This month at Blockfort features narrative works inspired by personal experiences of three artists who all work in graphic media. Comics, prints, and illustrations often tell a story, and this story is compounded and rich when developed from personal experience. Artists M.S. Harkness, Mariana Weflen, and Gloria Shows all bring their personal experiences to their work.

M.S. Harkness is the author of the autobiographical graphic novels Tinderella and Desperate Pleasures. She was nominated for the Cartoonist Studio Prize in 2020 and was the recipient of the Minnesota State Art's Board Visual Artist Grant in 2018. Now a resident of Columbus's Clintonville neighborhood, she is working on her third book Time Under Tension to be published with Fantagraphics in 2023.

Mariana Weflen (she/they) is an Appalachian-born artist, designer, and mental health nerd currently living in Columbus, Ohio. Mariana’s upcoming wordless graphic novel, Wolf Girl, tells the folkloric tale of a headstrong child who runs away from home and is taken in by a mothering wolf. Intricately-detailed scenes illustrate post-traumatic stress responses (fight - flight - freeze - fawn) and explore conflicts related to family dynamics, spirituality, and gender identity.

Gloria Shows imagines distant, nondescript landscapes as parallels to the experience of cultural amnesia, assimilation, and the condition of being in-between. She reflects on microhistories of herself and those with whom she shares her life. She sees these as part of larger historical and geographical narratives. Her associative and visual memories of rootlessness are illuminated by material traces of the past such as photographs, videos, notebooks, diaries, and letters. From these materials, she fragments and layers to make tangible the strained ways that she articulates her relationship to place.

An opening reception for the show will take place August 13, 6-8pm.