ALEXIS STITELER + VICTORIA SASS ON MAKING OBJECTS THAT LIVE WITH US LONGER, DEEPER, AND CLOSER TO PLACE

When artists and designers talk about place, it’s often framed as influence. The light, the landscape, the pace. But in the Midwest, place feels less like backdrop and more like pressure. A force that accumulates slowly: through weather, through history, through objects that refuse to be discarded. It reshapes how people build, how they collaborate, how they imagine permanence.

This conversation between artist Alexis Stiteler and designer and gallerist Victoria Sass (joined by Mathew Swenson of TELL) begins there. Not with aesthetics, but with endurance. With the question of what it means to choose this region: to stay, to return, to build within its particular constraints and generosities.

ALEXIS: For me, being in the Midwest slows things down in a way. It opens things up. Other places I’ve lived have a pulse and a rhythm. The rhythm here feels different, and it gives you space to be intricate in your details and to make decisions about who you want to partner with.

It’s about community and collaboration. Trying to figure out how to work other people into your own work. It’s very process-oriented.

VICTORIA: Yeah. It’s space and time. People assume: you’re removed from the rat race, so things are calmer. That’s true, but there’s also a different sense of permanence here.

When I work with clients who aren’t Midwest-based or don’t have Midwest roots, I see a different decision-making speed and philosophy. People here are slow to change. Not because they’re stubborn, but because they know they’ll probably have this object for the rest of their lives. Often they’re thinking generationally, actually.

There’s responsibility around thinking beyond your own interaction with an object or a space. Midwesterners do that. Sometimes it’s challenging. You try to get them out of their own way and they can’t.

MATHEW: It feels less trend-based because of that pace. I want to talk aesthetics...what feels “regional,” beyond cliché. What does the pace, scale, and these values do to what we make?

ALEXIS: I’ve been thinking about that through the building I’m in...the materiality, the honesty. It’s not trying to be more than it is. There’s not a flashiness. It’s that these are the materials we had. These are the materials we chose because they function.

There’s a quiet confidence in the decision-making. The people who built out the building didn’t take photos while they were doing it. It was the 70s, but still it wasn’t about getting into a magazine. It was these are the things we like, so we’re doing them.

VICTORIA: Midwesterners are allergic to trends not because they want to be cooler than trends. They’re unwilling to embrace things quickly, and there’s good and bad to that. But yes: function first. People temper function for form, but if it doesn’t function, form is moot.

ALEXIS: You see it in the history here too...St. Croix pottery, Warren MacKenzie. Pots for the people. Functionality. That mentality still seeps into everything.

VICTORIA: And there’s also ethical idealism. This foundational sense of equality. It shows up in something like democratic design. Even people with means are conscious of how their choices engage community. They don’t want to stand out or seem other than. Tall poppy syndrome. We try not to rise above. There are positives to that.

MATHEW: I want to jump to the show. I’m thrilled to get this story out into the world. It feels like the potential for Prospect Refuge Gallery: aesthetic objects coming out of here.

Alexis is complicated in that she is Minnesotan by choice. That complexity matters. You carry Texas, Pennsylvania, and now Minnesota as an active chapter. The active chapter is always hardest to see clearly.

VICTORIA: It is. We’re always trying to define regionality, but maybe we can’t while we’re in it. Alexis’s work is a uniquely regional viewpoint actively in process. Her previous chapters are layered, and this one is alive. And because so much of the work is collaborative, other voices are actively involved. Nothing lands exactly as imagined and it can be better for that.

ALEXIS: I’m grateful to have space to do it. When we first talked, you understood what I was trying to do. That was refreshing after hearing: “Nobody’s going to get this.”

Working through what works for a show, finding the right people to build things out...it’s been special. We put oil on the couch today and it snapped into place. It made sense. Steph gets it. I get it. Victoria gets it.

It’s so many materials and people coming together to translate the work. That collaboration has been the biggest reward.

VICTORIA: Selfishly, I wanted to see what Alexis would make. I have a few of her clothing pieces. I’d seen a couple screens and a light fixture and thought: I need to see more in this object direction.

ALEXIS: It’s fulfilling my dream too because it’s been in my head forever. I’ve wanted to build this couch for so long and had nowhere to put it. We live in a 700-square-foot apartment. Having a space and a timeline is everything.

MATHEW: Living on the coast, sometimes people engineer environments to set the tone for what they’re going to make. Here, we often work from what already exists. Less generating a vibe and more living with something that evolved.

VICTORIA: I rarely start from scratch. If I do, it’s because nothing exists. Someone’s second home and they have nothing. But usually people bring their history. It’s non-negotiable. They’re not reinventing themselves. It’s evolution, and they won’t let it go.

ALEXIS: Working from a place feels relational...of our body, our history, our past. Working in a place can feel like it could be anywhere.

Minnesotans are rooted. The dating joke is: you move away, you come back. People told me, “Two years—that’s about as long as it works anywhere else.” And it’s special. I moved around so much, never really had a home base. This has become home in a different way...a chosen home.

VICTORIA: It’s interesting to hear you say that as someone who wasn’t born here. You’re Minnesotan by choice, not obligation. That can be a comfort and a burden. With community comes responsibility. But it’s a relationship that can be engaging over a lifetime.

ALEXIS: I moved here after college for the ceramics community. I was here ten years, then I was like: I’ve got to go. I did a lot of growing up here. Young and wild years. I stopped drinking a couple years before I left and felt like I needed to go reinvent myself. You go somewhere else and you’re still you.

In my family, when we move, we don’t go back. So I felt pressure to leave because I’d been here so long. Then I realized: Derek (her partner) has a real tie here, I have a tie to him, and my long-term friendships are here. My brother is here with his kids. Other places didn’t feel like home either. This feels the most home.

