A small rectangular abstract painting with a dark grey and white speckled rubber surface. There's a piece of canvas painted yellow and black with a scratched-in grid pattern attached at top half of the painting. At the top of the piece of canvas are three lumps of light grey plaster. A small fragment of light grey flooring from the artist's studio is attached to the bottom left corner of the painting. The perimeter of the painting is marked with silver and black paint. There are several thin, short plastic hairs jutting out from the top, left, and bottom sides of the painting.

Play Surface

Vanishing into radiance

An overhead view of leaves of a silver heuchera; young, fresh, emerging and the silver gray of age. A merging of photography and digital manipulation.

Silver Heuchera

"KITTY PARTY" is a mixed media painting combining elements of hand painted motifs with collage, paint pours, resin, and glitter to depict a group of four felines seated together in a regal manner. 
Conceptually, "Kitty Party" is a play on words relating to South Asian feminine culture. The word "kitty party" itself is used to refer to women who congregate to host social get togethers in their local communities. Often times, a stereotype is associated with these parties, where housewives are known to gossip, spread drama, and create "cliques". This artwork not only takes the definition quite literally by portraying women as the cats they're made out to be, but flipping the definition from the stereotypical gossip group to something more modern: a group of empowered women who despite their differences can come together to lift each other up, fix each others crowns, be there for one another, and create room for the next generation of spirited women. 

"KITTY PARTY" is also painted in the ancient Indian art form of “miniature” painting. Historically this form of art combines influences from Indian, Persian, and Islamic painting. Since it is a style that represents “one form of art created from many” it further pushes the message of unity.
This piece is also a multi media painting bringing together acrylic, collage, glitter, and resin to transform the traditional into something modern, which is also symbolic of the changing landscape of diasporic, second-generation South Asian-American culture. 

Kitty Party

An abstract encaustic work with an added Terra Cotta tile that echoes the colors and shapes in the encaustic.

Desert Lake

This collage  captures trees in the foreground and the suggestion of trees in the distance. It is dusk with a light blue tone in the sky and background and  a deeper blue grey tone in the trees. Behind and in front of the trees there is a gentle glow of fireflies. Some in the foreground, but most filling the background becoming smaller in the distance. There is a darker gold center to the flash and a softer glow emitting around it. There is texture on the surface from paper overlays.


Fireflies

Swirling shapes writing above and underneath...Colors..blues, yellows, whites, reds, and soft greens. Thinking about words and writing.

A Writer's Aspirations and Successes 

Tiny green paper cutouts on heads of pins, to form a mass gathering of 4 leaf clovers

A Field of 4Leaf Clovers

A mixed media work with heavily textured stylized flames, smoke, ash and embers painted in the foreground and covering most of the page. Peeking through the flames are various decoupaged words cut from magazines. Each word encased in a small "window" with blue, plum and teal background. The flames are devouring all the inspriational and positive words like "calm, confident & focus"; leaving only "lost, stress & adversity."

Up in Flames: a Meditation on the Twice-Exceptional Life

A color collage combining two black and white human figures with purple flowers, green plants, and a variety of statues and architectural elements. Created during quarantine, the words "Somewhere Beneath" appear. Representing the artists' state of mind. 

Somewhere Beneath

A mixed-medium portrait of local drag queen, Mexica Xadows, surrounded by dahlias, Mexico's national flower, which both depicts Mexica's pride in their Mexican culture, and to juxtapose the powerful pose and dress of Mexica. This is part of a series of portraits of local drag queens. 

Portrait of Mexica Xadows

Orange, yellow and red stained and layered glass form the background and represent dangers of climate change (earth on fire/flooding due to polar melting). Paper mache' figures of Peruvian masked dancers with instruments (drum and accordion) sing the warning cry.  A blue and red fused glass disc represents earth flooded while the "sky" is the color most recently viewed during the West Coast wild fires.

Climate's Clarion Call

Stained Glass of a 1917 Gas Pump with same period automobile waiting to pump gasoline, with a tree and Gas Station on the background.

