Wowicakekage: Weaving Realities, Artwork By Autumn

‘Wowicakekage: Weaving Realities’ is a traveling exhibit of Wicanhpi Iyotan Win (Autumn Cavender)’s explorations and experimental applications of digital and generative art practices within a Dakota context. This exhibit highlights just one of the generative processes that Autumn has explored and developed.

Much of Autumn’s practice is rooted in an exploration of traditional Dakota artistic methodology, centering around quillwork as a method of recording-keeping and encoding data into design. Traditional designs depict and encode cosmological concepts, personal events, and connections to land and ancestors.

Using this quillworking philosophy, Autumn explores innovative ways to digitally generate Dakota geometrics and designs that retain their original function as informational carriers. Wowicakekage highlights her process of “generative quillwork” as both a digital and ancestral technology.

At its most basic, generative quillwork is a culturally-specific way of visualizing sound. From the perspective and principles of Dakota aesthetics, it is a way of depicting how the sounds of songs and stories reverberate through space, and a Dakota sense of direction and visualizations. And as a quillworking methodology, it is a way of encoding words, songs, and stories into color schemes, patterns and designs.

Opening August 5, this exhibition will be on display in our gallery through August 27.

An artist reception will take place on Friday, August 12, from 5:00 – 6:00 pm. Free will donation at the door. Light refreshments will be served. The public is invited to attend.

This exhibition is funded, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through grants from Five Wings Arts Council and the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

For more information contact Crossing Arts at 218-833-0416, info@crossingarts.org. Our hours are Tuesday – Friday 10:00 am – 5:00 pm, and Saturday 10:00 am – 4:00 pm. Crossing Arts is a 501c3 nonprofit located in the heart of downtown Brainerd at 711 Laurel Street.

Traveling for this event? Find Brainerd Lakes Area Lodging