TOA Presents

TOA Presents is a flexible exhibition space in the Northeast neighborhood of Minneapolis, created as a brick-and-mortar extension of The Orange Advisory’s commitment to supporting emerging and mid-career artists. TOA Presents primarily functions as a rotating venue for national and international galleries seeking to connect with Twin Cities audiences through one to two month residencies. Since launching in August 2021, TOA Presents has collaborated with 15 galleries from Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Minneapolis, featuring the work of more than 50 artists.

655 19th Avenue NE, Suite 104 in Minneapolis

Past Exhibition // Aporia

TOA Presents is pleased to announce Aporia, a solo exhibition featuring new work by Los Angeles-based artist Esteban Ramón Pérez.

Working primarily with leather, Pérez creates objects that place painting in dialogue with textiles and sculpture, expanding how we consider the history and possibilities of painting as a medium. While drawing has always been central to Pérez’s practice, Aporia is the first exhibition to center his works on paper.

Following the philosophical concept of aporia as a logical impasse with no resolution, Aporia brings two contradictory approaches to drawing face to face. In one approach, Pérez utilizes line drawing to create custom compositions that examine themes of religion, colonial history, art traditions and cultural and personal narratives. These compositions are frequently transferred onto leather surfaces using a modified tattoo machine and soldering irons.

The artist’s second approach to drawing uses automotive masking tape to create freehand designs called emanations. Inspired by auras in Mexican Baroque figurative art, Pérez’s emanations explore the potential for abstract fields of energy to function as non-figurative portraits.

Aporia unites approaches to drawing often seen as distinct, allowing Pérez to maintain two separate bodies of work while affirming their entanglement within a unified concept. The exhibition features eight works on paper—four employing one approach to drawing and four employing the second—alongside two leather works.

Past Exhibition // RULE

TOA Presents and Gelo Shop are pleased to announce RULE, a two-person exhibition featuring new and collaborative works by artists Vernon Vanderwood and Miles Mendenhall.

Guided by process, repetitive pursuits in movement and material, Vanderwood and Mendenhall create kaleidoscopic landscapes of in-betweens. Spiraling thoughts of binary, squares, structure and rules, the works in RULE pose sugar coated questions and suggest ribbon tied answers.

Vernon Vanderwood’s evolving and expansive practice is guided by cycling questions. They equip new processes to more palpably confront inquiries such as What is the expanded body? What is their relationship to the body and to containment? What are the poetic and political potential of material and mark making? How can ecology and identity be lenses for systematic decomposition?

Those explorations compel Vanderwood to play with binaries. In her large-scale works featured in RULE, free expressions in dance and disintegrating mediums are juxtaposed against silk binds and frames.

Over the course of the last decade, Miles Mendenhall has developed a printmaking process that intersects experimental histories of early photography and abstract expressionistic painting. Using gelatin, pigment and photographic chemistry, he creates monoprints that exist between worlds – hallucinogenic fractures where comprehension stutters and swirls.

In RULE, Mendenhall presents large-scale monoprints encased in fractal expanses of an alien shape-language. The untreated wood geometry of the frames composes a formidable presence that is still vulnerable, raw and delicately crafted. Simultaneously historic and futuristic, and symmetrical in their asymmetry, the frames defy their functional classification, not unlike the monoprints they surround.

Past Exhibition // Intimate Landscapes

TOA Presents is thrilled to host PATRON as the next gallery in residence. PATRON’s residency takes the shape of Intimate Landscapes, a group exhibition featuring works Bethany Collins, Jamal Cyrus, Mika Horibuchi, Samuel Levi Jones, Caroline Kent, Harold Mendez, Kaveri Raina, Claire Sherman, Alice Tippit and Liat Yossifor. Looking to the images and fabric of nature’s renewal as a source of content and inspiration, these artists draw from the quiet resilience and strength of a northern spring.

As artist Claire Sherman notes, wildflowers are among the first plants to return after forest fires, laying the foundation for continued upward growth. Intimate Landscapes features new and recent works by the artists, including paintings, works on paper and sculpture.

Past Exhibition // Zach Harris: Drawings, 2023

TOA Presents and Perrotin are pleased to announce Zach Harris: Drawings, 2023, a solo exhibition featuring 140 drawings from the artist’s spiral bound notebook, alongside a selection of paintings on linen and carved wood.

