Megan Berner

This work combines digital transfers with cyanotype process and experimentation with bleaching and toning of the surface to create color shifts and other effects. Working with a combination of digital and traditional processes, I create layered landscapes that reflect imagined spaces. The resulting hybrid landscapes are both desert and arctic, meshed together as imagined and potentially real places, a landscape of the mind.

Video of handmade cyanotype flag blowing in the wind in the Arctic Circle. This video was created while on a residency in the Arctic Circle in 2015. A meditative study of the movement of the flag in the wind and how the image becomes visible and obscured.

This video was created while in residency at PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon. A meditation on the landscape and exploration, being in a place and experiencing it.

In the summer of 2015, I spent 2 weeks aboard a tall ship sailing around the archipelago of Svalbard as part of The Arctic Circle residency.

The surreal landscape and 24-hour light inspired me to create mirage-like photographs referencing the psychological experience of the otherworldly landscape. Using a Polaroid camera to create double exposures on instant film or digitally piecing together glaciers, I created transfers on plexiglass and paper. 

Inspired by my time in the Arctic and experiments with cyanotypes in the desert. Positive/negative pairs of images created from a digital photograph of ice melting on cyanotype paper and a cyanotype made from a digital negative of the same photograph.

Passing Time in the Desert: self-portrait after Judy Dater is a slow-moving meditation inspired by Judy Dater's feminist self-portrait series.

Light, as well as wind, are two integral elements for me of the changing of seasons and cycles in the desert—particularly here in Nevada. The idea of mirages appeals to me because they are real optical phenomena that can be captured on camera, however, what the image appears to represent is determined by the interpretation of the viewer. In a very real way, it reflects this idea of a landscape of the mind or imagination—a concept related to mostly uninhabited or unconstructed landscapes. Much of my work is about the psychological relationship to landscape.

My Mirage images are created with Fuji instant film in a Polaroid camera using double exposures. I scan the images to make large-scale prints. The work invites the viewer to get lost in the impossibility of the image or simply slip into a state of reverie.

This work stemmed from a piece created for a show titled Universal Map and Place Markers, which consists of a piece of paper with the writing "you are here" and six small white flags with the text "here" written on them. I decided to enact the piece by taking the flags out into the landscape and photographing my action/performance of the piece. This work stems from other flag projects that I have done in the past. The images deal with ideas of our connection to the landscape as well as the idea of being present in time and space. All images are made using a Polaroid camera.

Work made while on a 2-week residency in the Black Rock Desert High Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. 

Collections of things found in the desert—sagebrush, broken bottles, Mojave Redhead spines. Created from a grid of individual cyanotypes made in the desert.

In 2014, I was commissioned by the Reno Philharmonic to create a video piece for the composition Desert Garden by Sean Shepherd as part of their Nevada Sesquicentennial celebration.

Wind and light became two elements of the Nevada landscape, intangible yet ever-present, that describe this place to me and represent the passing of time and changing of seasons.

(HD video, 15 minute total run time)

Music composed by Sean Shepherd

Performed by the Reno Philharmonic Orchestra

One morning in 2012, I was up early and decided to photograph the sunrise out of my apartment window. It wasn’t meant to be a series or an artwork when I started it. I posted the photograph to Instagram (all of the sunrises are made with my iPhone). I found myself up when the sun was rising quite often and began to photograph it when I was up and the conditions were right. It started to get some attention on social media and people really appreciated seeing the photographs so I’ve continued the series, making it into a sort of morning ritual (although I don’t photograph the sunrise every day). It makes me pay attention to this event that happens every day that many of us sleep through. The skies here in Nevada are some of the most unique and picturesque that I’ve seen anywhere. It’s incredible how rapidly the sky changes with the sunrise and how varied the sunrise is from day to day. These images are looking east from my apartment window of the sun rising over the Pah Rah and Virginia Ranges. I now have over 600 unique photographs of the Nevada sunrise.

Of This World, Not In It is an site-specific installation done at the St. Mary's Art Center in Virginia City, NV. Using large-scale, layered images of trees and fog printed on vellum, combined with sheer fabric and the changing light in the room, the installation invites the viewer to enter in and interact with the space. Inspired by wandering through eucalyptus groves in the Marin Headlands on a foggy morning, Of This World, Not In It attempts to create the feeling of being somewhat disoriented in your surroundings while promoting a sense of calm and escape. As the light changes throughout the day, the images shift and shadows shift, making the space dynamic and mimicking the loss of depth perception and diminished sense of space that fog can create.

This series deals with the subjects of mapping and exploration in an ethereal and undefined way. I am interested in creating a feeling of being lost or of confusion—similar to what one might feel at various points in a journey or when traveling in a new place. The photographs are site specific and I have used maps specific to the places that the photographs are made in. However, through the process I used to photograph, the maps become unreadable and useless. The images are disorienting and blurred, making it hard to distinguish what is happening within them. The viewer is submerged, leaving it up to them to orient themselves and search within the images to find direction and meaning.

(letterpressed artist's book and HD animation, 21 minutes)

In a Shifting Landscape explores the connections between geographic locations--tundra, desert, prairie, ocean--seasons and migration, exploration, and concepts of time in the natural world. The animation is based on an artist book that was hand printed from linoleum blocks and photopolymer plates on vellum. It is accompanied by an original score by composer Nat Evans.

This series mimics the historical images and charted paths made during the early years of exploration. Drawing from various historical—Lewis and Clark, Roald Amundsen, Captain James Cook—and fictional accounts, these photographs and maps touch on various aspects of the ideas of exploration, claiming of territory, structures of power, and the veracity of History, as well as ideas of fantasy, imagination, and daydreams.

I am particularly interested in how we define ourselves and the rest of the world based on our environments—where we are from and the places we interact with.

This series of flags represents and is symbolic of my personal environment. The flags are photographed in places that I have explored or 'discovered,' marking them as part of my territory (the places have personal significance). The idea is to mimic the claiming of spaces that went on during early years of exploration—for example in the Arctic or the image of U.S. astronauts planting the American flag on the moon.

The concept of claiming land is interesting to me and, through this project, I am exploring the ways we interact with the land—how we form relationships with it and how those connections influence our interpretation of the world around us.

All of us have different places that we can claim to be our own because of our unique experiences there. The idea of place becomes much more internalized and individual. In a way, the places and events in our lives create a map that can only serve to guide the person who created it

This series of photographs is based on sculptural, site-specific, and environmental installations. They center around the idea of a wallow—a place where one goes to think, daydream, revel, or just be—that becomes somehow marked by repeated use, often resulting in a transformation of some sort. They also comment on the relationship between humans and the environment and how our acts are intimately responded to.

The View From Here is an installation intended for one person. In a room, there is a single chair placed in front of a video that is projected onto the wall. Transparent curtains frame the projection and some of the light spills onto and through the curtains. The room is otherwise empty.

The video is of a single shot through a window looking out over the rooftops at the sea and sky. The window serves as a means of transporting oneself into another world. It takes the viwer into another place yet simultaneously denies them entry. The installation creates a space for meditation and daydreaming guided by the view out the window and the sounds wafting in from the street below. There is much movement and action taking place alluded to by the sound—traffic on a busy street, conversations drifting up from below, piano music, the wind—yet the image is very calm, containing very slow movement, almost imperceptible at times.

This series of photographs was taken in Oaxaca, Mexico during a 10-day workshop. They are 11" x 14", type C prints made from negatives taken with a Nikon 35 mm SLR or a Zeiss Ikon medium format camera.