Pennsylvania still feels like home in my body though. When I cross from Ohio into Pennsylvania, I feel it. Minnesota is different, but it’s home too.

VICTORIA: Alexis, your work is comforting but also offers something to chew on. The way you organize your pieces so people can land and linger. It’s like little offerings. I have a question: you have roots in Texas...your cotton is grown there, right? And roots in Pennsylvania...your fabric is woven there?

ALEXIS: Yes. It’s woven in the town where my great-grandparents lived. When I began building materials (clothing and furniture) I was thinking about family history. I don’t live in Pennsylvania but I feel a draw there. That’s where so much of my family is. That’s where people are buried.

It helped me reestablish place in myself, and support economies of work there. The looms are from the 40s. Pat’s dad was a mechanic. When textile industry was leaving the states, people were throwing these looms away. He collected them, stored them. I get to carry the place with me.

VICTORIA: Objects are extensions of people if you acquire them with intention. We’re coming off decades of consumerism, and we have to reprogram ourselves. My great-grandmother’s had heirlooms nobody wanted. Big furniture is hard. But they’re ties to a person with incredible taste.

During COVID my abuelita was flying back to Pittsburgh at 92. We told her not to. She said: “If I’m going to die, I want to die with all my stuff.” I understood immediately. Objects hold the moments we’ve lived through. I want people to feel that strongly about what they share home with.

If you’ve acquired objects with intention with connections to people then it isn’t consumption. It’s coexistence.

MATHEW: Part of what I love about your practice, Victoria, is that objects have to have story and history. Alexis, even if the next generation doesn’t want heirlooms, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build our own story through what we live with.

ALEXIS: The stories matter. I think part of why we’re in what we’re in right now is we’re forgetting family stories. Where we come from, what people went through to get us here. My great-grandfather was a coal miner from Slovakia, worked in Pennsylvania, died at 40. And I’m making clothing and objects. Those pieces hold ties. They make us ask questions. Without them, we forget who we are. We become homogeneous.

MATHEW: I want to transition to Brick Alley in Stillwater, and your relationship with that space.

ALEXIS: It’s influenced a lot. All the clothing is shot in the building. I didn’t meet Mike (Micheal McGuire, the Architect) before he passed, but it feels like I know a part of him. He built it out with friends in the 70s for his friends, but it feels familiar to me, like my college in Alfred.

When I found the space, it was the first place I immediately connected to. I could envision myself there, and I wanted to share the story of it. It’s been office space for so long it’s gone to the wayside. But Warren MacKenzie had a studio here, across the hall. There was an ecosystem of artists. Mike’s intention was storefronts with workspace.

When I moved back, I heard: “What you’re doing isn’t going to work here.” Over and over. Finding this building was like: I can exist here. I can share the work I’m doing. I can rave about what Mike did. You become a part-time historian and cultural anthropologist.

MATHEW: And you’ve been inspired by other buildings too? Like the state park building you loved before you even moved in, and then realized it was the same architect.

ALEXIS: Exactly. We went to a Willow River State Park, walked into the building to warm up, and I thought: someone special built this. Then later I realized it was Mike McGuire. That information isn’t really anywhere. It’s the Midwest thing: “Oh yeah, Mike built those.” Like the Bertoia statues at the mall “Oh yeah, we’ve got giant Bertoias in our malls.” Just part of it.

MATHEW: For readers: can you talk more about Michael Graham McGuire?

ALEXIS: Mike was an architect in this region. He studied under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, then moved back. In the 70s he moved along the St. Croix River Valley and found buildings like this one.

This building was originally built in the 1900s as a power plant. He moved in during the 70s and built out studio spaces. Almost like combined buildings into separate offices or studios for artist friends. You can go town to town along the St. Croix and find a McGuire houses and buildings dotted along.

It was a time when you could do that. I long for that...a time when you could buy a building and fix it up for your friends using materials that were around. It’s so expensive now.

He passed last year. This was his favorite building. Behind us is another building he built out (his studio) now Airbnbs. He spent a lot of time in Stillwater.

VICTORIA: I wasn’t familiar with him before, but I’ve been to your studio and felt the energy. It feels like where you should be. I admire people who preserve spaces and feel connected across time.

Mathew knows my mission: to have interiors recognized as an artistic medium. There’s power in space. There’s power in objects we populate spaces with. People miss that potential. So, Mathew has told me you’re trying to bring more people into Brick Alley? Almost recruiting?

ALEXIS: Mike’s original idea was an indoor mall for artists. I’d love to see the building become that. It’s built for it. I imagine it filled with people shopping in these unique little shops, with workspace inside. Stillwater is busy and touristy. If we bring life back into the building, it could do beautiful things for Stillwater too.

VICTORIA: Architecturally it feels like a house (central staircase, rooms off a hallway) communal, but not residential.

ALEXIS: When we held a holiday market here, someone said: “It felt like we were in someone’s living room.” That’s my favorite compliment. The building makes people feel comfortable.

We visited Taliesin and talked about Frank Lloyd Wright’s “compressing.” Mike leaves more space, but you still feel contained. It’s cozy and intimate. You can share space and story without it feeling like a warehouse.

MATHEW: How much of that future can be engineered versus naturally occurring?

ALEXIS: People will want traffic. So how do you get people to come through and understand they’re allowed to navigate it? Who else is doing things in Stillwater? How do I connect with them? How do you get people to leave Minneapolis and come out?

It’s office space right now. It’s hard to sell storefronts without flow. We need transitional tenants...people who want workspace and a small stores. It’s also a hard time for people to commit. The vision might not all come together immediately.