(from the press release)

More than 90 works by seven artists will be featured in this unique exhibition that explores – primarily through photography and film projects – the mythology of history, its ties to popular culture and commerce, and layers of truth and fiction as well as its strong hold on our imagination.

Matthew Buckingham’s “The Truth About Abraham Lincoln” (1992) presents a female Asian actress who wears the beard and hat associated with the visual iconography of the president, while answering true or false questions about his life. 

In John Huddleston’s series “Killing Ground, Photographs of the Civil War and the Changing American Landscape,” he presents his contemporary color photographs of battle sites from the same vantage point and time of day against the historical photograph from the actual Civil War. 

In “History Sighs,” Danielle Mericle presents twenty photographs and a two-channel video installation that depicts the sun setting over the Arabian Sea where the British made landfall in India and the sun rising over the site in the Atlantic where Columbus made landfall. The contemporary photographs depict life as it is at these two places that are bound up with memory, nostalgia, colonialism and history. 

In her photographic essay, “Nineteen Lincolns,” Greta Pratt photographs individuals and groups of members of The Association of Lincoln Presenters. All are inspired and imbued with history’s invested presentation of Lincoln as the self-made man who held strong to his own principles. In her “Using History” series, Pratt explores how Americans remember and embody their own history through pageants and tourist iconography. 

Andrea Robbins and Max Becher have been mining the intersection of photography and history for more than 20 years. In “German Indians” they document the Karnival festival in Germany where people dress up and reenact Native American rituals and dances, most learned from movies and the books of Karl May. In “Bavarian by Law,” the duo turned to Leavenworth, WA where the town voluntarily instituted a ‘Bavarianization’ of its shops, houses, and festivals to attract tourists and income. In “Old Tucson,” the pair photographed an old Western movie set at Old Tucson Studios, which has now become a tourist attraction and representation of the historic old west. 

In her series, “Perfectible Worlds,” Sage Sohier captures obsessed people alone with their hobbies, such as historical reenacting, building a sprawling replica of a nativity scene or perfecting small-scale historical models of American towns. 

In “Place and Time,” Edie Winograde photographs various staged pageant participants as they re-embody historical events such as the Battle of Little Big Horn in its same location. 

The Nicolaysen Art Museum is a contemporary arts institution in the middle of the Rocky Mountain West. 

The Nicolaysen Art Museum
400 E. Collins Dr.
Casper, Wyoming
http://www.thenic.org

"Best Western Two Step"
Walt Kuhn and Edie Winograde
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center
To explore the subject of the American West, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center curator Blake Milteer put together a pair of conjoined solos that turned out brilliantly. In the back was Walt Kuhn: An Imaginary History of the West, and in the front, Place and Time: Reenactment Pageant Photographs by Edie Winograde. Kuhn, who worked in the early twentieth century, created blurry abstract paintings of cowboys and Indians, while Winograde, who is active now, takes photos of people playing cowboys and Indians. And because she used slow shutter speeds, her pieces were blurry and abstract, too. The combining of the modernist and the postmodernist was a terrific match.