To prepare for “Meet Me in the Forest,” the newest exhibition at Shoreview’s Cafesjian Art Trust Museum, staff began by drilling holes across three gallery walls. 

Then artists like Erica Rosenfeld started a meticulous installation process. She created small nests for the bizarre creatures and collections she makes from glass, sculpture and found objects.

The result is Rosenfeld’s “Welcome to Reverie Forest: Sanctuary for Strange Creatures” (2026), part of CAT Museum’s new exhibition that looks to gardens and woods as imaginative launching points. Here, artists examine memory, confront trauma, and seek shelter in the metaphorical space of the forest.

The exhibition, curated by Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Linnea Seidling, features five works recently acquired by the museum, along with loans and permanent collection pieces. It spans painting, glass, ceramics, textiles, installation, mixed media and photography.

The forest “has many dichotomies,” Rosenfeld noted. “It can be scary and beautiful.” She began the broader body of work in 2017, inspired by mass-market paint-by-number kits that surged in popularity during the McCarthy era of the 1940s and 50s. McCarthyism, she said, preyed on Americans’ fears of outsiders and lost freedoms. The kits often featured “adorable animals, pastoral landscapes, and vacation scenes,” she said. They reflected “a sugar-coated reality that wasn’t really attainable to most.”

In response, Rosenfeld upends the paint-by-numbers aesthetic through obsessive, labor-intensive processes, taking mass-produced kitsch and contorting it into her own surreal creatures, such as two-headed animals and other hybrid beings. Her forest becomes a sanctuary for these misfits, “a safe zone outside of societal constraints,” she said.

For co-curator Jill Ahlberg Yohe, this sense of duality sits at the heart of the show. Within a single work, artists confront pain and joy, tragedy and triumph, placing layered images in dialogue across media. “They’re just so variable and layered,” Ahlberg Yohe said, pointing to the way glass, textiles, painting, and photography bounce off one another.

In “She taught me to listen to the wind” (2023), Kelly Sinnapah Mary juxtaposes an erotic scene of bodies romping in forest leaves with something far more sinister: a white claw looming overhead. The work grapples with the artist’s family history as descendants of Tamil laborers brought to Guadeloupe. The plantation landscape is cast as a site of colonial violence, but also as a sanctuary where her grandmother’s botanical knowledge connects the artist and her family to the land.  

A similar tension animates Pao Houa Her’s 3D lenticular print mounted on panel from her series “Other Pictures of Paradise” (2022–24). It depicts jungle sites along the border of Laos and Thailand where Her’s family sought refuge while fleeing the Secret War – the covert, CIA-led military operation in Laos in the 1960s and 70s. Viewed from one side, poppy flowers stretch toward the light in an idyllic landscape. From the other, the jungle darkens, thick with implied danger. Her’s work treats this former refuge as a space holding both fear and beauty, blending historical terror with moments of children’s delight.

Throughout the exhibition, artists blur the line between nature and its illusion. Rosenfeld’s wall installation uses plastic knickknacks and glass elements to mimic a fantastical forest. Ebony G. Patterson’s “…among the blades between the flowers…” – a hand-cut, jacquard-woven photo tapestry – is embellished with glitter, appliqué, beads, trim, and fabric and embraces full-blown maximalism. According to Ahlberg Yohe, Patterson’s work utilizes visual abundance to draw viewers into more difficult histories, referencing both the legacies of colonization and the exuberance of Carnival. 

Related: Nature provides the visuals for a new North Shore art installation

Nearby, Kate Clements’ “Stain” (2022), a new museum acquisition, is a glittering glasswork that creates a compelling shadow on the gallery wall behind it. Co-curator Linnea Seidling notes that the piece is designed to elicit anxiety through its blood and scab-evoking textures, heightened by the way it is suspended from the wall by thin monofilament.

“It’s a layered viewing experience where it’s sparkly, colorful, and really beckoning,” Seidling said. “But then you look a little bit closer, and all of a sudden it becomes kind of terrifying.”

Other works in the exhibition explore the forest as a place of healing. In the ceramic piece “Trust Issues,” Amanda Michelle Smith’s mines her experience of leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, while in “Trauma,” the forest can be seen as a place of transformation.

Smith’s spellbinding style echoes that of the “outsider” art of Henry Darger. Her forests stage the disorientation of exiting a tight-knit religious community and unpack experiences of belonging, fear and perhaps repair, as well. 

Ahlberg Yohe notes that she and Seidling designed “Meet Me in the Forest” to present nature as a realm where “human creativity, activity and memory happen,” she said, rather than a site of loss. Even as the show acknowledges catastrophe and anxiety, it treats the forest as a space of abundance – of stories, lineages and imaginative possibility – where artists can hold violence and beauty, terror and refuge together. 

“Meet Me in the Forest” is on view at the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum from September 3, 2026, through February 27, 2027. The opening reception takes place Thursday, September 3, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the CAT Museum, 4600 Churchill Street, Shoreview ($39). More information here.

And if you’re interested in nature, you may want to check out “Out There: A National Parks Story,” screening on Monday, September 14 at 7 p.m. at the Parkway Theater, 4814 Chicago Ave., Minneapolis. ($18 in advance, $25 at the door). The Mississippi Park Connection is presenting the event. It’s a film that explores the national parks through the people that love them – park rangers, hikers, photographers, and outdoor enthusiasts. Directed by Brenden Hall, who shot the film with his childhood friend Anthony Blake in national parks across the country, the film features a cinematic look at America’s most beautiful places. In a moment when our national landscapes seem extremely vulnerable, I found the film a heartwarming reason to keep fighting for them. More information here. 

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