artists: rodrigo bello, julie gard, michelle matthees, kathy mctavish, erika mock, nickolas monson, sheila packa, alison price, kathleen roberts, rocky makes room, jacob swanson, swoon (marc neys), garrett tiedemann, tony zappa

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The Lost, the Discarded and the Beautiful is an exhibition at Prøve Gallery that explores legacies of American culture through abandoned objects. Whether these objects are hurdling through outer space, accidentally dropped on city streets, or overlooked in plain sight, each of the four artists in this exhibition regards them with a special sense of awe.

New photographic works by Andy Mattern represent a collection of inscrutable urban artifacts that are both entirely common and visually adrift. Through a process of cataloging similar found objects, this new body of work shifts the waste of modern life into the uncanny. By photographing these discarded items in the studio, Mattern removes their environmental context and allows us to inspect them without distraction. This special scrutiny elevates these mass-produced objects and a raises the idea of their separate histories and inevitable fates.

Also dealing with the everyday, Brent Erickson uses the iconography of the office chair to explore contemporary human experience. Erickson’s large-scale wall drawings obfuscate this common form through layering and repetition. The first impression of his monumental wall drawings is dominated by geometric pattern, but, upon deeper inspection, individual chairs emerge from the intricate design and reveal their familiar selves. In these works, Erickson re-imagines the objects of our daily life with a playful and theatrical wit.

Debuting at Prøve Gallery, the new collaborative installation by David Bowen and Kristina Estell takes space travel and extra planetary measurement as its subject. In 1977, NASA launched Voyager I to explore Jupiter and Saturn. After completing that mission, the probe continued moving outward into deep space, and still does to this day. Incredibly, it continues to transmit information back to Earth even though it is well beyond Pluto and nearing the edge of the heliosphere. Bowen and Estell have taken the stream of live location data from the probe and integrated it into a real-time light installation that considers the limits of human exploration and the threshold between contact and oblivion.

* At the opening, Andy Mattern will sign copies of two self-published artist books Driven Snow and Everyone I Never Knew as the culmination of his Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant.

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Show Description: In the third millennium B.C., ancient Egyptians created the first papyri by pounding the pulp of papyrus plants into thin, durable sheets. Five thousand years later, we continue to use the same technology to create a medium for our thoughts, our observations, to communicate with others from afar. We have developed various techniques - written word, drawing, origami, bookmaking - to accomplish these tasks, but the material has remained constant. Prøve is seeking art on any concept in any form, provided that its primary medium is paper.

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