Kiernan Lofland finds and creates worlds, real and imaginary, material and invented, deliberate and accidental. He is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the expanding and changing imagination of landscape. Sculptural and photographic means are asked to find moments that can be named, and then also moments that are uncertain in time and place. The work is moving towards understanding this uncertainty, of our epochal reality and imagination, as the world heats up. The beginning glimpses of a practice meditating on this can be seen in this site.
Raised in Virginia, Lofland received a BA in Art and Art History from the College of William and Mary, and an MFA as a Meadows Fellow from Southern Methodist University. Lofland is a co-founder of 100W Corsicana, a residency hosting national and international artists and writers in Corsicana, TX. Lofland has taught at the University of Nebraska Omaha, Concordia University Nebraska, and the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where he served as director of the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery. Through the Lincoln Arts Council, he was awarded an artist residency working with children on a permanent and site specific sculptural installation for Lincoln Public Schools, Lincoln, NE. Following this experience, he is now jumping through all the hoops needed for a K-12 Art Teaching Certification.
KiernanLofland(at)gmail(dot)com
Raised in Virginia, Lofland received a BA in Art and Art History from the College of William and Mary, and an MFA as a Meadows Fellow from Southern Methodist University. Lofland is a co-founder of 100W Corsicana, a residency hosting national and international artists and writers in Corsicana, TX. Lofland has taught at the University of Nebraska Omaha, Concordia University Nebraska, and the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where he served as director of the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery. Through the Lincoln Arts Council, he was awarded an artist residency working with children on a permanent and site specific sculptural installation for Lincoln Public Schools, Lincoln, NE. Following this experience, he is now jumping through all the hoops needed for a K-12 Art Teaching Certification.
KiernanLofland(at)gmail(dot)com
Through the pairing of digital photographs with sculptural elements Kiernan Lofland creates
multilayered and highly textural installations that challenge the ways we perceive space and
place. The photographs, which often function as backdrops to the three- dimensional
components of his installations, are landscapes taken by the artist that he manually
manipulates. Lofland works into the surface of the photographs, removing layers of ink and
paper in patterns that leave shapes and formations on the photographic prints that
organically integrate themselves into the layout of the original image. Along with expanding
the realm of the landscape captured within the image, the renderings add volume to the
works themselves and collapse the distance between the flat surfaces of the works and the
sculptural elements of the overall installation.
The 'sculptural' elements of these installations are comprised of clustered groups of biomorphic shapes that further the exercise of closing the divide between the photographic and molded components of the work. Honed from materials such as plaster and wax and colored in pale neutral hues the shapes appear as petrified forms of sea vegetation or plant life from astral realms. The surfaces that they are placed upon are otherworldly and undulating, constructed from plaster and other pre-fab materials and fused to supports that reveal their origins as objects such as drywall and sawhorse legs. Through the synthesis of "real" elements and others perceived to be "unreal" or imaginary, the artist proposes the tangibility of everything he presents, and suggests the liminal landscapes that he presents us with are on the same planes as those that viewers gaze upon in the photographs.
- SALLY FRATER, Independent Curator
The 'sculptural' elements of these installations are comprised of clustered groups of biomorphic shapes that further the exercise of closing the divide between the photographic and molded components of the work. Honed from materials such as plaster and wax and colored in pale neutral hues the shapes appear as petrified forms of sea vegetation or plant life from astral realms. The surfaces that they are placed upon are otherworldly and undulating, constructed from plaster and other pre-fab materials and fused to supports that reveal their origins as objects such as drywall and sawhorse legs. Through the synthesis of "real" elements and others perceived to be "unreal" or imaginary, the artist proposes the tangibility of everything he presents, and suggests the liminal landscapes that he presents us with are on the same planes as those that viewers gaze upon in the photographs.
- SALLY FRATER, Independent Curator