Tobias Zikmund: Electric Fence

Exhibition on view from 30 January to 15 March.
Join us for the public opening on Sunday 1 February from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. The artist will give a gallery talk at 2 p.m.

Tobias Zikmund is a painter and public artist living in Fargo. He grew up on a pig farm near Pisek, in northeast North Dakota, and studied painting and art history at Minnesota State University Moorhead.

Recent activity includes a residency at the New York Mills Cultural Center; a lecture entitled Public Art, Civic Practice at TEDxFargo; a two-person exhibit, Garden Variety, at The Spirit Room; and Spring Awaits, an exhibit at WICK Gallery, Minneapolis. Tobias has received grants from Fargo’s The Arts Partnership, the North Dakota Community Foundation, and Springboard for the Arts. Projects of his include Pony Club, a domestic gallery project; the Stables, a group studio; the annual Great Mail Art Exchange, with international reach; and a tomato-forward garden. He’s trying to sew more.

Artist Statement

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Looking at landscapes that have been made orderly, I search for the peripheries and spaces between which forced orderliness is rejected and landscape’s power and self-assertion shimmer below the surface. Landscape’s division and subsequent yoking aren’t neutral or inevitable, but chosen, guided by larger systems, worldviews, histories, and values. And like an electric fence, the borders hold charge—they’ll bite back. I focus on the agricultural land of northeast North Dakota, sites personally familiar but which I paint from above with imagery sourced online. Small changes accumulate through the self-composting and rebirth of the same few images—paintings copied from paintings, each time born anew. When searching for the primary motivation for land modification, my conclusions oscillate between care, domination (—wait, plodding duty?—), and a heathen marriage of the two. Man’s works are small when viewed from above, yet glimmers of transcendence peek through.

Less macroscopic, my photowork is more personal and immediate—we’ve entered the garden. The captured actions are vaguely ritualistic, their slowly morphing mysteries simulating a glimpse of the divine, like a back-straightening grasp of the electric fence that leaves one awe-struck, aching, and repentant.