Passing Time in the Desert

Megan Berner

15 Nov 2021 - 15 Jan 2022

RECEPTION 4 DECEMBER 2-5 PM

MEGAN BERNER

Artist Statement

Coming from a desert home, I have always been drawn to more desolate, inhospitable, and subtle landscapes—places that seem to only show themselves to those who spend time in them and seek out what they have to offer. For me, they invite introspection and reflection on the complexity of human-place relationships and our own internal-external manifestations of these relationships. I am particularly interested in mirages and other light phenomena as visual representations of the liminal spaces of these relationships.                                 

In my work, I explore 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. All of us have different places that we can claim to be our own because of our unique experiences there. The idea of place becomes much more internalized and individual. Memories and experiences, those things we carry with us, are projected onto the present landscape, our own personal maps and reference points.                           

I am 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. I manipulate the surface of the photograph through multiple exposures and layering to invite the viewer into a more personal and psychological experience of the space.                              

Working with a combination of digital and traditional processes, I create layered landscapes that reflect imagined spaces. I began experimenting with the cyanotype process in 2014. As a trained photographer, I am drawn to the simplicity and directness of creating an image using sunlight. Particularly because light and the experience of it are so integral to my understanding of my desert home.

Whether through vistas of sunrises, stacked in grids to show passing time or manipulated digital transfers and layered cyanotypes, I am interested in creating spaces for daydreaming, exploration, and discovery to occur. The resulting images become a landscape of the mind.

Passing Time in the Desert

“Landscape’s most crucial condition is considered to be space, but its deepest theme is time.”            

-Rebecca Solnit in As Eve Said to the Serpent

“But we discover that [the deep blue sky] shows itself in its greatest depth only in the morning before sunrise. Then it is a dark blue, bordering upon purple; and for some time after the sun comes up it holds a deep blue tinge. At noon it has passed through a whole gamut of tones and is pale blue, yellowish, lilac-toned, or rosy; in the late afternoon it has changed again to pink or gold or orange; and after twilight and under the moon, warm purples stretch across the whole reach of the firmament from horizon to horizon.”                                                                

   - John C. Van Dyke in The Desert

Passing Time In the Desert, a solo exhibition by Megan Berner, transports the viewer through several years of work in photography and interactions with place, documenting moments of morning, daylight, and dusk, where light, landscape, and color shifts through time. Included are pieces from many different bodies of work that show us how visual perceptions can transform our experience of landscape.

It was in the starkness of the Mojave Desert in southern Nevada that Berner taught me about light, and for the first time, in this environment she knew and loved so well, I truly grasped what her work was all about. We were at The Goldwell Open Air Museum and Residency Program in Rhyolite, Nevada watching the shadows of the sunset cover a mining hill like a purple ink wash. The change in color was profound.  As the shadow finally swallowed the entire hill, Berner reminded those of us there that the combination of color, light, and duration in every sunset is unique and will never happen the same way again.

We see this most directly in the multi-year series, Good Morning. From 2012-2019, Berner captured over 600 unique photographs of the sun rising over the Pah Rah and Virginia Ranges from her apartment window in downtown Reno. Even as time is a looping tide of sunrises and golden hours, in the large grid of blues and purples and yellow glows we will never see the same sunrise twice.

As time passes, the sun casts out shadows that seem to race across the desert floor. One cold day in February, Berner set out from Goldwell’s Red Barn Studio to recreate Judy Dater’s Self Portrait with Stones. Just as Dater enters the landscape to blur the relationship between the artist and all the things on the other side of the camera, Berner’s relationship to place is linked to the objects and forms she finds there, the experience of the natural elements and phenomena that make the desert what it is. Berner’s re-creation, also titled Passing Time in the Desert: Self Portrait After Judy Dater, is a video, a time-lapse portrait not of the artist, but a portrait of light and the desert floor. Berner, like Dater, is nude and curled up on the ground, and yet, as the light passes over her the same way it passes over the rock and the scrub brush and everything else in the landscape, the human form fades into a boulder, a rock, a stone.

