What
Group exhibition that explores the relationships of landscape, imagination and experience
Exhibition Dates
May 22 – June 30, 2012
Gallery hours are 11 am to 6 pm, Tuesday through Saturday
Public Reception for the Artists
Saturday, June 9 from 9:00 pm – 12:00 am (midnight)
The public reception is presented by the Katherine E. Nash Gallery as part of Northern Spark 2012, produced by Northern Lights.mn
Film Screening
Laura Aguilar: Life, The Body, Her Perspective, a video biography of the artist Laura Aguilar, will be screened continuously during the Public Reception on June 9.
Where
Katherine E. Nash Gallery
Regis Center for Art, University of Minnesota
405 21st Avenue South, Minneapolis
Parking available nearby at the 21st Avenue ramp, hourly or event rates apply
Accessibility
The Regis Center for Art is wheelchair-accessible.
Cost
All events at the Regis Center for Art are free and open to the public
Credit
This exhibition was made possible in part by the Goethe-Institut Chicago, and the Hans G. & Thordis W. Burkhardt Foundation.
Artists Included in the Exhibition
Laura Aguilar (Rosemead, CA)
Kate Casanova (Minneapolis, MN)
Jan Estep (Minneapolis, MN)
Jil Evans (Minneapolis, MN)
India Flint (Mount Pleasant, South Australia)
Anita Glesta (Brooklyn, NY)
Richard Haas (New York, NY)
Mark Knierim (Minneapolis, MN)
Joyce Lyon (Minneapolis, MN)
Ulrike Mohr (Berlin, Germany)
Pipo Nguyen-duy (Oberlin, OH)
Jane Norling (Berkeley, CA)
Rebecca Pavlenko (Minneapolis, MN)
Anette Rose (Berlin, Germany)
Bernhard Sallmann (Berlin, Germany)
Petra Spielhagen (Berlin, Germany)
Kenneth Steinbach (Minneapolis, MN)
JoAnn Verburg (Minneapolis, MN)
Curators
Lynn Lukkas, Associate Professor of Experimental and Media Arts in the Department of Art and Howard Oransky, Director of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery curated the exhibition Landscape of the Mind.
Exhibition Description
The Katherine E. Nash Gallery in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota presents Landscape of the Mind. The exhibition explores the relationships of landscape, imagination and experience in a variety of media.
Each of us inhabits two separate but related landscapes: the physical landscape that surrounds us, and the mental landscape of our own interior environment. The body, memory, culture and history moderate the intersection of these landscapes. The artworks in Landscape of the Mind explore the shape, texture and topography of these spaces and the relationships between them.
The exhibition includes a site-specific artwork made by Berlin-based artist Ulrike Mohr during her residency at the University of Minnesota while teaching a sculpture workshop in March-April 2012. Projects made by the workshop students are displayed in a companion exhibition in the Quarter Gallery, also located in the Regis Center.
Artist Biographies
Laura Aguilar
Laura Aguilar is a photographer based in Rosemead, California.
Kate Casanova
Kate Casanova is a visual artist who lives and works in Minneapolis. Her work has been shown at such galleries as Le Poisson Rouge (New York, NY), Soo Visual Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN), and the Anita Sue Kolman Gallery (Minneapolis, MN). She has served as the Gallery Editor for InDigest Magazine and the curator of Common Roots Café. She received a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Minnesota.
Jan Estep
Jan Estep is an artist, writer, and educator with an expanded creative practice that comprises critical and creative writing and a range of visual media including sculpture, photography, video, and independent publishing. Trained as a philosopher and an artist, the relationship between mind, human behavior, and visual expression fuels a range of formal and conceptual investigations, particularly involving connections between art and language, thtought and experience, and how our sensory experience relates to the conceptual. She is associate professor of art at the University of Minnesota.
Jil Evans
Jil Evans has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally. Her work is in many private and public collections including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Halle Ford Museum of Art, Stanford University, Valparaiso University Museum of Art, Harry and Margaret Anderson Collection of Art, Healthmarc, Inc., Minnetonka Corp., Piper Jaffray and Hopwood, Winthrop and Weinstein, Coca Cola, Inc., and Walker Art Center. She has received the Jerome Foundation Grant, National Endowment for the Arts, two Minnesota State Arts Board grants, the Pew Grant, and residencies at the American Academy in Rome and Atlantic Center for the Arts. She currently lives in Minneapolis and is a founding member of Form + Content Gallery.
