Monstrous Growth: Exhibition by Annie Stenseth & Milada Miekle at The Art Garage

Date and Time for this Past Event

• Wed, Mar 1, 2023 - Sat, Mar 25, 2023  12pm - 4pm

Location

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Details

Join artists Annie Stenseth & Milada Meikle in celebrating the opening of their exhibition!

Monstrous Growth - Annie Stenseth & Milada Meikle

Exhibition Dates: March 1, 2023 - March 25, 2023
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 2 @ 5pm-7pm

Monstrous Growth encompasses sculpture, ceramics, metal work, and mixed media by artists Annie Stenseth and Milada Meikle. Enraptured by both physical and psychological transformation, these works speak about the fluidity of personal and physical growth .
Themes include multiple avenues of individual identity. These include the examination and acceptance of traumas, sexuality, mental health, self-image and morality.

The emulation of nature, especially fungi, is commonly used throughout this collection to portray growth within the dimensions between life, decay and rebirth. Monstrous Growth utilizes both realistic forms of the human body and the depictions of monstrous creatures as vessels of communication. While creatures convey topics outside of their preconceived perceptions of wrongdoing; the familiarity of realistic forms and surface work evoke a subconscious unsettled reaction in the viewer. The complex themes are uncomfortable in their allusions to pain and suffering yet emphasize the beauty of acceptance within growth.

Annie Stenseth is a visual artist who embraces the human body as a beautiful, familiar form and uses it as a sight of transformation and transcendence. Her studio practice encompasses sculpture, ceramics, metal work and mixed media. Fascinated by transformation manifested in both the physical and psychological realms, her art investigates the dimensions between growth, decay and rebirth.

Born in Decorah, Iowa, Annie grew up on a farm outside of a small town in Northeast Iowa. She earned a B.A. in Art from Luther College and continued to develop her artist practice through studio work. In 2019 she moved to Door County, WI and now resides in Green Bay, WI. Presently, she is the Ceramic Studio Coordinator at NWTC Artisan and Business Center.
Annie has shown her work in group exhibitions at the Kristin Wigley-Fleming Fine Arts Gallery at Luther College, ArtHaus in Decorah, The Art Garage in Green Bay, and The Neville Public Museum in Green Bay.

Milada Meikle uses her multidisciplinary artistic talents to capture a wide variety of different forms of monsters. Each monster has its own personality and emotions, and wants to be able to reflect those emotions to the viewer. They want to reveal that those with frightening stigmas have the same complex emotions as anyone else: depression, pain, happiness. Milada asks the viewer to see her monsters as a way to reinterpret preconceived notions of what a monster even is, that things are "not always as they seem."

Her work in "Monsterous Growth" brings forward the struggles of mental illness through different monsters. The states of the plants embody the deterioration of various mental states such as anxiety and depression, and the difficulties of simply just keeping oneself alive.
Milada graduated from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design where she received her BFA. She currently lives in Sturgeon Bay while working full time in Fish Creek.