Rhythm and Color at Gallery 120

Katie Bretzman and HML exhibition • Now through Friday, April 5, 2024

Rhythm and Color, an exhibition by Katie Bretzman and HML, is showing now through Friday, April 5, 2024, at Gallery 120. Art shows and exhibitions are hosted at the Gallery 120 brick-and-mortar location in the atrium of the Fine Arts building on the Inver Hills Community College campus in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota.

More about the exhibition…

Rhythm and Color considers the movements of an artist’s hand as well as the intimate landscapes created through this accumulation of marks. Repeated gestures abound in Katie Bretzman’s patchwork schematics and HML’s wearable soft sculptures.

Bretzman describes her quilt-like drawings as aerial views of living spaces and scenes from home. To make them, she carefully repeats a series of vertical strokes, using a systematic rotation of the same markers throughout a piece. In these vibrant studies, some about the size of a blueprint, Bretzman meditates on her experiences in domestic spaces and built environments. Blocks of color stand for rooms, windows, and doors, their perimeters determined by the thickness of the marker and the number of strokes she makes.

Together they invite the viewer to wander through an arrangement of private moments, traversing fields of lime, tangerine, black, gold, and inhabiting Bretzman’s prismatic scenes.

HML’s corporeal soft sculptures are medleys of found material, bound with thread by hand or with the mechanical hum of a sewing machine. Stitches accumulate to join soft ribs, deltoids, breastbones, and pectorals in fabrics sourced from thrift stores and friends.

The series explores the intersection of disability, gender identity, and sexuality. “The suits break down the body into a form that you can see from the inside out, which is a huge part of disability,” says HML. “If it’s not seeable, people don’t recognize it. And if it is seeable, it comes with being ostracized. With the suits, I’m thinking, here’s a body that someone will treat me better in. I make them androgynous so they’re usable by all people.”

Katie Bretzman and HML biographies

Katie Bretzman has presented work in exhibitions at Make Studio (Baltimore, MD), HGA Architects & Engineers (Minneapolis, Minnesota), Artspace Jackson Flats (Minneapolis, Minnesota), and Interact Gallery. She has practiced at Interact since 2018.

HML has recently presented work at Jennifer Lauren Gallery (Manchester, UK), Second Shift Studio (St. Paul, Minnesota), Gamut Gallery (Minneapolis, Minnesota), Textile Center (St. Paul, Minnesota), and the Minnesota Museum of American Art (St. Paul, Minnesota). In 2023, she was an artist in residence at Interact Gallery. HML has practiced at Interact since 2016.

Rhythm and Color gallery

WHAT: Rhythm and Color

WHO: Katie Bretzman and HML

WHEN: Now thru April 5, 2024

WHERE: Gallery 120

Fine Arts Building
Inver Hills Community College
2500 80th Street East
Inver Grove Heights, MN 55076
General: 651-450-3000
Gallery 120: 651-450-3101

Learn more about Rhythm and Color at Gallery 120 by contacting:

Janell Hammer
Gallery 120 Coordinator
Art Department 2D Art CLA
651-450-3101
Gallery 120 on Facebook
Gallery 120 Online

Learn more about the Art Transfer Pathway A.F.A. at Inver Hills by contacting: