Prairie

Prairie is located at 4035 Hamilton Avenue.

Hours 10-6 Tuesday through Friday, 10-4 Saturday
Opening Reception Saturday March 10th from 7-9pm

Airstream is a solo exhibition by veteran artist Peter Haberkorn showing at Prairie Gallery from March 10 through May 5, 2012. Airstream includes new work consisting of Haberkorn's trademark "three dimensional collages" which combine found materials with original photographs. In this body of work, the artist uses parts culled from vintage Airstream trailers as framing devices for photographs produced during his extended driving trips. 

              
Originally inspired by his architectural restoration activities, as well as by the finishing materials he used in fine art framing, Haberkorn became fascinated with the formal and evocative potential of cast-off, recycled and industrial components. Subsequently, he began creating specific new elements to mix in with the found materials. More recently,he has developed three bodies of work: collages incorporating textures and associations of animal forms and skins; constructions using telephones; and photography combined with found windows. Airstream consists of a series of images framed by fragments of vintage Airstream trailers. Haberkorn inserts his images into windows and door frames which have been crudely removed from the original trailer chassis. The images inserted into the empty frames act as a fictitious replacement for the world originally viewed from these openings.               

Haberkorn's combinations of new images with materials drawn from vintage trailers acts as a slight diversion from photography's usual method of transporting the viewer into a realm beyond the present. While photographs imply reality by virtue of their mechanical production from highly sophisticated recording devices, their meaning stems partly from fictitious worlds created by their viewers. Those details such as time of day, setting, mood and what happened just before and after the creation of any given photograph are normally generated entirely in the mind of the viewer. Haberkorn short circuits this process in one significant way by framing his images of the road with devices which themselves imply a specific mood and narrative about one kind of life on the road. The Airstream trailer itself represents the pinnacle of family luxury in the post-World War II population boom and subsequent suburban expansion in America. In this context, Haberkorn's images represent adventure, luxury, possibility and optimism; the American dream. His work is a welcome addition to a plethora of socially engaged contemporary art which tends to dwell more on social inequality and repression than idealism.