Jan – Feb 2026
Historic Lobby Main Level
– Artist Reception –
Fri, Feb 13 • 4-6PM
Exhibition Description:
This exhibition presents a series of mixed media paintings that explore landscapes not as physical places, but as conceptual and emotional terrains. Moving beyond representation, the works draw on abstraction to evoke shifting horizons, fragmented geographies, and imagined spaces shaped by memory and perception. Layers of paint, texture, and unconventional materials interact to create surfaces that feel both excavated and constructed. Gestural marks suggest erosion, movement, and growth, while subtle color fields reference atmosphere, light, and topography without settling into fixed forms. The landscapes unfold as ideas rather than views—spaces to be sensed, navigated, and interpreted rather than observed. Together, the paintings invite viewers to consider landscape as a mutable concept: a meeting point of environment, experience, and imagination. By blending abstraction with conceptual inquiry, the exhibition opens a dialogue between the visible and the felt, offering terrains that exist somewhere between the external world and internal reflection.
About the Artist: Derek Meier
Derek Meier is a painter and mixed media artist based in St. Paul, MN, where he works with artists with disabilities as a Visual Arts Designated Manager at Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts. Meier received a BFA with a focus in Studio Painting from the University of South Dakota. Notable collections include the Minnesota Museum of American Art and the University of South Dakota’s President’s Collection.
My work focuses on material exchange, immediacy, aesthetic dialogue and invented territories.
Every image, whether objective or nonobjective, is founded on deconstructed historical & cultural paradigms. These smashed realities are then reformed into a singular home. Each painting, drawing, and analog collage is a further examination of this elseworld and its physical and cultural constructs. I further maneuver these spaces with derelict icons, mixed media elements and soft narration as these languages consolidate.
Negotiating the terms of this reality allows me to do the same within my own.
Website: http://www.derek-meier.com/
Social: https://www.instagram.com/derek_august_/
Location: Historic Lobby
HOURS*
Mon – Fri 10AM – 5PM
Sat 10AM – 2PM
*Also open 1 hour before most performances.
Always Free to Attend. Always Inspiring!