Collab and Closing Receptions

Please Join us Thursday, October 25th, 6-9PM for a celebration of creative collaboration.

 

Collab: Michael Kleber-Diggs, Megan Mayer and Christopher Selleck
and Closing Receptions for It Comes in Waves and This is a Record

 

6:00pm Doors open

​

8:00pm Collab: A reading by Michael Kleber-Diggs, followed by a dance performance choreographed

by Megan Mayer

 

Writer Michael Kleber-Diggs, choreographer Megan Mayer and artist Christopher Selleck have been meeting for several months discussing issues of gender, race, the state of the world and how that is seen in the art world, in their own personal practice and in the arts community too.  Using Selleck’s current SooVAC exhibition (This Is A Record) as a jumping off point, the group responded to the feeling of being an outside observer to many of the communities they belong to, intentional or otherwise.  The resulting conversations, thoughts, interviews, movements, art works and writings will be shared in a newly produced zine, This Is Not A Record, which will be available the night of the event. 

The last of these collaborations will take place next spring with Heid E. Erdrich and Rosy Simas. All of the Collab projects are supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

This will also be the first opportunity to see the final outcome for It Comes In Waves, the second installment of an experimental residency program at Soo Visual Arts Center, during this five-week residency Sophia Songmi has created an evolving exhibition onsite this evening will mark it's completion. More about It Comes in Waves.

 

Collab at SooVAC Artist Bios:

Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet and essayist. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Poetry City, North Dakota Quarterly, Pollen Midwest, Paper Darts, Water~Stone Review and a few anthologies. He enjoys collaboration with visual artists. Michael is a past Fellow with the Givens Foundation for African-America Literature, a past-winner of the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry, and the inaugural Poet Laureate of Anoka County libraries. His work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Michael is husband to Karen. Karen and Michael have a daughter who is an accomplished dancer.

 

Megan Mayer is an award-winning artist working with choreography, dance, experimental video and photography. She obsesses over minimalism, mimicry, tenderness, wry humor, loneliness, fake bad timing and exacting musicality. By exposing tiny emotional undercurrents concerning the body, she constructs a unique perspective of what dance can be: virtuosity in vulnerability and victory in a gesture. Drawn to the edges of the experience of performing: the anticipatory rapid heartbeat before going onstage, and the regretful relief after exiting, her work often reveals where that switch lives in the body.

 

Christopher Selleck was born in Augusta, GA.  He received his BFA in Photography from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 2013 and his MFA in Visual Studies and Photography from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design in 2016. Selleck’s work has been exhibited regionally and nationally at places such as the Plains Art Museum, Rochester Art Center, The DeVos Art Museum, The Duluth Art Institute among others.

Drawing by Sophia Hill...