Exhibitions

In the American heartland, far from the big cities and the oceans, where the clocks tick a bit slower, the streets are wider, and the sky seems endless, one encounters artists who enjoy the great luxury of time – and have decided to put it to good use. HEARTLANDISH exhibits the complex works of such artists, starting on June 13 in the gallery of MEINBLAU – in the heart of Berlin.

The artists of the HEARTLANDISH project are artists, who teach visual arts at universities, or are filmmakers and authors. In their works they concentrate very intensely on the art-making process itself. They live in small university towns. In their calm day-to-day lives they meet the "simple" people – ranchers, sales clerks, construction workers. Their art works have sometimes been created over the course of many years, and often serve as the representation of a worldview they feel needs to be expressed.
The prevailing serenity in the heartland – far away from the influences of gentrification, pressures to produce, rising studio rents, and the ever-increasing costs of living – enables the artists to delve into creative processes in which their ideas and methods can be explored, discarded, allowed to congeal, and returned to years later. This relaxed, long-term approach is reflected in their works, which do not concern themselves with short-lived headlines, but rather with the contemporary overarching themes of their own experience.

Thomas Poolaw describes his creative process as one focused more on achieving a kind of poetry than on straight-forward documentation. As a Native American from Oklahoma, he seeks ways to come to terms with what remains of his culture from the 20th and 21st centuries, instead of trying to escape it. Matt Christy, who grew up in an ultra-conservative church-oriented environment, questions his past just as does Brandon Donahue, who spent his childhood amongst the African-American spirituality of Memphis, which was much more diverse and less indoctrinating. Kristi Hargrove took her experiences from a two-week workshop and turned them into a project ongoing for over a year now. Together with Death Row inmates, she exchanges drawings and sketches back and forth to allow a visual dialogue that proves much more than any newspaper articles or psychological evaluations ever could. Patricia Earnhardt, who received her first degree in her mid forties, uses video installations to delve into her own aging process, decay, and mortality. JJ Jones, who grew up in America but has spent 12 of the last 20 years in Europe, has developed a series of musical performances that engage the nostalgia of musical-cultural cliches common to both sides of the Atlantic. Sabine Schlunk, an artist born in the former East Germany, spent many years in the American heartland – a part of the country not all too free for European sensibilities. In her works, she attempts to discover new ways to perceive the former arch-enemy. Inspired mainly by nature, she has developed a curious gaze that dives into a strange and exotic wilderness, of which Europeans have almost no or little idea about.

The curators for the exhibition, Jule Kaiser and Sabine Schlunk, both spent significant periods of time in America. Sabine Schlunk lived for the better part of a decade between Ann Arbor, Michigan and Nashville, Tennessee, where she co-founded a gallery for contemporary and outsider art, which was quickly recognized as one of the city's best venues. Jule Kaiser returned to Oklahoma several times to complete a photographic journal of modern Native American life, which proved to be extreme in its beauty and contradiction. While in the USA together, they realized the potential of providing their colleagues with a European venue, where the public is more often than not presented with art from major cities like New York and Los Angeles – in other words art that is generally intended for sale. HEARTLANDISH gives the public an opportunity to observe art that is not meant to convince a person to spend money, but rather to discover something new about a quiet, misunderstood place.