The act of drawing is fundamental to Harris’ unique practice, which is rooted in multiple traditions of painting, sculpture and architecture. Previous exhibitions of the artist have centered around objects falling under the rubric of painting; Drawings, 2023 foregrounds works on paper, presenting an expansive and ambitious installation of drawings, all completed last year.

Drawings, 2023 is the culmination of a year-long project that began with an invitation for Harris to create a coloring book. That point of origin eventually branched outwards to address an array of themes and interests, including pedagogy and color theory, as well as a desire to respond more intuitively to pressing political and technological events with a sense of imagination and freedom.

Harris' imagery is wide ranging: furniture and object studies, surreal anatomical renderings, political satire and sci-fi dystopian scenes. Tiny notes and cryptic musings are embedded in the drawings, adding a greater sense of intimacy and meaning to these idiosyncratic, personal works.

Harris has long considered the artist notebook to be the purest form of creative practice, allowing for an immediate and profound exploration of ideas. The openness and vitality Harris experienced through his drawing project is writ large in Drawings, 2023. From one drawing to the next, we are offered an intimate glimpse into the facets of daily life over the course of 2023.

Past Exhibition // Amir H. Fallah: What We Are And What We Were

TOA Presents is thrilled to announce What We Are And What We Were, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Amir H. Fallah, on view at the Minneapolis venue through December 27, 2023.

Amir H. Fallah is renowned for his paintings, murals and sculptures that explore systems of representation and portraiture in the history of Western art. The paintings, figurative sculptures and mirrored tondos featured in What We Are And What We Were continue that exploration, while delving into themes of migration, cultural exchange and the pursuits of knowledge and empathy.

Cultural hybridity is at the heart of Amir’s practice. True to form, What We Are And What We Were juxtaposes an eclectic array of visual source material, including Persian miniature painting, Art Nouveau design, 20th century abstraction, vintage Gucci motifs, botanical illustrations, anatomical drawings, "Ranger Rick" magazine and the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The exhibition is anchored by the monumental painting Science Is But An Image Of The Truth, an expansive work combining Fallah’s use of vivid colors, dense patterns and layered imagery with his impassioned engagement with public discourse and power structures.

What We Are And What We Were is the second collaboration between Amir H. Fallah and TOA Presents. Fallah was previously featured in the 2022 group show Horror Vacui, which he co-curated with fellow artist Mark Schoening.

Past Exhibition // Mark Schoening: Single File

TOA Presents is pleased to announce Single File, a solo exhibition of new works by Minneapolis-based artist Mark Schoening. Inspired by mathematics, design, architecture, play and obsessive organization, Single File will feature multiple forms of rule-based objects and experiences that include digitally fabricated sculptures, surface frequency paintings and kinetic animations. Schoening’s expanded practice encompassing vector drawing, 3D modeling and algorithmic outputs serves as catalyst for highly patterned structures in Single File, which are visually stacked, folded, stretched and doubled to reveal a meticulous rhythm of repeating patterns and forms.

Past Exhibition // Christina Forrer

TOA Presents is thrilled to host Luhring Augustine for a solo exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Christina Forrer, including two textile works – a large-scale, cotton and wool weaving and a large-format fabric book – alongside five works on paper.

Animated by an interest in fairy tales, Christina Forrer’s vibrant weavings and electrifying works on paper explore the depths of human emotion. Depicted in her signature style of bold colors and rich patterning, her fantastical characters are rendered cartoonish with their exaggerated features and twisted, elongated forms. While many of her works portray moments of dramatic, explosive conflict, they also provide the viewer with glimpses into smaller, more personal terrors: private anxieties, internal tensions and irrational fears.

Past Exhibition // Hanna Hur

TOA Presents is thrilled to host Kristina Kite Gallery for a solo exhibition of new and recent paintings and drawings by artist Hanna Hur. The exhibition features five grid-based paintings alongside a selection of drawings and a work from the artist’s ongoing series of chainmail sculptures.

Hanna Hur (b. 1985, Toronto) makes paintings using flashe, acrylic paint and color pencil, as well as intricate drawings and copper chainmail sculptural works. The process of making her repetitive compositions, whether on canvas, paper or in copper, is one of meditation and obsessive focus. Against a wash of paint, the carefully drawn circles and squares in her works on canvas vibrate and hum with a soft energy. Motifs repeat over time throughout the works – spirals, flowers and what Hur has named “the muse” – in different situations, building sentience. The perceptual puzzles presented by the works ensnare our vision and invite us into their portals of transcendence.

