Curio | Dan Bruggeman

For over 30 years Dan Bruggeman's work has been part of exhibitions across the U.S. including the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo, the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearny, and the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul. Bruggeman recently retired from teaching in the Fine Art Department at Carleton College in Northfield.

Included in this exhibition will be a new series of landscapes on paper. About this new work, Bruggeman writes:

“In this exhibit, Curio, I continue my exploration into the visual potential of our northern Midwestern landscape. A place where vast woods meet open meadows on one side and an endless body of water on the other. This is a subject that, for me, stimulates the imagination and offers endless visual and narrative possibility.

As the work in this exhibit evolved, a theme emerged, perhaps unintentionally: the familiar has become unfamiliar. Suspended between land, water and sky and maybe life and death, a toy-like truck removes an entire swath of forest on its flat-bed trailer; a red sweater has somehow been abandoned on a wintry lifeguard’s chair long after summer is an impossible memory; mounted specimens of extinct birds reanimate the habitat where they have long been absent.

Dreamlike, these arboreal scenes evoke a place in nature one might have experienced, but, now, takes on an aura of uncertainty. Like a stage setting, we can only imagine the events and actors that generated these uncanny dramas.

Traveling northward from my home in Saint Paul, I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the place and landscape we all share. I am reminded of what might have similarly compelled artists like Pieter Brueghel and Martin Johnson Heade to paint their allegorical, evocative and somewhat speculative scenes. I’ve sought to explore that terrain while paying homage to the melancholy derived from its transitory nature. These tiny vignettes might be playful if not for the suggestion of an uncertain future. But still, in the midst of this void, they offer hope of what once existed may live on.”

This exhibition will show concurrently with Terrain Vague, featuring new work by David Lefkowitz.