Drifting
Mark Cowardin
about the artist
Mark Cowardin is a Lawrence, Kansas based artist who examines the complex relationship to natural resources that the Midwest sometimes embodies. Drifting is an installation that illustrates these points in a variety of ways. Two cloud-like structures are built on, in and around wheeled scaffold- ing structures that float in the gallery and are each self-illuminated. Inspired by the beauty of a Kansas sunset, the colors immerse the room and the viewers with serenity.
October 27, 2021 - January 2, 2022
Alyssa Baguss, a Minneapolis, Minnesota based artist and Jerome Foundation Fellow, shares three works at the Art Center. While environmentalism is a theme for this Iowa native, her practice examines what she refers to as a digital wanderlust. She explains this as how many use their phones to virtually transport and imagine themselves outside their environs. Mapping, Google Earth, and such digital spaces become vehicles for travel, allowing users to navigate into alternative zones.
New Landscapes contains three independent solo presentations from artists Alyssa Baguss, Marc Berghaus, and Mark Cowardin. While the title suggests a collective exhibition, New Landscapes stretches out to connect the ways in which these three artists individually mediate, manipulate, and mitigate the natural world. The term “landscape” is inherently tied to environment, land, and geographical placement, but can also refer to the horizontal orientation of an artwork. In either case, landscape is an aesthetic reference of what surrounds us and how we understand our habitat. Whether we think of this in nostalgic terms, in an idealized setting, or simply as a reminder of where we are in the world, landscape fundamentally shapes the way we understand our place.
Artists Baguss, Berghaus, and Cowardin create immersive installation-based artworks that serve as hyper-realized landscapes which are equally representative as they are imaginative. These artworks also suggest imagined landscapes that allow us to transport ourselves to a new locale. While commenting on our current condition and asserting a hopeful future narrative, these artists are ultimately creating spaces for reflection.
PROGRAMMING
LUNCH & LEARN | ALYSSA BAGUSS
OCTOBER 20 | 12 PM
SALINA ART CENTER
Artist talk
Film screening and discussion - THIS EVENT IS CANCELED
NOVEMBER 4 | 5:30 - 7 PM
lunch & Learn | Marc Berghaus
NOVEMBER 17 | 12 PM
ZOOM AND FACEBOOK LIVE
Artist Talk
Lunch & Learn | Mark Cowardin
DECEMBER 15 | 12 PM
ZOOM AND FACEBOOK LIVE
Artist talk