CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

Indulgences by James Ostrander

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 25, 2026, 6 - 9 PM

Exhibitions run July 25 - August 30, 2026

Indulgences by James Ostrander is a densely detailed, absurdist approach to atelier-style painting that playfully scrutinizes the Western canon and its attendant ideologies. His work explores selfhood, embodiment, ecology, and cultural inheritance. These works parody his struggles as a navel-gazing pseudo-Romantic, finding humor in human folly, sorrow in species-wide loneliness, absurdity in embodiment, and shame in complicity with a cultural inheritance that has privileged some at the expense of others. Working in traditional modes of oil painting, James engages the Western canon through emulation and caricature, repurposing the sublime landscapes of Romanticism, the titillating pastorals of Rococo, and the nightmarish oddities of Surrealism. Caught between inherited ideals and disappointing realities, his painterly avatar "Orstranger” struggles through would-be Edenic landscapes, laid low by flora, fauna, and environmental waste. Orstranger mimics the gestures of the genius artist in Nature, but his clownish failures and grotesque transformations undermine his lofty goals – the artist is a fool, and his paradises are trashed.

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Sway by Alexandra Beaumont

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 25, 2026, 6 - 9 PM

Exhibitions run July 25 - August 30, 2026

Sway is a solo exhibition by Minneapolis-based textile artist and dancer Alexandra Beaumont that celebrates movement as a powerful force for building community and solidarity. Her textile work focuses on collective movement, social dance, and gathering to reclaim the present through the body, with each stitch and layer reflecting expressions of collective power found in stepping in time together. Drawing from her personal experience with line dancing and her heritage as the daughter of musicians, Beaumont's pieces explore the tension of unified bodies moving within structured grids while inviting flourishes of color and swirl. Her practice features large-scale cloth banners—often centering painted, embroidered, and beaded silhouettes of friends and neighbors on sheer cloths—that capture the visual and kinetic joy of the dance floor.

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Little Black Book by Marcus Rothering

Closing reception: Saturday, August 29, 2026, 6–8 PM

Rug Tufting Demonstration: Sunday, August 16, 1-3 PM

Exhibitions run July 25 - August 30, 2026

THIS EXHIBITION CONTAINS ADULT THEMES.

SooVAC’s Front Space Residency Presents:

Marcus Rothering will be the second artist to participate in SooVAC's pilot program, the Front Space Residency. Throughout 2026, artists will create work both on-site and off-site during their exhibitions, allowing their projects to evolve and adapt over the course of the show. Rothering will host a closing reception to showcase how the work has developed over the course of his exhibition, Little Black Book.

Marcus Rothering is a Minneapolis-based artist working in ceramics and fiber. He received his MFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He researched ceramics and garments in Seoul, South Korea, as a Rose Fellow and was an artist-in-residence at Ateliergemeinschaft Milchhof in Berlin, Germany. His work explores Black queer intimacy and humor through sculptures and textiles.

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UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

Trading Post: 41.77260° N, 72.66754° W, when a garden doesn’t return or can’t be found by Chotsani Elaine Dean

Opening reception: Saturday, September 19, 2026, 6 - 9 PM

Exhibitions run September 20 - November 8, 2026

Trading Post...by Chotsani Elaine Dean is another entry into the complex, layered realities of Dean’s communal ancestry's history and visual archives set forth the foundations of creative purpose in her practice and research. Much of Dean’s work is rooted in quilts made during the period of early European colonization of North America through post-antebellum, stitched on and, eventually, off cotton plantations by enslaved and free African Americans well into the mid-20th century and continuing to a communal practice today. These quilts, their makers' lives, and the material that gives them life, cotton, serve as the historical sources and points of departure she uses to examine, explore, and comprehend this dreadful time in America's history while simultaneously searching and locating connected global and cultural economics, commodities, and realities people and place and the entanglements therein that have rippled into the present.

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Catch-All by Erika Terwilliger

Opening reception: Saturday, September 19, 2026, 6 - 9 PM

Exhibitions run September 20 - November 8, 2026

Catch-All by Erika Terwilliger excavates pockets of material accumulation found within Terwilliger’s home. Drawn from gutters clogged with silver maple leaves, corroding ventilation ductwork, and blue plastic tarp fragments, the exhibition offers handworked transformations of these familiar but overlooked things from everyday life. Terwilliger’s process mirrors repetitive actions of daily living, folding, wrapping, dipping, and stacking. The work finds its form through the small acts of transformation that occur within a deeply embodied way of making. Catch-All holds a material conversation between what we keep and what we toss, with a bit of breathing room in between.

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SooVAC’s Front Space Residency Presents: New Experimental Work by Sarah Abdel-Jelil

Closing Reception for Sarah Abdel-Jelil’s experiments is Saturday November 7, 2026 6-8PM

Exhibitions run September 20 - November 8, 2026

Sarah Abdel-Jelil will be the third artist to participate in SooVAC's pilot program, the Front Space Residency. Throughout 2026, artists will create work both on-site and off-site during their exhibitions, allowing their projects to evolve and adapt over the course of the show. In Abdel-Jelil’s kaleidoscopic film work, she is less interested in the direct focus on a singular body – but the ways in which a fractal, collective body emerges through repetition, doubling, and mirroring. She will use this residency to deepen this research on patterns and repetition through film, soundscapes, textiles, and interactive sculpture.