Flourish: Jennifer Davis, Erika Olson Gross, Terrence Payne and Joe Sinness

The exhibition Flourish featured new work by four Minneapolis artists: Jennifer Davis, Erika Olson Gross, Terrence Payne, and Joe Sinness. Jennifer Davis’s delicate paintings include a cast of animal, monster, and human characters who all have parts to play in her colorful fantasies. But her charming, Easter-egg palette belies the underlying psychological dramas of introversion and lost innocence. Erika Olson Gross is a multimedia artist whose sculptures and paintings express the poetry and fecundity of nature. Her recent bucolic landscapes are intricately painted. The illustrative, woodblock-print flatness of her landscape and textile patterns resemble collaged pieces of paper attached to the canvas. Terrence Payne’s large oil pastels on paper produce a sense of humor tinged with melancholy; the hand-written captions reveal his characters’ internal narratives of disappointment, apathy, and resignation. Rendered in colored pencil with a fastidious, hyper-realistic attention to detail, Joe Sinness’ baroque-style drawings are filled with color, pattern, and texture. The work implies sexual double-entendres and employs sly turns of phrase.

Download the exhibition brochure of Flourish (pdf)

Generous support for MAEP is provided by The McKnight Foundation and Jerome Foundation.