever more important. These small works –- made on the table in my living room over the months that my daughter and I barely left the house –- proved to be another iteration of the life of the images. Every timeI circulate those images, I am extending the community of viewers of those original works: imperfectly, and in a way never imagined by the original makers.

Artist's Biography

Margaret Pezalla-Granlund received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She was awarded a McKnight Fellowship and a Jerome Travel Grant to the archives of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ and the Velaslevansky Panorama and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, CA. She has exhibited both locally and nationally, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Santa Monica Museum, and at Burnett Gallery in the Minneapolis. Her work was included in the 2015 Midwest Biennial at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis. She is currently the director of The College of New Jersey Art Gallery and The Sarnoff Collection.

Awards & Honors

2015
MRAC Next Step Fund Grant

Lucas Artist Fellow, Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA

2014
Lucas Artist Fellow, Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA

2013
Minnesota State Arts Board, Artist Initiative Grant

2011
Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant

MRAC Next Step Fund Grant

2009
Jerome Foundation Artist Travel Grant

2008
McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship

William and Ardelle Haas Travel Award

2005
Minnesota State Arts Board, Artist Initiative Grant

Artist's Bibliography

2006
Space Available, Visual Feature, Rake Magazine, October, 2006

Collections

Floating Library, Minneapolis MN
Fairview Hospital
Park Nicollet Clinic

Artist Talks and Presentations

The College of New Jersey
Bethel University
MCAD
Walker Art Center
Museum of Jurassic Technology
Make Day, Science Museum of MN

Selected Exhibitions

Solo‍

2020
Circulation, Abington Art Center, Jenkintown, PA

2012
Burnet Art Gallery at Chambers, Wayzata, MN

2008
Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis, MN

Group

‍2018
Extraordinary Outdoors, Nemeth Art Center, Park Rapids, MN

2017
Seeing Math, Flaten Art Museum, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN

2016
superrusted, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI

Collaboratory, Gallery 71, Edina, MN
Curator: Mary Bergs

2015
The Midwest Biennial, Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN

2014
Evidence of Air, Coe College, Cedar Rapids, IA

2012
Why This Place, Form + Content Gallery, Minneapolis, MN

2011
Universe City, CSULA Fine Arts Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2010
What Remains, The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN

Tangible Digital Matter, Wilson Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

2009
A New Breed of Watercolor, Soo Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN

McKnight Fellowship Exhibition

Melting Point, El Camino College, Torrance, CA
Curator: Susanna Meiers

2008
Journey to the Surface of the Earth, Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Minneapolis, MN

2007
Environments of Invention, Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul, MN

Project Room, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA

2006
Untitled 5, Soo Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN
Juried Exhibition

2005
Project Room, Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis, MN

Minnesota State Arts Board (MSAB) Grant Recipient Exhibition, MSAB, Saint Paul, MN

Christensen Center Art Gallery, Augsburg College, Minneapolis, MN

Project Room: The Universe in a Parking Ramp: Models to visualize the shape of the universe, No Name Exhibitions @ the Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN

Other

‍2016
TuckUnder Projects
Curator: Peter Driessen

2014
Commissioned artist, Floating Library, Minneapolis, MN
Curator: Sarah Peters

2013
Great Astronomical Discoveries (Nearly) Lately Made, collaboration with Tim Granlund, Astronaut Spirit Academy group project, Northern Spark Festival, Saint Paul, MN

2010
In the Midst of the Fall, installation for Showtel, Palm Beach, FL