We are a group of collaborators living in Duluth and Minneapolis, with an expanding network of colleagues in Canada, Norway and beyond.
David Beard is professor of rhetoric and arts advocate at the University of Minnesota Duluth. A former board member of his regional arts council and grants reader for the state arts board, David has worked to expand arts in the Arrowhead of Minnesota. As a scholar, he publishes on listening, among other areas of human communication and culture.
His research can be found here: Google Scholar and UMN Digital Conservancy
Annie Dugan is an independent curator, educator, and farmer. She teaches at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth and the University of Wisconsin, Superior where she also manages the Kruk campus gallery.
Dugan owns and operates the Food Farm, an organic vegetable farm with her husband in Northern Minnesota and uses her rural community spaces for artistic interventions including a root cellar concert, a popup tent with interactive projection, a mowed field for meditation, and a lab space for visual experimentation. In 2004 she founded the Free Range Film Festival in her barn. The festival screens independent documentaries, animation, and experimental work and serves as a catalyst for creative production.
Rebecca Krinke has a multidisciplinary practice that works across sculpture, installations, and public art – creating spaces, objects, and encounters. She has used the body (animal and human) and aspects of domestic objects and architecture as vehicles for exploring both wonder and terror.
A historic black four-poster bed at the MIA inspired Krinke’s current series of bed sculptures. This circles back to the beginnings of her work: her art originated with a powerful dream she had (as an adult) about a bear. Her sculptures evoke a mood of darkly marvelous fairy tales where strange beds, rooms, and cottages in the deep woods abound.
This work and her larger practice is both highly personal and collective – as it asks questions about dreams, transformation, struggle, growth, beauty, stress, trauma, coping – what is private and what is public, what is spoken or unspoken, seen or unseen.
Kathy McTavish is an artist, media composer, and cellist whose practice combines code, sound, moving images and video to create cross-sensory landscapes and experiences.
Her background is as fluid as her work - a blend of cello performance, mathematics, ecology, music theory and coding - which informs her work as a multimedia artist.
Working in a large variety of spaces, from traditional galleries to alleyways and cellars, Kathy discovers the underlying personalities of space, that have long been hiding. Through this she also awakens the submerged, hidden parts of ourselves.
Catherine Meier is an artist that captures the power of vast, open landscapes. Her work ranges from drawings and animations, to large-scale installations of vast spaces and sky. Each project is developed after many years of listening, and developing a deep relationship with the land.
A settler descendent, Catherine grew up on the eastern edge of the Nebraska Sandhills, and for many years, Meier worked as a truck driver hauling cattle from Montana to Texas throughout the Plains. In recent years, her work has focused on the Sage Creek area of Badlands National Park in South Dakota, located on Lakota Homelands.
Her work has been shown in traditional gallery spaces, film festivals and even in the spaces her work was born from.
LATERNA is Inger-Reidun Olsen and Marianne Skjeldal. They are both choreographers, dance and performance artists who are currently working in various formats within performance dealing with bodies and actions in dialogue with history, place, materials and sound.
The performative works of LATERNA are grounded in an artistic ecology, where everything exists in a context and develops over time through regular practice and methodological investigations. Tracing history and gathering collectives, LATERNA create new ways of shaping communities – as in their works in the project ‘CoSA’, taking place at historical places like Monte Verità (CH), Steilneset (NO), the Museum of St. Petersburg Avantgarde (RU) and at Black Box teater in Oslo.
LATERNA is exploring dialogical listening as a method to facilitate spaces where interconnections can emerge, as a ‘listening with’, researching a participatory performance practice as a choreographed being-with-others, in the interest of arriving at new ideas and ethics together with place, with plants, with others.