material mythos
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On View In Our Charles Beck Gallery
November 4 - December 30, 2025
Opening Reception
5-7PM Thursday, November 6, 2025
Driven by color, shape, and memory, Kandace Creel Falcón and Ilaamen Pelshaw explore dreams, folktales, and the cultural realities that emerge from their childhoods in a Duo Show bringing paintings, quilts, and sculptures into conversation.
November 4 - December 30, 2025
Opening Reception
5-7PM Thursday, November 6, 2025
Driven by color, shape, and memory, Kandace Creel Falcón and Ilaamen Pelshaw explore dreams, folktales, and the cultural realities that emerge from their childhoods in a Duo Show bringing paintings, quilts, and sculptures into conversation.
Artist Statement
Driven by color we, Kandace Creel Falcón and Ilaamen Pelshaw, explore dreams, folktales, and the sociocultural realities that emerge from our childhoods in a Duo Show bringing paintings and sculptures into conversation. Pelshaw examines these themes primarily through Guatemalan and Latin American folktales while Creel Falcón uses the site of their childhood bedrooms and Catholic upbringing in Kansas and New Mexico as entry points into connections to the collective symbolic world.
Despite different cultural sites of upbringing, we both choose vibrant color and bold shapes as the building blocks for narrative paintings that are literally and figuratively quilted together. Through the form of unstretched canvas scrolls, quilts, tapestries, and embellished wooden folk sculptures we explore collective memory from the vantage point of our childhoods with a variety of materials. Whether through the site of the bedroom where we dreamed as children or the fantastical spaces of Latino folktales, we both revisit our childhoods to reckon with the socio-cultural legacies of our formative years in the 1980s from the vantage point of today. By looking backward and reflecting on where we’ve come from, what can we learn to inform our cultural understanding of ourselves in our current Midwestern geographies of Nebraska and Minnesota?
Dreams, folktales, archetypes, and childlike memory provide opportunities to explore where everything began for us as artists. The intangible connection to our pasts through the unreliability of memory enables us to revisit the first moments that sparked our creative desires. Our material explorations also provide reminders and invitations to play and to examine shared stories that transcend cultural borders. Ilaamen engages with this by making oral folkloric stories visibly material, while KCF turns to Catholicism and US pop culture as origin sites of shared collective knowledge. Through a purposeful overload of the senses in size, scale, scope, and color, we invite you to remember where your creative origins began.
What are the themes that shape you and make you who you are?
Despite different cultural sites of upbringing, we both choose vibrant color and bold shapes as the building blocks for narrative paintings that are literally and figuratively quilted together. Through the form of unstretched canvas scrolls, quilts, tapestries, and embellished wooden folk sculptures we explore collective memory from the vantage point of our childhoods with a variety of materials. Whether through the site of the bedroom where we dreamed as children or the fantastical spaces of Latino folktales, we both revisit our childhoods to reckon with the socio-cultural legacies of our formative years in the 1980s from the vantage point of today. By looking backward and reflecting on where we’ve come from, what can we learn to inform our cultural understanding of ourselves in our current Midwestern geographies of Nebraska and Minnesota?
Dreams, folktales, archetypes, and childlike memory provide opportunities to explore where everything began for us as artists. The intangible connection to our pasts through the unreliability of memory enables us to revisit the first moments that sparked our creative desires. Our material explorations also provide reminders and invitations to play and to examine shared stories that transcend cultural borders. Ilaamen engages with this by making oral folkloric stories visibly material, while KCF turns to Catholicism and US pop culture as origin sites of shared collective knowledge. Through a purposeful overload of the senses in size, scale, scope, and color, we invite you to remember where your creative origins began.
What are the themes that shape you and make you who you are?
Artist Bio - Kandace Creel Falcón
Kandace Creel Falcón (b. 1981) is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar, writer, and visual artist. Their life’s passion grounds the power of narrative for social transformation. As a Xicanx femme feminist, KCF’s work is driven to disrupt conventional notions related to femininity and domesticity. Drawn to interdisciplinary inquiry and mixed-media methods of painting, fabric arts, and writing KCF brings together various mediums to make sense of the world around them for queer utopic worldbuilding.
Beginning in 2019, they have had seven solo shows of several bodies of work and participated in numerous regional juried and group shows across the Midwest. Their work has appeared on a billboard in rural Minnesota, in higher education galleries, and was recently added to the permanent collection at the Spencer Museum of Art. As a primarily self-taught painter KCF is thrilled to be part of the community of artists demanding painting's relevance through continued innovation of form and content.
Beginning in 2019, they have had seven solo shows of several bodies of work and participated in numerous regional juried and group shows across the Midwest. Their work has appeared on a billboard in rural Minnesota, in higher education galleries, and was recently added to the permanent collection at the Spencer Museum of Art. As a primarily self-taught painter KCF is thrilled to be part of the community of artists demanding painting's relevance through continued innovation of form and content.
