Bridging Between : Fiendish Plots Lincoln, Nebraska 2023
your outer borders are rambling — somehow the home comes to you
In 2006, I visited Berlin for the first time. When I arrived, I felt grounded and oddly pulled to the city; I experienced a strange sense of returning home. Bridging studio practices between Berlin and Seward, Thave devoted much of the past fifteen years to making Berlin a significant destination for my personal growth as an artist. This exhibition surveys works made in Berlin during a sabbatical in 2022; it includes works on paper, photography, and video work, as well as a collection of found objects that hang in my Nebraska studio. I see that the workspace in Seward and my urban wanderings in Berlin are contact points that cross pollinate, generating opportunities for new growth and personal discovery. Here the drawings, found objects, and videos mark an engagement and participation with a particular locality, between Berlin and Seward.
The installation at Fiendish Plots is an opportunity to look for correspondence between different bodies of work, moments of play and concentration, and the awareness of one's surroundings be they foreign or familiar. Heimat surfaced during the Romantic period to describe the nostalgia for one's birthplace. For German speakers, the term is intuitive; Heimat is something one has within oneself. This felt connection is not descriptive of an objective reality, one cannot simply go to a location and arrive home. Rather, it represents an amalgamation, a construction of the various experiences, values and feelings associated with one's homeland. At times human beings can experience homelessness and loss. Forcefully, the quality of a person's identity is directly related to one's understanding of place — Heimat is the sense of being somewhere (wherever you happen to be) without having to justify yourself for being there. To the point, when a person experiences Heimat, "the split is reconciled, where landscape and identity, nature and self, reason and space become fused." I gravitate towards the concept of Heimat because I see it also as a particular process of image formation. Bridging one's identity with place is related to the interrelationship between figure and ground and relates directly to my own process of abstract, image formation.