India Flint
India Flint works primarily with cloth, paper and stitch; using bio-regionally gathered windfalls and weeds to colour her work. Flint is the author of ‘Eco Colour’ and ‘Second Skin’ both published by Murdoch Books. She completed an MA investigating sustainable eucalyptus dyes for textiles in 2001. Her work is represented in museum collections in Europe and Australia, also in the costume collections of Leigh Warren & Dancers and the West Australian Ballet. The production ‘breathe’, designed and costumed by Flint for LWD, will be performed in New York and at the Edinburgh Festival in 2012.
Anita Glesta
Anita Glesta’s work has been installed in public spaces, galleries, museums, and non-profit spaces in New York and internationally. As an artist in the public she has worked on several large-scale international projects, including a permanent outdoor integrated landscape sculpture for the Federal Census Bureau Building in Washington D.C. commissioned by the General Services Administration Art and Architecture program, in 2010. The project Gernika/Guernica (Desde El Cielo Hasta El Fondo) was shown as a two part installation in New York City at White Box Exhibition Space and through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council at Chase Manhattan Plaza in June 2007 and will be exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow and the Sackler Museum, Bejing in 2013. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards. Glesta was commissioned to do a work through Artport and the United Nations for the Climate Change Summit in 2009. Her video Putti for Sara was featured at the BigScreenPlaza in New York City in January 2012. Her public art project Watershed is installed as a multi channel video projection on 14th Street in New York City during May 2012.
Mark Knierim
Mark Knierim is a Minnesota based artist. His BFA degree is from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA degree is from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. His work is in the collections of David Nash, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Valspar Paint Co., The Minnesota Timberwolves, Wells Fargo Bank, U of M Morris. Mark has exhibited widely throughout the Mid West. Mark is the Facilities and Technical Coordinator for the University of Minnesota, Department of Art.
Joyce Lyon
Joyce Lyon is a maker of drawings and digital artist’s books. Her work is in collections nationally, including Georgetown University Law Library, Florida Holocaust Museum, Federal Reserve Bank, Ninth District, Minnesota History Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, and Weisman Art Museum. In Minneapolis she exhibits at Groveland Gallery and is a member of Form + Content Gallery. She has received three Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowships and a Jerome / MCBA Books Arts grant and was a participant in a Fulbright-Hays Group Project in Poland. She is Associate Professor of Art at the University of Minnesota.
Ulrike Mohr
Ulrike Mohr is a Berlin-based artist. She received her MFA in 2004 from the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee, Berlin. Her work involves critical observations of processes, measurements and systems, and includes interventions in relation to spontaneous nature and processes of transformation such as charcoal making. Solo shows include the Kunsthaus Kloster Gravenhorst (2009), Cluster, Berlin (2008) and Kunstverein Hildesheim (2007), along with numerous group exhibitions such as the 5th berlin biennial for contemporary art (2008) and the Momentum Biennial in Norway (2011). She has received support for her work from various sources including the Istanbul Foundation of the Berlin Senate and the Kunstfonds Foundation.
Pipo Nguyen-duy
Pipo Nguyen-duy, born in Hue, Vietnam in 1962, received a master’s degree of fine arts in photography from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1998. In 2011, Nguyen-duy received the fellowship in the field of photography from the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The artist lives in Ashland, Oregon, and teaches at Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio, where he is associate professor of photography. His work has been shown internationally, with recent exhibitions at Light Work Gallery, New York; Faaborg Museum, Denmark; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; and the Light Factory, North Carolina.
Jane Norling
Jane Norling graduated from Bennington College with a BA in painting and printmaking and has been active in Bay Area (California) cultural venues since 1970. Jane’s series “Shaped by Water” was launched in a solo exhibition in 2007 and her “Cappadocia Ex/Interiors” was exhibited in Oakland in 2008. Her mural “Absent” concerning the war in Afghanistan is traveling the U.S. for three years in in the AFSC group show “Windows and Mirrors.” She received a Morris Graves Residency in 2009. Moved by social and environmental concerns, Jane’s belief in Nature’s power to connect the individual to the universal is the foundation of her art.