Artist Bio - Ilaamen Pelshaw
Ilaamen Pelshaw (b. 1977) Is a Guatemalan-American artist based in Omaha NE, since 2015. With a background in commercial graphic design and illustration, her work is representational and illustrative. As a storyteller, her topics explore elements of everyday life in a colorful and cheerful way, often focused on kindness and inclusion.
Since 2015 she’s participated in more than 40+ group exhibitions in Omaha, Lincoln, Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Monica, Portland, Miami and Melbourne FL, and three local solo shows, with collectors in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Central America.
Since 2015 she’s participated in more than 40+ group exhibitions in Omaha, Lincoln, Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Monica, Portland, Miami and Melbourne FL, and three local solo shows, with collectors in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Central America.
- Selected as the Omaha Summer Arts Festival Featured Illustrator for 2 consecutive years.
- One of the winners of the 7th edition of Latin American Illustration by AI/AP
- Selected artist for the United States Department of State’s Art in Embassies program, with the piece “United We Live” displayed at the US Ambassador’s residence in Kampala, Uganda. (2021-2023)
- Featured in SINGULART Magazine as One of 7 Illustrators to Watch. Paris, France (2020)
Kim Embretson: holy ground |
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On View In Our Studio K Gallery
November 4 - December 30, 2025
Opening Reception
5-7PM Thursday, November 6, 2025
November 4 - December 30, 2025
Opening Reception
5-7PM Thursday, November 6, 2025
Artist Statement
Holy Ground
“This rock and tree filled space
was holy a million days before we came.”
This line from my father-in-law’s poem ”Holy Ground” about a family island on Rainy Lake, is the inspiration for my series of paintings. I have tried to answer the question: How does land become holy?
Watching the parade of color ignite the sky at sunset becomes a sacred ritual. Encountering white pines glowing from the golden light at dusk recalls the awe of standing before a burning bush. Silently watching an eagle with our grandchildren evokes the still quiet voice of God. Certainly our shared visual experiences in a landscape is one way land becomes holy.
Holy ground can also be anyplace where rituals of love and visions of beauty occur over and over again. We invest our emotion into the buildings, rocks and trees of the place where we meet God, and share that love with others. Holy ground is an Island on Rainy Lake for me and my family, but I have also seen holy ground in the corner of a house with all the photos of loved ones lost. Backyards where a garden is lovingly tended reveal God’s constant creativity. I can imagine any place grand or simple that binds us to our maker and each other, as holy ground.
Where we find beauty, friendship, sorrow, and joy, or a place where we perform daily rituals of love, these are the places of Holy Ground.
It is then we know,
“The voice Elijah heard, still speaks,
and bushes burn.”
“This rock and tree filled space
was holy a million days before we came.”
This line from my father-in-law’s poem ”Holy Ground” about a family island on Rainy Lake, is the inspiration for my series of paintings. I have tried to answer the question: How does land become holy?
Watching the parade of color ignite the sky at sunset becomes a sacred ritual. Encountering white pines glowing from the golden light at dusk recalls the awe of standing before a burning bush. Silently watching an eagle with our grandchildren evokes the still quiet voice of God. Certainly our shared visual experiences in a landscape is one way land becomes holy.
Holy ground can also be anyplace where rituals of love and visions of beauty occur over and over again. We invest our emotion into the buildings, rocks and trees of the place where we meet God, and share that love with others. Holy ground is an Island on Rainy Lake for me and my family, but I have also seen holy ground in the corner of a house with all the photos of loved ones lost. Backyards where a garden is lovingly tended reveal God’s constant creativity. I can imagine any place grand or simple that binds us to our maker and each other, as holy ground.
Where we find beauty, friendship, sorrow, and joy, or a place where we perform daily rituals of love, these are the places of Holy Ground.
It is then we know,
“The voice Elijah heard, still speaks,
and bushes burn.”
Artist Bio - Kim Embretson
Kim Embretson
(in his own words)
Fergus Falls has been my hometown since 2002. Though I moved here for work, my retirement in 2016 has refired me to follow my creative passions. I have studied art with John Charles Cox at M State Fergus Falls campus and benefited from many student and local artist suggestions. I feel blessed to be living in such a beautiful part of the country and to be engaged with so many people that cherish this place we call home.
(in his own words)
Fergus Falls has been my hometown since 2002. Though I moved here for work, my retirement in 2016 has refired me to follow my creative passions. I have studied art with John Charles Cox at M State Fergus Falls campus and benefited from many student and local artist suggestions. I feel blessed to be living in such a beautiful part of the country and to be engaged with so many people that cherish this place we call home.