Past Exhibition // Miles Mendenhall: Flowers

Over the course of the last decade, Miles Mendenhall developed a printmaking process that intersects the experimental histories of early photography and abstract expressionistic painting. Using gelatin, pigment and photographic chemistry, he creates monoprints that exist between worlds – hallucinogenic fractures where comprehension stutters and swirls. The debut collection of monoprints featured in Flowers proffers a fluidity of color and gesture held together by a single image of lilies. The intersections of photography and painting in each work dazzle and disturb, their repetitive mania insisting upon the viewer’s attention.

About Miles Mendenhall

Miles Mendenhall (b. 1986, Burnsville, MN) cultivates the possible through an intense dedication to his studio laboratory. Working with a combination of advanced digital tools and archaic analog printmaking techniques, he plies the depths of the visual world in service of unique surfaces. Working serially and with a keen eye to approaches normally associated with painting and sculpture, Mendenhall’s artworks represent specific moments through which the totality of his vision – one which he is constantly developing through intuition and complex gestures – become fixed in time and space.

Past Exhibition // Kim Benson: Long Sweet Gone

Co-presented by TOA Presents and HAIR + NAILS, Kim Benson: Long Sweet Gone, featured fifteen paintings that continued Benson’s process of “doing and undoing” her rich, abstract surfaces.

References to Renaissance paintings, whether in image or color palette, populate many of Benson’s canvases, establishing a historical ground for exploration and excavation. Materially and metaphorically, representations dissolve under a multitude of strategies that include sanding, stenciling, casting and extruding, as well as more traditional modes of application by brush.

The result of this ouroboric process is Long Sweet Gone, a series of hallucinogenic abstractions that at times feel solid and sculptural like a stucco wall, and at others like a gossamer curtain undulating in a soft breeze. In navigating the history of painting as well as her own excessive processes of repetition and erasure, time emerges as a conceit in Benson’s work; viewer and artist are together suspended in geological, art historical, personal and anthropocenic time scales materialized in paint.

Kim Benson: Long Sweet Gone is on view at TOA Presents from Saturday, October 1 through Sunday, November 20. The show is open to the public from 11:00am to 2:00pm on Fridays and Saturdays and by appointment.

Past Exhibition // Jessica Silverman Presents

Jessica Silverman Presents features artists Sadie Barnette, Conrad Egyir, Julian Hoeber, Isaac Julien, Dashiell Manley, Hayal Pozanti, Rose B. Simpson, Rupy C. Tut and Chelsea Ryoko Wong. The exhibition includes new abstract paintings by Hoeber, Manley, and Pozanti that probe the poetics of inner worlds; Barnette’s intricate graphite drawing and Julien’s photography use text to capture grand ideas about race, sex, and love; and Simpson’s ceramic mask and new figurative paintings by Egyir, Tut, and Wong present the diverse beauty of the human form.

Past Exhibition // Rebecca Morris: Thirteen Works on Paper

TOA Presents is thrilled to announce Rebecca Morris: Thirteen Works on Paper, organized in collaboration with Bortolami Gallery in New York. Selected from a body of work produced during a two month-long endeavor in 2020, Thirteen Works on Paper will mark the largest presentation to date of the artist’s watercolor drawings.

Guided by Morris’ deft hand, ink and watercolor are wielded with almost alchemic results, producing ethereal, swirling compositions. The watercolor drawings are often imbued with a distinct metallic iridescence, creating a shimmering effect that’s accentuated by an immaculate, polished chrome framing treatment.

Morris creates the watercolor drawings through a serial process, swiftly moving from one work to the next, with varying degrees of shared formal traits. Although produced continuously, the works are not iterative, defying repetition and singular interpretation.

The expansive selection of work featured in Thirteen Works on Paper reveals that even with the most determined intentions, it’s not possible to replicate previous results as Morris moves from one work to the next.

Past Exhibition // Horror Vacui

TOA Presents is thrilled to announce Horror Vacui, a group exhibition organized by Amir H. Fallah (Los Angeles) and Mark Schoening (Minneapolis), featuring both artists alongside Amie Cunat, Asad Faulwell, Wendell Gladstone, Sherin Guirguis, Justine Hill, Dennis Koch and Geoffrey Todd Smith.