Rebecca Pavlenko
Rebecca Pavlenko is a photographer and scenic artist. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Minnesota with degrees in Studio Arts and Art History. Her work has been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally and is in the permanent collection of the Weismann Museum. She has taught numerous classes and workshops at The Minnesota Center for Photography, Vision Quest and other venues and has served as a mentor in WARM’s Mentor/Protégé program. She works part –time as a scenic artist for the Guthrie Theatre. She was a recipient of a 2010 Minnesota State Arts Board Grant. Her current photography work grows out of her Zen practice and love of nature.
Anette Rose
Anette Rose is a Berlin-based artist. She has been invited to RWTH Aachen University as an Artist-in-Residence, was awarded a working stipend for fine arts from the state government of Berlin and has also received project and film support for installations in her long-term “Encyclopaedia of Manual Operations” project. Alongside her participation in large exhibitions of contemporary art (including “Between Bodies and Object” in 2006 and “Colossal – Art Fact Fiction” in 2009-2012, both curated by Jan Hoet), she has also presented her works in the contexts of work, film and technology, at anthropology and cultural studies symposia, and at meetings on gesture studies.
Bernhard Sallman
Bernhard Sallman was born in Linz, Austria in 1967 and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He studied Journalism, German Literature and Sociology in Salzburg and Berlin and studied filmdirecting at HFF “Konrad Wolf” in Potsdam-Babelsberg. He has been a practicing filmmaker since 2004. His most recent films include, 2009 Traume Der Lausitz, 2009; Das Schlechte Feld, 2011 and Mandelstam (work in progress) 2011. He is the receipient of a 2000 DAAD-Prize. His work has been included in numerous international exhibitions including, Werkschau/Retrospective: BAFICI-Festival/Buenos Aires, 2010.
Petra Spielhagen
Petra Spielhagen was born in Berlin in 1966 and is currently living in Berlin. She has received awards from Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, 2012; Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt Berlin, 2011;
Project grant, DA, Kunsthaus Kloster Gravenhorst, 2007; Artist Residency, Cannes, 2004; Hotel Neustadt, Festival, Halle-Neustadt, Projektförderung des Senats für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur, Berlin, 2003; First Prize in the Max-Planck Society Competition, Roaming Field of Light for the Fritz-Haber Institute in Berlin Exhibitions, 1999. Exhibitions include Festival der Regionen, Linz, Austria, 2009; unvermittelt, NGBK, Berlin, 2008; Tausche Bilder gegen Geschichten, DA, Kunsthaus Kloster Gravenhorst, Achtung Sprengarbeiten! NGBK, Berlin, 2007; Petra Spielhagen. Photographie, Ateliers Seruse, Marseille, 2004.
Kenneth Steinbach
Kenneth Steinbach is a Minneapolis based artist who uses a variety of media and approaches, but works principally in sculpture. He has shown throughout the United States, including exhibits at the Phillip Slein Gallery in St. Louis, Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles, and Circa gallery in Minneapolis, who has represented his work for the past six years. Kenneth is the recipient of two Minnesota State Arts Board grants in direct support of his work. He is Professor of Art in Sculpture at Bethel University in St. Paul, and a member of Form + Content Gallery in Minneapolis.
JoAnn Verburg
JoAnn Verburg began her long love affair with 5x7 photography in the late 1970s, and her work has been exhibited and collected extensively. In 2007, The Museum of Modern Art mounted Present Tense: Photographs by JoAnn Verburg, a solo exhibition of her photographs and video with a catalog of the same title. It traveled to Walker Art Center in 2008. Of this exhibition, Philip Gefter wrote in The New York Times, “Time doesn’t exactly stand still in JoAnn Verburg’s photographs . . . Instead, her portraits, still lifes and landscapes generate a state of prolonged experience.” Verburg received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986.
Artist Statements
Kate Casanova
I am fascinated by human perceptions of nature and draw on conventions such as the curiosity cabinet, the expedition, the nature book, and the natural history museum for inspiration. I work with living organisms such as mushrooms or hermit crabs to create visual experiences in which sensation trumps language. In my surreal creations, fungi grow out of furniture, crustaceans crawl on heads, and land masses float. Through objects and material, I strive to create poetic encounters with the natural world that reveal truths about how we perceive nature.
