By Sun Contributor Andrea Hull

GILBERTSVILLE – The Dunderberg Gallery in Gilbertsville is pleased to announce its December 2022 exhibition, Map, Body, Memory, mixed media and painted works on paper by Brian Elder. Elder is a Professor of Painting and Drawing and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Central Michigan University.

He was previously a member of the art faculty at SUNY Oneonta and at Hartwick College, among others.

His bachelors degree is from the University of New Hampshire, and Master of Fine Arts from Indiana University, Bloomington.


Elder said, “My work records our awareness of coming to know a place or moving from one place to another, as a metaphor of our movements, both physical and emotional, throughout our lives.”

Since the early 2000’s, he has employed the technique of collage to fuse disparate elements, both conceptual and material, thereby enlarging our sense of the whole of human experience.

A reception and artist talk by Brian Elder for Map, Body, Memory will be held on December 17 at the Dunderberg Gallery, 118 Marion Avenue in Gilbertsville. The exhibition is now on view from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursday-Saturday.

Elder’s exhibition at Dunderberg comprises four distinct bodies of work he has made since 2001.

Location: Works on Paper imagines the organs of the human body as a type of location, and juxtaposes their images with maps of various terrains, as “the body of the Earth.” The Nantes Series preserves the process of memory by exploring how we learn new places. Using time and distance as associations through which previously-known places merge with a new one, in the Location series, we watch the details of these images coalesce and fade away.

One part of Elder’s multi-media Venice Series included in the Dunderberg show refers to mapping the body of “The Queen of the Sea,” including her artery-like canals, by changing the perspective and scale of the map, from “the land in the water” to “the water in the land,” with the purpose of developing a multi-faceted experience of the city. Works on Paper 2001-2003 uses the image of the reliquary to explore memory, both of objects and of emotions.