Alexa Horochowski: Beautiful Sky

Alexa Horochowski is one of the top artists working in Minnesota due to her multi-layered art practice that weaves together sculpture, video, printmaking in dramatic forms and epic displays. Using such things as Styrofoam cups or coir logs that line rivers to shore up their banks or kelp from the sea, Horochowski’s work always surprises and sustains further looking and thinking. 

In design and material, the objects are intended to broach the uneasy relationship between ecological sustainability and the market forces driving industry, farm production, and the politics of environmental stewardship. Using sculpture and video she helps us look more closely at our physical relationship to the materials used in ecological preservation, the seemingly futile attempts to keep nature from changing due to the Anthropocene era in which we live.

Beautiful Sky takes land based materials that are used in soil and water preservation and transforms them into abstract but somehow knowable forms. The effect is that the viewer experiences these functional materials in a new way, bringing that perspective then back to the land. The sculptural forms she creates are eerie in how they both mask and reveal at the same time. A type of land art in the gallery that responds, reflects and acts on the contemporary issues around land use in our time, taking into consideration wider scope of global trade, post-colonial ethnic relations that takes land and water to supply a system that craves this resource rather than needs it.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website