Strange Time: Exploring the Infinite Layers of Land, Time, and Art at EOU’s Nightingale Gallery

Strange Time: Exploring the Infinite Layers of Land, Time, and Art at EOU’s Nightingale Gallery

LA GRANDE, Ore. – Eastern Oregon University’s Nightingale Gallery is excited to begin our 2024-25 exhibition season with “Strange Time,” an exhibition of work by Utah artists Collin Bradford, Tiana Birrell, and Ron Linn. The three artists explore issues associated with their deep relationship to the land, its geology, and the stratum of time that the rock layers represent. The exhibit opens on Friday, October 4 at 5 p.m. with a reception for the artists.

As an adjunct to the exhibition, the three artists will also present a public talk about their studio practices as well as the conceptual underpinnings of the exhibit. The talk will take place Wednesday, October 2 at 6 p.m. in Huber Auditorium, Badgley Hall. The public is encouraged to attend both events.

Writer Annie Dillard, in her essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk” suggests that “We [humans] are here to witness…  All we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it. We can stage our own act on this planet—build our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils—but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain.” The witnessing of the geologic gives us a chance to see ourselves as small, and yet part of the whole, the continuous interchanging of matter that is the earth. The strange time that results in this suddenly expanded view is both disorienting and reorienting; in it we lose and find ourselves again. And, perhaps, it is in this same strange time that we can finally understand the language the stone speaks to us.

Collectively, the three artists explore this idea of a strange time. How an object as simple as a rock contains a record of its own history and the deep time in which it was formed. How we as humans tend to think on the level of our own scale, in both size and time, but in the span of the life of a rock, something like a wall is a mere blot on the page. What if these rocks could speak? What would they tell us about our part in this temporary arrangement of materials that surrounds us?

The interdisciplinary is central to Collin Bradford’s work, which is rooted in documentation and response to the landscapes he encounters. His representations fluctuate between drawing, 3D scans, photography, video, and constructed objects, flitting between diverse methods of knowing and observing the land.  Collectively, his works act as evidence of research and direct engagement with the complex histories,

presents, and potential futures of material that has a durational span into which humans can only peer, blips on the cosmic time scale.

Tiana Birrell filters her work through the digital, exploring how the physical world takes form within the incorporeal space of the internet, to then reappear within the material. Using photo manipulations, screen-captures, Google Maps, and language itself, she investigates the internet as a web of interconnected “psychic and social” spaces that reverberate into our own. Lately, she has been researching data centers and the massive amounts of water used to cool the servers in the arid American West.

Ron Linn is interested in the language of things, hidden histories, and connective threads between human and non-human nature. In his drawings and objects, the desire to capture and understand the stories that a rock might tell is explored through a meditative process of translation. Linn’s newest work explores stones as signs, using the medium of lithography, and the slow process of drawing images of stones on physical stone to create a new layered record that echoes those he finds written on the surface of the earth.

“‘Strange Time’ explores these artists’ relationship to both the constancy and change of landscape as well as the passage of time on both human and geologic scale,” said Cory Peeke, Professor of Art and Director of the Nightingale Gallery.

The opening reception for “Strange Time” will be held from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Friday, October 4, 2024, and visitors may see the exhibit through Friday, November 1, between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. For more information, follow the Nightingale Gallery on Facebook and Instagram.