A solo exhibition of Meuschke’s new photographs at Rosalux Gallery, Minneapolis, MN. Opening Reception is on Saturday, November 2, from 6:30pm - 9:30pm.

My landscape photographs depict places of personal or cultural significance, all potent sites of melancholy, and are evocative of my artistic influences from American Luminist painters to Gerhard Richter, photographers Edward Steichen to Richard Misrach. With this work I intend to create an experience of melancholy linked to the experience of nature; to synthesize the pleasure of living on this planet with the grief of change.

Melancholy is not sorrow nor depression, but is an aesthetic-emotive response to internal or external stimuli. Landscape, a memory, an image, a quality of light, a thought, or even a scent -these things, and others, can trigger or sustain it. Melancholy has a counterpart in the sublime, and both have roots in nature experience and human emotion. Where sublimity is the transmutation of terror into awe, melancholy is the intentional contemplation of transience, things lost, longing or the faint promise of hope; it connects the past with the present, links the painful to the pleasurable, and harmonizes imagination and emotion. Melancholy, like the sublime, is a reflective, higher order experience capable of lifting us above raw emotions; one that processes and synthesizes feeling, memory, imagination, experience, place, and time.