RAIR | 2007-08

Nick Conbere | Vancouver, Canada

Nick Conbere’s artwork presents landscapes that reflect experiential and investigative interpretations of place. His most recent work, in collaboration with photographer John Holmgren, interprets his observations of dams on the Columbia River. The central focus is a struggle to comprehend the implications of human constructions that drastically alter forces of nature. Nick lives with his family in Vancouver, Canada, where he maintains a studio practice and works as an associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

www.nickconbere.com

Nick Conbere's work both embraces and challenges the historical traditions of landscape. Working from drawings and photographs, he invents dreamlike panoramas that explore connections between culture and nature. As an artist-in-residence in Roswell, Conbere created scenes of New Mexico that represent experiential and personal interpretations rather than geographic or literal depictions. Through a process of layering images, timelines of relationships and histories emerge. The resulting work unfolds as though excavating and examining objects buried in layers of sediment or carefully searching for hidden images with a Highlights magazine puzzle. The meticulous detail in each piece builds and interrupts upon previous marks, obscuring images and blending the stratum.

Trained as an illustrator, Conbere is interested in representing images in a naturalistic manner through traditional drawing, printmaking processes, and contemporary digital techniques. The repetitive drawing and manipulation of scanned images and photographs merges disparate subject matter into dense tangles, building sprawling structures that become landscapes. Several visual constants-the panoramic scene, the bird's eye view, and the overlapping linear approach to depiction-allow for storylines to emerge through cumulative viewing. Although the journey throughout Conbere's natural landscapes is seemingly blocked by objects of human activity, the overall intent is not to pit nature and humankind against one another but to document them as equal chapters in the experiential history of a fictitious place.

Contemporary landscape artists cannot avoid the art historical baggage associated with the genre. Likewise, the viewer cannot block personal and collective history and experience when viewing a work of art or their own backyard. Conbere's landscapes are uninhabited, but the evidence of human intervention and presence of memory are left behind like ghostly reminders scattered throughout the topography.

Roswell Museum and Art Center

Rair exhibition • Nick Conbere • June 21 - July 27, 2008