Catherine Meier (B.F.A. Art 2005), of Duluth, Minn., has returned to campus to present her exhibition, “Open Richness” at the Great Plains Art Museum.
The exhibition, which includes prints, drawings and projected animations, is on display through Sept. 23 at the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St. Meier will attend a First Friday reception on Sept. 7 from 5-7 p.m. in the Gallery. The reception and exhibition are free and open to the public.
“The setting of the Great Plains Art Museum will allow Meier to work on a larger scale, and couple her animations, which are often projected in the open environment, to be shown alongside her prints and drawings,” said Curator Amber Mohr.
Meier, a fiscal year 2012 recipient of a Career Development grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, is a native of the Nebraska Sand Hills from Orchard, Neb. Prior to coming to UNL, she was a truck driver through the Great Plains. While attending her Master’s program at the University of Michigan, where she received her M.F.A. in 2009, she received a Rackham research grant to travel to Mongolia, a country with a landscape very similar to the Great Plains. Those experiences lent her a greater understanding of the way open spaces and landscapes are navigated.
“I just love the open landscape. I don’t live in it anymore, but I kind of ache for it,” Meier said. “I love the expansiveness and this feeling you can just move. I like isolation, and I like the sense that there isn’t anybody around me. I just think it’s beautiful.
“But it’s also interesting, because to some people it’s completely boring,” she said. “It’s a subject that takes patience, and you have to be willing to settle in and pay attention to it. And then it creeps up on you, and pretty soon, you realize that it’s a part of you.”
While at Michigan for graduate school, Meier was searching for that “thing” that she wanted to study.
“I just started drawing whatever would come to mind,” she said. “What I would draw is earth, sky and a horizon line. That is what comes out in everything I do. If I draw a picture of the woods, it has a horizon line in it.”
She had this romantic idea about nomadic culture that she needed to mature.
“But at the same time, that’s the way I have lived since I was 18,” she said. “So when I was driving a truck, I was essentially living this modern way of constantly moving throughout the land.”
She decided she wanted to travel to Mongolia.
“I read a book or something and said, ‘I want to go to Mongolia,’” she said. “Mongolia is exactly opposite of the Great Plains on the globe, and it has this culture of livestock that I was familiar with.”
She also wanted to expand her view of the Great Plains and the landscape.
“I’m not just talking about my home. This isn’t just nostalgia,” Meier said. “I’m trying to explain something that’s bigger, and it has to do with this kind of landscape. I was trying to extend my knowledge of it, and then my experience of it to gain some validity. I don’t want people to just say, ‘Oh she’s from Nebraska, so of course, she makes landscapes of the prairie.’”
She made a connection with Cliff Montagne, Professor Emeritus at Montana State University in Bozeman, Mt., whose research as a soil scientist takes him to Mongolia every year. In May 2008, she traveled with his team to Mongolia.
“I figured it was a safe way to get there,” she said. “They have translators, they have a plan. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done.”
She was there for seven weeks. Montagne’s team was in northern Mongolia, which is more mountainous. During her last week there, she hired a translator and driver and went by herself to eastern Mongolia.
“We drove out to the place that’s supposed to look like Nebraska, circa 1888, as the guidebook says,” Meier said. “And it does look like Nebraska, except there are no roads that crisscross it.”
Mongolia is all public land, so you can go anywhere.
“You have a completely different sense of mobility and motion,” Meier said. “You don’t have this grid that separates everything into who owns what and where you can drive.”
In fact, her driver took a wrong turn on a path, and they ended up in a protected grasslands area near the Chinese border.
“We’re out into this area where it’s absolutely flat, so you can see the curve of the Earth all the way around you,” Meier said.
And then she freaked out.
“I realized that this is isolation and flat,” she said. “And I’m out here with people I don’t really know, and I’m a long ways from anyone who knows that I’m here. Clearly, I was obvious. I couldn’t hide the fact that I was a tourist.”
But it was a fantastic adventure.
“It gave me a new understanding of how you can experience the landscape because the Plains are familiar, and I feel safe,” Meier said. “I have a sense of safety because I know them.”
She got home on July 1, 2008, and in August that same year, she went out and drove through the Great Plains again.
“I just wanted to go and see what that felt like after being in a place that was so different,” she said. “It felt like home, recognizable, comfortable. It was easy. It felt like a part of me.”
Meier is excited to be back in Lincoln for this exhibition at the Great Plains Art Collection.
“I like that it’s part of the Center for Great Plains Studies,” she said. “I am very serious about this. The Great Plains are beautiful to me, and I want to make work, but it’s tied to more than just art. I want to be part of the greater community of people that are looking at the Great Plains and understanding it in different ways. I feel like I have a lot of life experience and my work that helps that.”
It’s also good to be back at UNL.
“I’m excited to have a show in Lincoln, because this is where it all started, so I’m coming back full circle,” Meier said.
She credits three experiences at UNL that helped push her forward.
“The things that are still helping me to this day is the fact that I worked at the New Media Center, that I was in the UCARE program, and my experience on the Student Advisory Board,” Meier said.
Her New Media Center skills help her in her work as a freelance designer. Her UCARE experience with Associate Professor of Art Dana Fritz gave her financial support and freedom to create bold work, including her animated feature titled “A Time To Speak,” which looked at meth addiction in a rural environment. Her experience on the Student Advisory Board, which reviewed Hixson-Lied Endowment grants for students, helped land her a spot on the Board of the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council in Minnesota, which distributes state funding and McKnight funding to support the arts.
“This place gave me a really good foundation that just allowed me to believe I could do crazy things,” Meier said.
Meier said she has thoughts for the next work she wants to make, which will involve more animations.
“I think part of what’s next is I’ve started to realize my life as an artist is this long thing,” Meier said. “It’s something that I have to take a really long view on, and I’m going to be working on this subject for a long time and will just let it evolve.”