Riverland Community College

“A Woven Harmony: Paintings by Joonja Mornes” is open through April 28. A closing reception and artist talk will be held on April 28 at 11:30 am. The reception and talk are free and open to the public. The James Wegner Art Gallery is open Monday through Friday from 8 am- 6 pm and is located on the East campus of Riverland Community College.

In “A Woven Harmony: Paintings by Joonja Mornes”, the artist has transformed the James Wegner Art Gallery into a peaceful space for contemplation. A sense of quiet calm permeates the room, in which the artist literally grounds us with her representations of prairie grasses. The artist effectively represents the moods of the seasons and times of day through evocative color, texture and movement.  In several works, the artist has incorporated lines of poetry from authors like Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke within the flowing, wind- blown grasses. Suggestions of written language alternatively surface and submerge as though woven into the land. Poetry, dance and music are called to mind.

Joonja Lee Mornes is a Korean native who blends her feelings and memories of childhood rice fields with her new experiences of the Minnesota prairie. Part of her inspiration comes from traditional Asian Ink landscapes which are also accompanied by calligraphy. Within that older tradition as well as with Mornes recent work, legibility is secondary to design and expressive considerations.

Mornes has a Master of Arts degree in painting and worked for ten years as an art teacher in both Minnesota and Wisconsin. She has exhibited throughout Minnesota, including the installation “Night Garden” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts which was also used for the dance theatre production “Cut Sleeve” at Intermedia Arts.