Artists with a uniquely South Dakotan perspective exhibit their work on The Garage's walls, inspiring conversations and questions.

LITTLE FICTIONS:
AN EXHIBITION BY LUKE GORDER

Luke Gorder's fascinating new exhibition at The Garage-Rapid City, “Little Fictions," spans from 2015 to 2019 and represents a slow evolution in figurative and abstract experimentation. It strikes a balance between painterly abstraction, representational figurative and landscape imagery. Most of the paintings on display are based on collages of images that he has collected over the years from magazines, family photographs, anthropological and wildlife, and books. The pieces gravitate toward overarching themes of the profoundness of primordial nature, death of moral innocence, the relationship between animal and human, and the spiritual impact of existing in a culture removed from nature.

For Luke, painting itself is a paradox because it welcomes the viewer to take part in an “unreality.” It is his hope to create some sort of equilibrium so that the viewer will want to inject the painting with his or her own reality.

He earned a BFA from the University of Wyoming in 2008, and an education degree from Black Hills State University in 2012. He currently teaches drawing and painting at Central High School in Rapid City.

DRAWN AND CORNERED:
AN EXHIBITION BY MARK ZIMMERMAN

Opening Reception with the Artist on FRI, NOV 8 from 5:30-7pm

The subject of Mark Zimmerman’s new exhibition, “Drawn and Cornered,” at The Garage is place—the landscape of the Northern High Plains and the Black Hills, which he calls home. Memories of place, the feel as much as the look, haunt Mark’s existence.

String memories of multiple visions together, dump them on a canvas and stir them into visual equivalents of place and memory, and you’re close to his artistic process. This is coupled with an appreciation for the slant and refraction of light, colors reflected to the eye by land and sky, textures underfoot and at hand, and the space, that fraught emptiness of these lands as felt, seen, remembered and conceptualized. All of these interests, in varying and unpredictable combinations, provide the subject for Mark’s work.

Born a bit early and way too late in Last Chance, Colorado, Mark is the eldest of two sons. Vagabonds across the High Plains and prairies, his family eventually settled in Fargo, North Dakota, near a large extended maternal clan with deep roots on a family farm, which, along with omnipresent and expansively stretching spaces of a vast land running off to arcing horizons, had a powerful and lasting effect on Mark’s character, concerns, and work. At Minnesota State University (Moorhead), Mark began a serious pursuit of fine art informed by earlier diverse interests. Graduating with a BFA in printmaking, Mark continued his education at Illinois State University, earning an MS in printmaking and an MFA in painting.

Showcase Your Artwork at The Garage

The Garage welcomes artists from the Black Hills, and the state of South Dakota, to submit their work for consideration of an artist exhibition at our space. Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis. Learn more and apply below.