Jan Estep
The video essay Searching for Ludwig Wittgenstein features footage of the trail leading to a fjord-side hut that Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein (1889-1951) built in Norway as a private place to write; Estep visited the site hoping to map its location and learn more about his time there. The accompanying voiceover narrative describes the search for the hut, which was simultaneously a physical, embodied experience of walking in the woods and a conceptual, interpretive experience of remembering the philosopher’s words and ideas. The video is a companion piece to the illustrated print map Searching for Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lake Eidsvatnet, Skjolden, Sogn, Norway, 2007, which will also be on display; viewers are free to take copies.
Jil Evans
The series Breaking Light, now over thirty abstract paintings and drawings, begins in the observation of the Cannon River flood in Minnesota in 2010. The river’s flooded banks in the Northfield Arboretum dramatically changed the local landscape and environment. Trees and branches were submerged and tangled, and reflections on the water captured what was near and far. I am interpreting the broken and altered landscape through the light and color of abstract painting. The cacophony I found in the layered reflections and transparencies of the river and the material abundance of the broken ground it covers, invite the viewer to experience the volatility of tensions and resolutions that have an echo in our subjective experience.
India Flint
My work literally and metaphorically has its roots in place and landscape. I gather cloth fragments on my travels , the leaves used for dyeing are gathered as windfalls from the ground and the marks stitched into the cloth derived from things absorbed in my peripheral vision. Thus the garment bears remembered narratives imprinted by the bodies that wore the earlier incarnations of the cloth as well as the visual marks and colours from plants grown in the regions where they were conceived.
Anita Glesta
Putti For Sara is a video in which bodies, in highly saturated colors, ascend through space as though they are floating in the ether. Bodies float between the grid-like structures in a shifting and asymmetrical pattern, at once echoing and reconstructing the buildings. Hot pinks and yellows mixed with reds and blues are reminiscent of Renaissance frescoes. Putti For Sara, like a contemporary version of the chapel ceilings, is a moving painting that speaks to our urban environment in a haunting and spiritual dialogue.
Mark Knierim
In all of my work I explore the agricultural esthetic of the prairie landscape of western Minnesota. These new pieces explore the marking and ordering. I choose to work in green wood because the wood is alive and still moving. I make my marks and as the wood dries it reforms itself not unlike the landscape, which is always changing. Obstinate is homage to the commitment of labor of farming. In the area where I grew up, fieldstones would present themselves every spring due to the frost. Farmers would remove stones year after year. The stone is obstinate and the farmer is obstinate.
Joyce Lyon
Joyce Lyon’s work focuses on the intersections of place and memory. In drawings and image and text pieces, she works from observation with emotion and an acute sense of the layering of time. In Approaches to the Garden she began with the interlock, literal and metaphoric, of light and dark, known and unknown. This was her garden, her grapevine at night. She hoped to infuse into these drawings what John Szarkowski said about Atget’s photographs of French formal gardens: that what the gardener leaves at sundown is never the same as what s/he returns to in the morning.
Ulrike Mohr
Ulrike Mohr's work is concerned primarily with the meaning and characteristics of public space. Investigative, her approach to materials and objects induces an abstracted idea of nature, landscape and urban space. The work involves critical observations of processes, measurements and systems, and includes interventions in relation to spontaneous nature (Restgrün, 2006; Neue Nachbarn, 2008) and processes of transformation such as charcoal making (Welt-Kataster, 2010). Mohr’s work is a space for experimentation that is measurable, formable and transformable and in which formal aspects are treated as important as ecological, economic, cultural or political aspects.
Pipo Nguyen-duy
I arrived in the United States as a refugee from Vietnam in 1975. As an American, my illusionary Garden of Eden was made unstable by the September 11th event. For the first time since 1975, I face a familiar feeling of uncertainty, fear and insecurity that I thought had been suppressed and forgotten. East of Eden is a manifestation of my urgent need to offer, as a war survivor, my perspective on the present landscape of anxiety. I began working on this project during the summer of 2002. East of Eden is a series of large, staged, color, narrative photographs that question the historical depiction of the American landscape as the Garden of Eden.
Jane Norling
I am fascinated with the interweaving of water and land, and indirectly, the mark of human hand there. The natural world is the heart of my artmaking, changed into landscape as it is by interpretation, civilization standing just outside the picture plane.
