Art Exhibits on Display Feb. 13–March 16, 2023
Truckee Meadows Community College (TMCC) is excited to be exhibiting four new exhibitions including three local artists and a visiting artist who lives and works in Emeryville, California. The exhibitions run Monday, Feb. 13–Thursday, March 16 at four locations on the Dandini Campus. There will be an opening artists’ reception and talk by artist Megan Berner on Wednesday, March 1, from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Student Center and Red Mountain Gallery on the 3rd floor in the Red Mountain Building on the Dandini Campus. Refreshments will be served, and the exhibitions are free and open to the public.
TMCC Main Gallery: Desert Ephemeral by Megan Berner
Originally from the high desert, Megan Berner is a visual artist living and working in Reno, Nevada. She graduated with her MFA in Intermedia from the University of Iowa in 2008 with a minor in drawing. Megan works with digital and experimental techniques such as instant film, digital transfers, and cyanotypes. Her work is greatly influenced by the landscape of her native Nevada home as well as the vast prairies of the Midwest, being a twin, mapping and exploration, and countless hours of daydreaming. She creates site-specific installations that incorporate video and sound and constructs performative scenes that ultimately exist as photographs. Other forms her artwork takes include artist's books, collaborative interactions, textile projects, and video. Megan's work has been shown nationally and internationally and is part of multiple collections including the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, University of Arizona Art Museum, the University of Iowa Special Collections, and Southern Graphics Council International Archive. In Berner’s work, she explores the ways we interact with our environment—how we form relationships with it and how those connections influence our interpretation of the world around us—what marks we leave behind, the experiences—intangible and manifest, and the action of moving through or being in a place. She is interested in liminal spaces, internal and external—spaces that are transitional and in-between, not quite here or there. Mirages and other light phenomena, states of meditation, suspended moments, and dream states all occupy this kind of territory. Berners work aims to create these types of environments and experiences, inviting the viewer into a more personal and psychological experience of the space. Desert Ephemeral, in particular, focuses on ideas of time and change–change that takes place over seasons, the cycle of a day, or even eons. Climate change is a topic that is front and center and something she thinks about in relationship to her work.
Red Mountain Gallery: Urban Repetition by Courtney Sennish
Living and working in Emeryville, California Courtney Sennish received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and graduated from her MFA at California College of the Arts. In 2015 she received the Headland’s Graduate Fellowship Alternate. Sennish was an artist in residence at Kala Art Institute, Incahoots and the Black Rock Desert NCA Artist in Residence program. In 2016 she had a solo show at Johansson Projects, and a solo exhibition at the Monterey Museum of Art’s Currents Gallery in 2019. Sennish’s work process begins through isolating specific moments and details found in the urban landscape through photo-documented walks. The city’s concrete gridded layout, road signals, paint colors and built textures weave together a familiar pattern: an urban fabric from which she can pull apart the individual pieces. She grants a spatial story to these accumulations through her sculptural work. She looks at repetition, shape and texture and interested in how nature is represented within the city structure and how people connect to the constructed landscape.
Erik Lauritzen Gallery: Southwest Landscapes by Gerald Franzen
Franzen received a BA in Psychology from California State University, Sonoma, and an MA in Humanities from California State University, Dominguez Hills. He has lived in San Francisco, New York City, Chicago and in Northern Nevada since 1980. Franzen works with the latest digital technology as well as maintaining his primary practice using film and silver-based materials. He emphasizes in his own work and in teaching - the importance of visual perception combined with craft as the basis of art making. He says his studio is the world, while keeping his production facility: a darkroom, digital lab and studio space in Reno. His work has been exhibited widely and he has done visual productions for as diverse artists as the Carson City Symphony and Pink Floyd.
Red Mountain Student Gallery: Winter Weavings by Linda Pinching
Linda Pinching currently resides in Reno and is a recent graduate of Fine Arts from TMCC. Creating is her passion and her passion currently is in creating with various forms of paint on canvas. For Pinching each painting seems to inspire yet another great idea, which often changes once the dialogue between paint and creator begins. Pinching’s life and art have been influenced and guided by Native American lore and the Medicine Wheel. The Native American Medicine Wheel is a sacred symbol representing all knowledge in the universe; the four directions, races, elements, and seasons. This current series of work represents the acceptance and appreciation for her journey through the seasons and her place in the winter of her life. Pinching likens this series of paintings to a spiritual rebirth. To Pinching, we choose our lessons, along with our gifts and talents, to weave our realities. We are the creators of our universe.