Translated from Latin as the “fear of empty space,” the term Horror Vacui first became associated with art and design when Italian critic Mario Praz used it to address the Victorian-era obsession with visual clutter. Within contemporary visual art, it names an artist’s compulsion to load the entirety of a picture plane with detail. In the act of leaving nothing vacant, our fear of vacancy is put to rest.

Yet what we choose to fill space with can appear vastly different from wall to wall, edge to edge. While artists in the exhibition are tethered to a shared language of pattern and color, each diverges into their own dialect. Spanning arabesque tessellations, uncanny tableaus, and optical illusions, the works in Horror Vacui challenge our visual perception, reminding us of how fickle the eye can be.

Horror Vacui is on view at TOA Presents from Friday, January 21 to Saturday, February 26.

Past Exhibition // Better Weather

TOA Presents is thrilled to announce Better Weather, a group exhibition organized by Charles Moffett (New York), featuring the work of Lois Dodd, Keiran Brennan Hinton and Lily Stockman.

Better Weather brings together a stylistically diverse, multigenerational trio of both figurative and abstract painters, inspired by the natural world and unified by a shared desire to document their immediate environments. Their practices are also bound by similar geometric foundations, natural palettes, and intimate scale.

The show includes recent paintings by Keiran Brennan Hinton and Lily Stockman, alongside an exceptional selection of paintings by Lois Dodd, produced between 1978 and 1988. Together, each artist’s work celebrates the ordinary and emphasizes the beauty in the fleeting, overlooked moments that punctuate daily life, unremarkable at first glance, but noticeable to those who look closely.

Past Exhibition // TOA Presents: Philip Martin Gallery

TOA Presents is thrilled to host Philip Martin Gallery as the next gallery in residence, with a group show featuring Kwame Brathwaite, Holly Coulis, Katy Cowan, Tomory Dodge, Sky Glabush, Sedrick Huckaby, Pamela Jorden, Kristy Luck and Nathan Mabry.

Philip Martin Gallery presents innovative, experimental and ambitious artworks, in all media, at its Los Angeles home and at art fairs in the United States and abroad. Philip Martin opened Cherry and Martin in 2005, which became Philip Martin Gallery in 2018. The gallery now represents Ericka Beckman, Kwame Brathwaite, Brian Bress, Carl Cheng, Holly Coulis, Katy Cowan, Tomory Dodge, Daniel Dove, J.A. Feng, Sky Glabush, Sedrick Huckaby, Pamela Jorden, Kristy Luck, Nathan Mabry, James Morse, Elizabeth Newman, Laurie Nye, Robert Overby, Pat O’Neill, Joanne Petit-Frère, Michael Rey and Lew Thomas. Philip Martin Gallery has played a key role in launching the careers numerous artists, including Matt Connors, Elad Lassry and Amanda Ross-Ho.

Past Exhibition // TOA Presents: Francois Ghebaly

TOA Presents is thrilled to host Francois Ghebaly as the inaugural gallery in residence, with a group exhibition featuring Kelly Akashi, Farah Atassi, Neil Beloufa, Channa Horwitz, Rindon Johnson, Christine Sun Kim and Candice Lin. On view from Friday, August 6 to Saturday, September 18.

Since 2009, François Ghebaly has presented an innovative, eclectic program of Los Angeles-based and international artists. With a history of identifying and championing diverse voices and emerging talent, the gallery’s roster has grown to include 22 artists and 2 artist estates, ranging from early career, such as Sharif Farrag, to mid-career, like Sayre Gomez, Christine Sun Kim, Kelly Akashi, Kathleen Ryan and Genesis Belanger, to well established, including Neïl Beloufa, Candice Lin, Marius Bercea and Channa Horwitz, as well as underground legends, like Patrick Jackson and Mike Kuchar. The gallery advances the reach of its artists’ visions by publishing exhibition catalogues and producing artist editions. Located since 2013 in a 12,000 square foot warehouse space in Downtown Los Angeles, the gallery is a mainstay of the burgeoning lower Arts District community. François Ghebaly’s program demonstrates a commitment to challenging work across all media and to fostering the progressive, boundary-pushing practices of its artists.