In the summer of 2015, Berner participated in the Arctic Circle Residency, spending 2 weeks on a ship sailing around the archipelago of Svalbard. Perhaps the desert followed her like a ghost to the Arctic, and the work she created from her time there contains traces of both. In viewing works such as Arctic Desert, and Fata Morgana 1 and 2, we see images that are both arctic and desert, glacier and sharp hillside. Muted blues and blasted sand set us adrift.  Northern Light (from the series Drift and inspired by the disorienting midnight sun) introduces cool greens and blues that appear otherworldly, almost thermochromic. These 4 acrylic panels evoke blocks of ice, frosty mirrors, and unearthly dreamscapes.

In Icebergs/Islands, the Arctic is referenced through experiments with light and the deep blue hue of the cyanotype. In the winter sun of the Mojave Desert, Berner photographed ice melting on coated paper during the exposure process. Berner often relies on chance and natural phenomena to influence her process: the sun determined the length of exposure, how quickly the ice melted, and how the light passed through the ice. I can’t think of a more beautiful way to experiment with desert light than with photo-sensitive techniques and the fragile and fleeting state of ice in the desert sun.

Berner works in a combination of digital and traditional photo techniques, shifting between positive and negative images, and real and imagined landscapes. If we pay attention to the processes employed in the work, we begin to consider how our experiences and perceptions slip in and through the landscape. Pausing at each piece in the exhibition, we experience time in recurring states (the sunrise each morning), we experience time in measured durations (the ice melting in the winter sun), and we experience time in relationships between light and natural objects (the shadows passing over land masses or bodies). We notice that the landscape changes depending on the time of day. No wonder we become lost so easily. 

In Desert Dusk, Berner attends to the fading light. The deep blue of the cyanotype has been stripped by bleaching and toning to create effects that are hyper-realized and surreal. Similarly, Fata Morgana 1 and 2 shows a layered landscape that is eerily calm, an effect attributed to an alcohol based photo transfer, as well as bleaching and toning of the cyanotype. These manipulated and imagined landscapes shift unconsciously between the Arctic and the desert. Berner offers a phenomenological relationship between the two, a relationship from which we view the Arctic landscape as though we are still standing in the desert peering through time. The iceberg is but a mirage.

In Of Wind and Light, we see another kind of mirage: a double exposed image of a flag waving in a dreamlike sky.  Of Wind and Light is also from Drift, and made with instant film that Berner digitally transferred and printed onto acrylic. As we pass through the photographs in the physical space of the gallery, these icy portals connect us to the landscapes of the artist’s imagination.

Many artists have gone to the desert to escape time, but the desert is all about time. In works such as Self Portrait After Judy Dater, the landscape is a space the artist enters and inhabits. These interactions require a communion of knowing what to expect, of knowing the light, and Berner’s attention is quiet and reflective. In other works, like Fata Morgana 1 and 2, we are viewing imagined spaces created through layers of time stitched together, like memories added over memories to complete the whole picture.

“Passing Time in the Desert” Essay was written by Jill Baker

Bio

Jill R Baker

(she, her), lives and works in the Willamette Valley of Oregon

A gatherer, gleaner, collaborator, educator and parent, Jill R Baker is a visual artist whose work employs painting, performance, and video to document improvised interactions with the natural world. She holds an MFA in Intermedia from the University of Iowa. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, project spaces, and screenings throughout the US. Currently she is an artist member of Eugene Contemporary Art, where she has exhibited and curated. In 2021, Jill was awarded a Career Opportunity Grant through the Oregon Arts Commission for her participation in the exhibition Architecture of Dreams, culminating in a Surrealist Games and Writing Day at the Kesey Farm Project.

  www.impossiblehistories.com www.instagram.com/jillrbaker/

MEGAN BERNER

Bio

Megan Berner is a visual artist living and working in Reno, Nevada. She graduated with her MFA in Intermedia from the University of Iowa 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 narrative videos.

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.