Tom Lundberg's MICROCOSMS currently on view in the Hillestad Gallery

16 Aug 2010    

            Leave any preconceptions you might have about embroidery at the door of the Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery when you arrive to view the magical stitched worlds created by Tom Lundberg. The artist wryly subverts notions of this genteel pastime by composing and painstakingly needling unpredictable, surreal, perverse or mystical dream states that serve as cautionary statements about our relationships with both the natural and the built universes we inhabit. That he manages on such a small scale to embrace many of the paradoxes and mysteries of life is nothing short of breathtaking.

            Now through September 3, 2010, the Hillestad Textiles Gallery is hosting the exhibition Microcosms: The Stitched Textiles of Tom Lundberg. The artist will will visit UNL and will present a free public talk in the Human Sciences Building, room 11, on Thursday, August 26 at 5:00 p.m., preceding a gallery reception in his honor. All members of the UNL and Nebraska communities are invited.

            Born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, Lundberg now lives in Fort Collins, Colorado where he is Professor of Art at Colorado State University. He earned his B.F.A. degree in painting from the University of Iowa and his M.F.A. in textiles from Indiana University. For more than three decades Lundberg has been exploring the world at the tip of a needle, confidently and persistently articulating private views into and through common objects, backyard corners, windows and rooms, and verdant landscapes. Disembodied legs and feet appear in the least likely places; stars shine and shoot, waters stream, matches, tools and barbed wire pose menacingly. Here we find the poignant and pragmatic sensibility of a poem by Emily Dickinson, there the cool and obtuse detachment of an Edward Hopper painting, and now here the ominous foreboding of a David Lynch film, and sometimes variants of these conditions are rolled together into single complex yet intimate scenarios, each defined by thousands of minute stitches. We viewers easily leave the real world behind as we’re pulled into Lundberg’s private and other-worldly microcosms.

            The exhibition, curated by department chair and textile artist Michael James, is supported in part by funding provided by the Friends of the Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery and by UNL’s Departments of Textiles, Clothing & Design. Tom Lundberg is represented by Hibberd McGrath Gallery of Breckenridge, Colorado.