Die Wende (the turning point)

June 01 - July 01, 2023
Opening Reception / Thursday, May 01, 5–8pm

Spring Gallery Hours:
Friday–Sunday, 12–5pm

Samantha Albert
Erin Elyse Burns

Die Wende (the turning point) is a two person collaborative exhibition by Berlin-based artist Samantha Albert and Seattle-based artist Erin Elyse Burns. The work began during an intensive research trip spent together in Northern Germany and then continued to develop across a year of long distance exchange. Let me be your hands.

“Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope – and this is another kind of oppression. If there is a way to see such landscapes, it might be thought of as ‘occulting’: the nautical term for a light that flashes on and off, and in which the periods of illumination are longer than the periods of darkness.” – Robert Macfarlane

The occulting landscape of Germany’s Baltic coastal region holds importance as a familial site of past and present histories. Samantha Albert considers this locale to be an inherited home. Erin Elyse Burns looks to this area as her grandmother’s place of origin and a location of familial displacement due to the impact of both World Wars.

Material collected from the area and a series of performative photographs made in situ are the backbone of the exhibition. Described colloquially as the land of amber, the land of dark woods and crystal lakes, a distant land, Burns and Albert were struck by the sense that everything is held in its memory. From shifting relationships to the sea and ideas of what constitutes home, to the effects of agriculture on the land, to resin harvesting in the region’s forests – the work aims to speak of changing tides and evolving matter. Fabric blows in the wind, obscuring form, creating shape, and echoing the ghostly traces left behind.

In German Die Wende means "the turning point,” and historically relates to the period of change that enabled the reunification of East and West Germany. For the artists, Die Wende has come to symbolize intimate cycles of transformation and regeneration. 

*Die Wende, German pronunciation: [diː ˈvɛndə]

ARTIST STATEMENTS AND BIOS //

Samantha Albert’s approach is driven by material processes and matter: from the minerals beneath our feet and the objects we surround ourselves with, to the stuff of the cosmos. She graduated from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts with an MFA in Medium and Material-based Art in 2020 in Norway and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Erin Elyse Burns has exhibited her work in exhibitions at Sarah Spurgeon Gallery at Central Washington University, Lilla Galleriet in Gerlesborg Sweden, Border Patrol Gallery in Portland, Maine and the Tucson Museum of Art, among other venues. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at SOIL Art Gallery and Jack Straw Cultural Center’s New Media Gallery in Seattle. She has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Westfjords Residency in Iceland and is a recipient of grants from 4Culture and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. Burns holds an MFA in Photomedia from the University of Washington and a BFA in Interdisciplinary Visual Art from the University of Nevada. She currently resides in Seattle, WA, where she is a member of the contemporary art collective SOIL and is an Associate Professor in the Art Department at Cornish College of the Arts.