Kaleena Stasiak is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores collective mythmaking through haptic media. Drawing from American colonial imagery, folk art, and quilting traditions, she reframes dominant ideologies surrounding early history and domestic labor. Originally from Ontario, Canada, Stasiak earned a BFA in printmaking from the Ontario College of Art and Design and an MFA in printmaking and book arts from the University of Georgia. Recent exhibitions include Prevailing Winds at Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee; Tournament of Lies at the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, New York; and Identity Measures at the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans. She completed residencies at Stoveworks in Chattanooga, Tennessee and the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Yukon, Canada. In 2017 Stasiak founded the South East Women Wrestlers, a performance troupe based in Athens, Georgia, that uses the spectacle of wrestling to reframe stereotypes and representations of femininity. Stasiak is currently area head and assistant professor of printmaking in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Mississippi.
Contributing writers were encouraged to pen texts using the style, voice, and format of their choice. The resulting suite of poetry, journalistic and critical prose, creative essays, and personal reflections offers diverse perspectives on the artists, their practices, and their lives.
A Note from the Curator
Claire Dempster is a writer, arts and culture professional, and amateur weaver based in Atlanta, Georgia. For the 2025 Mississippi Invitational, Dempster has penned a short essay detailing multimedia artist Kaleena Stasiak’s obsession with the weather. Stasiak paints, prints, and sculpts art objects in bright colors featuring emblematic shapes, signs, and symbols. Characteristic of her larger practice, her multimedia weather-predicting works— windsocks, mobiles, kites, and weathervanes—are whimsical, playful, and even cheeky. However, there is a dark undertone throughout the works featured in the exhibition, much like the foreboding quality of old folk tales. The weather, though an everyday occurrence, is always a potential threat.
Claire Dempster on Kaleena Stasiak
“There’s News in the Wind”
Some years ago, the artist Kaleena Stasiak became preoccupied by the weather. After graduate school in Athens, Georgia, she chased teaching jobs on the fringes of Hurricane Country in coastal Alabama and at the easterly edge of Tornado Alley in northern Mississippi. Along the way, she became a collector and creator of objects that attempt to divine and give shape to the wind.
Kaleena did not watch the skies obsessively or keep her eye on the radar. Instead, she’d describe the weathervanes and wind chimes on people’s roofs and porches seen from the road on one of the many long, criss-crossing drives that became part of her routine as a transplant in the rural South. She began to explore these vestiges for determining the weather, starting with a series of silk windsocks, hand-painted in her signature vivid pastels and covered in shapes of household objects.
Across Kaleena’s multimedia practice as a printmaker and sculptor, these domestic objects turned symbols are a mainstay. Simplified candles and houses, spinning looms and rocking chairs, skulls and coffins, running horses and crowing roosters, and stars, suns, and moons adorn everything from monoprints and windsocks to her gigantic, slightly ghastly hanging mobiles. Like symbols of the tarot or pictographs on a rock wall, she layers and repeats these images over and over in revolving patterns, sometimes transposed on top of one another, or stacked in illusive hierarchies. And like tarot cards and pictographs, their meanings are at once obvious and just out of reach—simple descriptions of everyday materials that hint at the universal and the timeless, greater-than-thou experiences of being and dying. Deciphering these symbols is like standing in a thunderstorm, an event which is both mundane in its regularity and sublime in its endlessly varied theatricality.
Always interested in the antique and anachronistic, Stasiak has complemented her symbol-adorned windsocks and mobiles with a growing series of handpainted signs bearing folk phrases related to weather and agriculture. “Hark how the chairs and tables crack!” “A tough apple skin means a hard winter.” “There is news in the wind!” Collected by word-of-mouth and found in books, these phrases often describe and occasionally prescribe. Kaleena has a tendency to select phrases that demystify the intangibility of weather events by equating them to the innocuous—clapping thunder as moving chairs and tables—or offer a course of action, like preparing for a bad winter if the apple crop is poor.
Technologically, our tools for charting the weather have never been more sophisticated. We know days, weeks, even months in advance the course the rains will take and where the heat will be unbearable. By pulling forward old ways of navigating the environment into our increasingly terrifying and unpredictable ecological present, Kaleena’s weather works are guideposts that remind us of the enduring supremacy of our senses and instincts to predict, discern, and navigate. If only we’d listen. If only we’d look.
Claire Dempster is a writer, arts and culture professional and amateur weaver based in Atlanta, Georgia.
