116 Ecotheory and the Bernsen Art Gallery
Edward Lossman
Earlier this semester, I was thinking about doing something different than usual. The shows on campus are great, and extra lectures are surely appealing. None of these things seemed to spark my interest, however. Thinking about the culture and creativity you can find this far North, I decided to drive around and stumble upon something random that strikes a certain interest within me. That’s when I pulled up to the Bernsen Art Gallery in Ashland, NH. An interesting looking building with sculptures created from scrap metal laid out everywhere on the land around it, I had to see what this place was.
My experience in the building turned out to be one of the most interesting days I’ve spent here in the Plymouth area. The local hikes are fantastic, the college campus is a blast, but something about this unique little art gallery, run by a single artist by the name of Bill Bernsen, truly showed me just how special this area and the people within it can be. Clicking here will bring you to a presentation I created that gives a general overview of my trip to the art gallery, information about it, my thoughts while visiting, as well as some photos of the fantastic art on display.
Noticing the reuse of metal scraps outside opened me up to a few ideas in comparing the art gallery to Introduction: Critical Thinking, involving Tim Morton’s essay on The Ecological Thought. However, it was when I went inside the building that I really hit the hammer on the nail with the concepts of the theory in regards to the art displayed at the location. You see, Bill Bernsen is what could be identified as an ‘assemblage artist’. This means he uses scraps, natural artifacts, and pretty much whatever else he sees that sparks the creativity within him. Inside the building, Bill had about fifteen different pieces of art on display, all designed the same way. Bill goes out into the wilderness, not to enjoy Nature and its pristine lakes, trees, and wildlife; but to find the broken, dead, commonly uninteresting pieces of nature. The dark ecology, we can say. When he finds the pieces he wants to use, which usually consist of dead tree stumps and logs, he gets to work. By snapping the wood in certain angles, Bill has mastered a very original and unique style of art. He shines bright colored lights on the inside of the snapped pieces of tree stumps, which brings out the abstract designs the splits create. Each piece looks like a different city skyline, and using the lights, he is able to make us perceive these skylines as different times of the day. He might use darker lights at a lower angle to make it seem like the sun is going down, or brighter lights up top to make it appear as if the sun is rising. Now, you may be asking yourself what this has to do with the ecological thought. Well, lets analyze this a bit.
To reflect on this, lets first talk about what makes up the ecological thought in Morton’s essay. “The ecological thou