1917 Gas Pump

A collage of screenprinted papers on coral paper taped to a letterpress print of a variety of black shapes printed on top of blue shapes.

Untitled

An altered book opened to reveal a lighted lamppost on a hill of snow beyond miniature pines and a section of wardrobe.

Spare Oom Secret

A collage with two birds from a 1960s bird atlas sitting on opposite sides of the frame, one above text from a vintage algebra schoolbook reading, “Distance between two points” 

The Distance Between Two Points

"Encountering the Others examines how Oligarchs utilize energy to govern control over indigenous cultures. With this growth of civilization comes unexpected behaviors and new challenges such as environmental issues, tolerance and acceptance, as well as the intrusion of strangers instilling their beliefs which they perceive to be better than others." 

Encountering the Others

A display of heart shaped crop art with the word VOTE spelled out in black beans, children's art and another crop art in the shape of the United States with the word WELCOME.  On the top of the heart is a visiting live  woodpecker, getting a snack.  All the art is on a garden trellis.  

Crop art, kid art, woodpecker

A collage of scattered pictures on a dark gray background interspersed with text. Pictures feature a young white woman in a dark green shirt and black pants outlining her body with green tape on to the white wall behind her. 
Text reads : 
 if dance is an excuse to practice being
if dance is an excuse to practice being together
here is me practicing alone, together. 

i cant tell you how it feels. 
​maybe i could stand next to you + vibrate

maybe i could stand next to you + vibrate

A collage featuring the face of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg imposed on a picture of the Virgin Mary, and embellished with faux gems, sequence decoration, and lace trim. 

Saint Ruth

A drawing of two multi-colored mandalas that converge in the middle, where the letters E V O L V E embellish their meeting place.

Love, in other words

A scale model of an outdoor sculpture depicting a grove of red pillars and the sky reflected in a series of mirrors located within the field. 

Scale model for The Stand

A former Big Mouth Billy Bass is transformed into a 3-dimensional false wooden plaque with wood grain made of actual grains (quinoa) and a mounted crappie fish, also made of crops in the distinctive black and yellow pattern of a crappie fish (corn, wild rice, canola, and other seeds and grains). Former bass fins have been replaced with crappie shaped fins. The plaque has an identifying sign just under the fish that is a pun: Croppie. This piece won a blue ribbon at the 2019 Minnesota State Fair in the Seed and Plant Craft Objects category of the Crop Art competition.

Croppie

My submission to this decades’ 4 MIA Foot in the Door is a 12x12 in board of Minnehaha Falls circa 1906. Inspired by an old hand tinted postcard and done in mixed media, including tissue paper, string and the plastic screens of a flatscreen T.V. which have been clipped and painted and spaced withscrapbooking spacers. When looked at in person, the T.V. screen parts have differing effects, some Mirror, some magnify and some opaque that change with the order of the layering. This helps the viewer see movement in the waterfall and creek below. The Creek almost seems to flow at the viewer. The falls might leap out , and the people stand out on either side of he wooden bridge. 

Thank you Susan Kangas


Submission: Minnehaha Falls Multi-Media

A mixed media piece incorporating photography, paint, fabric, and mirror.

Midnite Mine

A mixed media collage on wood panel. Reddish/orange sky with a cut out image of a large looming rocky, textural mountain. In the center of the mountain is a golden yellow doorway or portal. 

Under the Mountain

A photo/oil paint collage consisting of multiple photos taken over time and re-composed into an abstract composition. 

Mill City Industrial 

Collage- background photo image with flaking colors of dull burnt orange and blue on black, photo print on rag paper, white paint, white paper rectangles set on canvas board. shapes and paint in "space".

Distance

A mixed-media assemblage showing headstones in a Jewish cemetery in Europe.

Shard

A green meadow with pine trees. Butterfly and lady bug rest on blue flowers. All under a brilliant pink sunset.

Meadow Mountain

Abstract painting on a matchbox with found objects (matchstick and lint) in the foreground. 

Play Surface, 2020

Hannah Bassewitz