On Thursday, April 15th, 2021 our next gallery show opens, Long Lost. Exhibiting the work of Iowa-based artist Quelle. This is the second show in our Queer Iowan Artist series, Quelle’s work will be up in our gallery space until May 15th and we will host a virtual artist talk May 7th, at 7pm.
Register for Quelle’s artist talk at this link: https://tinyurl.com/LongLostTalk
Artist Bio
Quelle is an eco-artist rooted in rural Brooklyn, Iowa, who collects discarded waste materials to craft contemporary embroidery using outsider needlework techniques, confronting perceptions on the relationship between consumption and uselessness. She graduated from the University of Northern Iowa in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Graphic Design.
Artist Statement
I collect and embroider with littered, reclaimed, and thrifted objects as an effort to destabilize my inner capitalist and recover from hyper-consumerism. My primary philosophy as an artist is that waste is a verb, not a noun. My work is not meant to transform garbage into attractive or useful creations, but rather to hold space for the relics that these pieces already are, honoring each item as an individual within a collective.
Long Lost – Show Introduction
Do you know when you are home?
For the nearly 300 million tons of municipal garbage generated in the United States per year, home is ambiguous. The products we purchase often only share our space for mere minutes before they are consumed as intended and disposed of, averaging 4.9 pounds of waste per person each day. These objects already have lives lived and stories to tell; objects that visit us all briefly, but never deemed worthy to collect and cherish. Yet many of our most prized belongings are comprised of materials identical to the junk, but are perceived as valuable simply because we have assigned a different meaning to them. Anything deemed worthless, regardless of whether that is empirically true, is left to lie forgotten beneath our feet and at the bottom of the ocean. What happens when we stop wasting, and begin making space for what was to be wasted? All that which would have been lost, could find their way home.