Occasionally the built world asserts itself on my imagination, and a melted tin house high on Pacific bluff combines with my painted abstract landscape imagery to form a new construct in our digital era–an object-like shape whose origins are familiar but not quite understood.
Rebecca Pavlenko
The images in this series are a visual means of conveying zazen, the Zen Buddhist form of meditation. Meditation is common to many world religions and takes a variety of forms. As a spiritual practice it is experiential, thus personal and individual. Meditation is the process of holding the present moment in awareness. Thanks to Brent Derovitch, Ken Ford and other friends for offering their hands to be photographed. Special thanks to Fish for her class on the elements that helped inform some of the choices of nature imagery. This series is dedicated to all of my Zen teachers, Karen Sunna, Dosho, Bykuren, Nonan, Dokai , Myo-O, Fish, Joen and Michael whose teachings point the way.
Anette Rose
My works revolve around nonverbal body language. I synchronously capture face and hands, expressions and hand movements. In the film 16 Dream Fragments, I observe how the female protagonists express their nightly dreams in words. As they speak, individual experiences emerge and are reflected in the speakers’ tone of voice, their gestures and how each woman looks into the camera. Instead of trying to illustrate the content of their dreams, I focus on how my subjects speak, their body language and how this body language accompanies, highlights and interprets what they are saying.
Bernhard Sallman
A familiar view: How much does one see when one looks out of a window? What is visible, what remains invisible? The view of The Bad Field from the window of my room in my parents´ house is the starting point of this video work. The field is both a doorway into and a surface onto which themes of the film can be projected: childhood, war, the disappearance of rural world – periods, times overlap and clash.
Petra Spielhagen
Photographs are an integral component of my work. I photograph at night in public spaces. I encounter these places by chance. I leave them unlit. These “found” settings are model-like; they could just as easily be found in other places. Artificial light has a strong presence and produces a particular ambiance. In combination with the choice of details, the photograph gives the impression of staged rooms. Light plays an important role in the casting of the night. To whom does the 24-hour night belong? In my work thus far, it is only through the texts and actions that people have been present as protagonists. Lately, though, people are now also turning up in my photographs.
Kenneth Steinbach
Memoria Animus: Tramping Lake is from a body of drawings that explore ideas about landscape using the media of scrimshaw. The drawings are topographical maps of wilderness areas I have visited over the last twenty years, rendered entirely from memory, without the aid of maps or photographs. They use the traditional techniques and materials of scrimshaw, a method of drawing on ivory or whale tooth. The Memoria Animus works are drawn on elephant ivory imported for the fabrication of musical instruments, and since discarded. Like many traditional scrimshaw works, this series chronicles forays into unknown areas of wilderness in North America.
JoAnn Verburg
We make choices during our lives that have consequences. I hope mine contribute something of worth to others in my lifetime and culture, but also beyond the boundaries of each. In a sense, we are all in it together. (I find that comforting.) I see art as a way of asking questions that are not going to be answered. As for photography’s subject matter, that has never seemed to me to be the point; however, I enjoy getting lost under the dark cloth trying to make a picture as I distort images of the world on the ground glass of my large camera. It’s intense and can be fun and feels relevant.
Katherine E. Nash Gallery Mission
Mission: The Katherine E. Nash Gallery is a research laboratory for the practice and interpretation of the visual arts. Vision: We believe the visual arts have the capacity to interpret, critique and expand on all of human experience. Our engagement with the visual arts helps us to discover who we are and understand our relationships to each other and society. The Katherine E. Nash Gallery will be a center of discourse on the practice of visual art and its relationship to culture and community -- a place where we examine our assumptions about the past and suggest possibilities for the future. The Nash Gallery will play an indispensible role in the educational development of students, faculty, staff and the community. http://nash.umn.edu/
Department of Art Mission
The Department of Art provides an introduction to the practice of art for all students as well as immersive training for emerging artists. We promote creative expression and conceptual development through a broad range of art disciplines and practices. Initial experiences emphasizing traditional methods are supplemented at intermediate and advanced levels by experimental processes. We offer courses in painting and drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics and experimental media (EMA). Students pursue their work in our state of the art facilities, mentored by our faculty, all artists recognized in their fields. http://www.art.umn.edu/
