Despite a viewer’s irresistible impulse to fit Verburg’s figure into a straightforward story, he resists neat narrative.ĭeeper into the exhibit, Petra Spielhagen’s images similarly invite and defy the viewer’s storytelling efforts. Some elements of the man’s posture and surroundings – closed eyes, crossed hands, dried yellow leaves – suggest death, but that’s also deceptive: after all, leafless trees don’t die in the winter, they sleep the man himself isn’t quite prone or lifeless either - he’s on his side, in the fetal position. However, nothing else about the man fits that assessment: his clothes are spotless he has a nice-looking watch and a wedding ring upon closer examination, it’s clear the newspaper isn’t used as a blanket, it’s just neatly folded reading material. At first, one assumes the man is homeless - he’s unshaven and sleeping on a park bench, covered by a newspaper, no less. In JoAnn Verburg‘s photographic piece, Underground, a man sleeps on a park bench. The didactic materials describe the exhibition as an exploration of “the relationships of landscape, imagination and experience in a variety of media.” Illuminating contradictions between the real and imagined emerge as a running theme in those examinations. Nash Gallery, and what resonates most is a pervasive sense of fragility, of the impermanence of the human mind in the face of nature’s timelessness. SPEND SOME TIME WITH THE WORKS IN LANDSCAPE OF THE MIND, a group exhibition now at the University of Minnesota’s Katherine E.
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