August 4, 2012, Saturday - Talking Image Connection for Hedge Magic at The Soap Factory

Time: 8:00pm

Location: Soap Factory, 514 Second Street SE

Talking Image Connection for Hedge Magic brings together writers, contemporary art and new audiences in art galleries around the Twin Cities.

A group exhibition drawn from our annual artist submissions, with artists examining issues of transformation,interpretation, reclamation and the super-natural.

Participating artists: Chris Lawrence, David Hamlow, Jess Hirsch, Amy Reckley, Meredith Foster, Peter Goché, Keith Lemley.

Selected as part of The Soap Factory’s annual submissions program, the artists in Hedge Magic all look at the processes of transformation through the super-natural lens of art, with the artist as the interrogator of the secret process of nature and culture. As an industrial building, The Soap Factory acted as a nexus of transformation between the various states of matter; artists take this alchemical process further into a transformation of states of being.

Peter Goché takes the natural forms of the Mississippi ox-bow, forms made over millennia, and transforms them into sinuous sculptures of crafted wood. Meredith Foster also looks to the ageless river for her inspiration, drawing out the river and its landscape through water and ash. Keith Lemley works with wood and neon, using the ancient timber of The Soap Factory to create an illuminated arbor, while Amy Reckley gathers material from the building and its environs for an explosion of sculptural gesture. Chris Lawrence arranges objects into patterns that evoke the hidden occult geometries of the gallery space. Jess Hirsch takes abandoned and forg Talking Image Connection brings together writers, contemporary art and new audiences in art galleries around the Twin Cities. otten furniture and transforms them into sculpture, changing them beyond recognition, and then re-presents them to their original owners. David Hamlow takes the refuse and detritus of our commercial life and fashions this material as building blocks for his own interpretive structures.

Hedge Magic is magic that is practiced without regard for the mediation or the control of a higher power. This non-Hermetic practice uses intuition and inspiration, gathering and interpreting found materials. It is at once intimate and more encompassing, recognizing the importance of the chaotic detail that creates the whole.