Sonja Peterson’s delicate, dizzyingly complex paper cut works pack a provocative punch in an exhibition called “Sonja Peterson: What the Trade Winds Brought,” on view on the Minnesota Marine Art Museum. 

The gem of an art center is one which not enough people find out about. Nestled by the Mississippi River in town of Winona, the museum displays art concerning the sea, boats, rivers, sailors, and watery landscapes. The museum has a powerful list of impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern works, quite a few examples of the Hudson River School painters and more, with artists like Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Jamie Wyeth, and Georgia O’Keeffe amongst its collection. The museum also rotates contemporary artists who also address marine themes of their work.

Based in Minneapolis, Peterson goes through X-ACTO blades by the a whole bunch, as she cuts out designs, first sketched on paper. She also creates three-dimensional works, designed on a pc, vectorized after which cut with a laser or with a high-speed drill bit.

The exhibition on the Marine Art Museum features past work in addition to work she created for the show. Each are brought together thematically in a swirl of sea ships, bleached coral reefs, invasive plants and sea monsters. Through imagery that emerges from her careful designs, Peterson examines ways humans have moved through nature historically, and with increasing acceleration in recent times. 

Peterson says the exhibition got here together across the theme of trade history.“The trade winds were an initial point of which explorers found out easy methods to rebound across the Atlantic to the Americas,” Peterson says. 

An epic recent piece Peterson created for the exhibition, “Empire Builder,” (2022) references Moorish tile design, African batik patterns, and Mayan stonework carvings, in addition to plants like pepper, tobacco, nutmeg, and tobacco, which were traded internationally. You see ships sailing amidst the cut patterns, in addition to the figures of Queen Isabel, who sent Columbus to the Americas, Marie-Joseph Angélique, a Portuguese-born Black slave who lived in Quebec and was accused of burning down her owner’s home and subsequently an area generally known as Old Montreal. A 3rd figure represents Cockacoeske, a pacesetter of a Native tribe on the coast of Virginia. “I like the concept of putting these women in several power structures together and selecting women to represent the identical area in history,” Peterson says. 

Using human faces isn’t something Peterson has done often in past work. The artist has often explored ways in which humans have impacted the environment, but placing human faces, other than self-referential imagery, proved a brand new development in her work. 

“That’s definitely a leap for me,” she says. “Just having the proper to attempt to portray a variety of different people in history and check out to know where I slot in.” 

Peterson’s work is usually narrative, but normally she leaves room for the audience to have an open-ended experience. On this case, her use of historical figures charts the impact of colonialism on people and the earth. 

“I believe it’s necessary to inform a story of various power structures having a relationship together,” Peterson says. 

One other piece, “Ghost Ship-Part One” (2015), references Romantic literature about colonial exploration, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The epic poem relays a sea journey that goes terribly unsuitable, and pinpoints a seaman shooting a good looking albatross— a bird that was speculated to bring good luck— as the rationale for awful things that subsequently occur within the story. 

Peterson’s “Ghost Ship” shows the sailor shooting the albatross from his ship. On the opposite side of the piece, a lady with an octopus coming out of her head casts a net from her eye toward the ship. The web — or perhaps web — incorporates different invasive species trapped inside it. 

“It’s connecting this figure of the lady to the ship with all these creatures being brought with it,” Peterson says. 

On the time the poem was published, women were considered unlucky on voyages. Peterson is each fidgeting with tropes of marine mythology and layering a up to date understanding of the impact of colonial exploration on the natural world. 

Peterson says she’s at all times been drawn to exploration and adventure. “I believe the imagination just form of goes wild, and I run with it,” she says. At the identical time, she said her technique of drawing from this topic has offered moments of introspection and demanding evaluation. 

“I like reading books about explorers,” Peterson says. “I held them on this pedestal. Then it’s like, ‘Oh, wait a minute. Can we dig somewhat deeper here?’ I want to relearn what the hell I’m here.” This sort of questioning has led Peterson to bend historical stories and narratives, adding elements of fantasy or imagination. “I’m trying to search out a soft landing for some very necessary issues interwoven in it,” she says.

Ultimately, Peterson’s work looks at how exploration and colonialism viewed land as something that may very well be used for profits. They brought recent plants to recent places, reshaping the makeup of flora internationally. 

In her “Islands and Intersections” series (2013-22), Peterson was desirous about how ship ballasts —  which prior to the late 1800s were often rocks and sand — in addition to invasive species carried on ships decimated bird nests. “It’s interesting because islands hold essentially the most biodiversity, yet are the place of the best extinction,” Peterson says. The ships got here through these islands and brought recent creatures. One other layer that has come into the work is the threat islands now face from glacial melt and rising sea water. “It just seems to maintain layering up,” she says. 

Try the exhibition through Sept. 11 on the Marine Art Museum  in Winona ($10). More information here.