Wayfaring Strangers will be featured at two locations this fall. The full collection will be at the Great Plains Art Museum through December 17. https://www.unl.edu/plains/great-plains-art-museum
And a smaller set of really big enlargements plus a chance for you to have a portrait made in the same vein at WallSpace-LNK during September only. Contact Michael via text 402 429 3684 or email mfarrell.1st@gmail.com for details.
“Stream Crossings: Where the River Meets the Road” August 5-27, 2022 at WallSpace-LNK
with an opening reception Friday August 5, 5-8pm…
Streams, creeks, and rivers meander their sinuous curves across Nebraska’s landscapes. These ribbons of water intersect with the “relentless rectangularity” of our road grid, one-mile squares laid out over state. “Stream Crossings,” large-format color photographs, examines some of the places where the river meets the road. Photographer Michael Farrell searched out the bridges and culverts people imposed on the waterways, and discovered some surviving, handsome steel-truss bridges that add their own aesthetic element to nature’s scene.
Only Alaska has more river miles than Nebraska, so these intersections of angles and curves are frequent. The steel bridges are rapidly vanishing, in some cases replaced with concrete structures that barely differ from the roadway. In other places, nature is slowly but inevitably encroaching on abandoned wood and steel. An essay by Farrell traces the development of the land survey that created roads and bridges. It poses questions for the future, too. If our water is considered to be a resource owned by the public, what of these complex river systems? How can we divorce our watercourses from the life-giving water that runs through them? Isn’t a river, creek or stream an integral natural system overflowing with all manner of life and complexity – including our own? Who among us will be empowered or emboldened enough to dare to speak out or to act on behalf of our essential yet increasingly vulnerable watercourses?
Five national and international lens-based artists will show their creative relationships with landscapes in July at WallSpace-LNK. A special “second Friday” reception July 8 at 5pm for “that space, that garden” features artists from Canada, California, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Washington.
Madeline Cass of Lincoln curated the group show of artists that use tools from the earliest photographic methods to the most postmodern, to investigate the feelings, both literal and emotional, elicited by a climate on the brink of catastrophe.
Invited artists:
Meganelizabeth Diamond, living in rural Manitoba on Treaty 1, uses photography, collage and moving image “to recontextualize our relationships with the natural world and domestic spaces.” All Sides of the Grassblades, Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Berkeley-based Leah Koransky works with light, shape, and shadow in a variety of photographic and painterly techniques on paper and fabric. She often uses minerals and plant-based inks to highlight lesser noticed or overlooked aspects of the landscape. Sun fused to the blue, cyanotype on arches paper
Emily Margarit Mason creates momentary sculptural sets for the camera using fragmented photographic prints and found materials. Living and working in New Mexico, she “reimagines the perceived natural world from something seen to something felt.” A Wet Sunset, archival pigment print on satin
Meg Roussos starts from Seattle to find sites for installations she makes, then photographs. Dragging materials and camera into wild spaces, her work “engages in a dialogue about what it means to physically experience the landscape.” Inlay 1, archival pigment print
Madeline Cass is a multidisciplinary artist based in Lincoln, Nebraska. She primarily works within photography, poetry, artist books, painting, and drawing. She uses these tools to examine the multitude of relationships between art, science, nature, and humanity. Suns, archival inkjet print
“Gospel,” is an exhibition of 40 photographic images in color and black and white which tell the story of “walking through darkness to living in the Light.”
The landscapes, portraits, and moments of the COVID-19 pandemic reflect the new life in Jesus that followed. “In my experience, as trials lead me to know greater love, suffering becomes a powerful gift,” Emily tells us.
“Nothing to See Here” is Roger Bruhn’s set of color photographs made during the past year of Covid-19. The images, made at night, resonate with “the loneliness and isolation the pandemic imposed on all of us.”
Stephen Dinsmore and Ted Kooser’s collaboration involves pairing intimate paintings with tender poems. The paintings are available for purchase and a signed broadside of the paired poem is included.
This exhibition was up from May 5th through the 28th.
Michael Farrell welcomes these three artists and friends as the first to make use of the WallSpace-LNK gallery’s “artist as curator” opportunities. There will be similar artist curated exhibitions in June and July.
