Archer Gallery presents Magnitudes and Increments, an exhibition of works by Peter Happel Christian (Saint Cloud, Minnesota) and Dan Gilsdorf (Portland, Oregon). Both artists interact with the world by measuring, reducing, and recording it through a range of media. The processes vary for the artists, but both Gilsdorf and Happel Christian engage in systematic methods of artmaking in order to gain understanding of what is more true than real, more poignant than scientific.

Dan Gilsdorf’s Black Mass is a drawing project recording the expansion and reach of the artist in a series of fixed points. The final form derives from the dimensions of his body and describe the limits of his grasp and the edges of his sphere of influence. In Gilsdorf’s video installation, two towers of televisions feature iconic war films from different cinematic eras, turned to face the wall. The resulting glows around the towers illustrate a visually reductive comparison of the color pallette’s used in the films. In both works, Gilsdorf presents visual evidence of subject matter that can be deduced and contemplated but not seen without his investigation.

Peter Happel Christian examines relationships with the natural world while exploring mediation and representation. Inspired by walks in his central Minnesota neighborhood, the mixture of photographs and sculpture illuminates his struggle with the passive practice of taking pictures while in the process of questioning historical and contemporary perceptions of Nature as a primary place of transcendental experience and the sublime.

Special thanks to the artists, Jessica Bromer, Caitlin Schaap, Associated Students of Clark College, and the Clark College Art Department.

- Blake Shell, Archer Gallery Director

PRESS FOR MAGNITUDES AND INCREMENTS

"... "Magnitudes and Increments," the title of the Archer Gallery's current two-artist exhibition, is a sly wink at the kind of quantifying that art actually performs."
-John Motley, The Oregonian, read the review here