From the Place
Hotel Garber
346 N Webster St
Red Cloud, NE 68970
United States
Regional artists Rick Houchin and David Lovekin once collaborated on an exhibit titled Presence of Absence at the Great Plains Art Museum. That photography exhibit—developed to celebrate Nebraska's sesquicentennial—depicted many of the state's small towns and the poignant echoes of a more vibrant past.
From the Place, the duo's latest exhibition now on view in the lower level of Hotel Garber, also begins there. A selection of black-and-white photographs and multimedia pieces capture capture town and country alike, in Nebraska and in locales like Ireland and Ranchos de Taos.
Joining the strong photography in this exhibit are Houchin's and Lovekin's strong paintings. Ranging from subtle landscapes to vibrant abstract acrylics and Eastern-inspired ink, the artists demonstrate their skill for composition and tonal control across several mediums.
This exhibition was developed in partnership between the Red Cloud Opera House and the Red Cloud Creative District. The mission of the Red Cloud Creative District includes providing opportunities for practicing artists and diverse expression. Toward that end, artwork from this exhibit will be for sale, with proceeds supporting the artists' practice and the work of the exhibit's curatorial partners.
The Red Cloud Opera House and the Red Cloud Creative District receive support from the Nebraska Arts Council and Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
About the Artists
Rick Houchin
Rick L. Houchin has nearly fifty years of photography experience, primarily as a photojournalist for award-winning Nebraska newspapers, but for the past twenty-five years, he has been an active fine art photographer. Houchin has exhibited work across Nebraska, including Omaha’s Joslyn Art Museum, Hastings College, Seward Civic Center, Minden Opera House, and elsewhere. His most recent show was held at Great Plains Art Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, along with fellow photographer David Lovekin, entitled Presence of Absence. Houchin is a graduate of University of Nebraska at Kearney and Kodak Fine Arts Education Center in Chicago. Houchin is the editor and photographer at the Webster County Sun, a newspaper in south-central Nebraska’s city of Red Cloud. He’s been a photographer since 1976 and is a former Nebraska Writer/Photographer of the Year.
Artist’s Statement
Photography has been my life, with decades of photojournalism and fine art. I added abstract painting in the past few years in an effort to express other feelings and ideas.
During my career, I pass through a lot of small towns in the center of the country. Usually on my way elsewhere, I often marvel at the nuances of some of the smallest towns. Other travels have presented different photographs and styles.
I don’t limit myself to realistic presentations, although sometimes that is the proper method, depending upon the mood or the subject. I photograph and paint, whether anyone ever sees the finished product. I am compelled to create.
David Lovekin
David Lovekin is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Hastings College, in nearby Hastings, Nebraska. His PhD is from the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of Technique, Discourse, and Consciousness: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jacques Ellul and editor with Donald Phillip Verene of Essays in Humanity and Technology. He co-edited a book with David Gill called Political Illusion and Reality (2018). He is co-translator of Jacques Ellul’s The Empire of Non-Sense, a critique of modernist art. Exploring the idea of technology as a problem for the philosophy of culture, his most recent essay is “Looking and Seeing: the Play of Image and Word—the Wager of Art in the Technological Society.” He is the recipient of five National Endowment for the Humanities grants. His photography has been published in numerous books and periodicals; his most recent work appears on covers of Prairie Schooner and in the gallery Modern Arts/ Midwest in Omaha. He paints abstractions in acrylics and currently is doing ink painting in the sumi-e style.
Artist's Statement
Echoing photographer Eugene Smith, I attempt to use my cameras, brushes, paint, canvases, and paper to the best of my ability. I began photography seriously in the late 1960s in a friend’s dark room watching images magically appear on blank sheets of paper. The visible and the invisible conjoined. Writing with light. Reality hobnobbing with appearance. Seeming and being were bedfellows. Most of us learn on the grade school playground that reality is at least a matter of perspective. The child whose hat is flung about eats a different lunch than the tormentors. On a more advanced playground we hear nuclear physicists espousing an uncertainty principle that insists that the measured responds to being measured. “Reality” profits from being uncovered as we fling our own hats about as well as those of the tormentors.
I photograph what I do not understand, often the incongruous that defines the familiar or that has become the familiar. I look for limits, for horizons where earth and sky kiss but do not combine. I paint making marks that suggest other marks, again, to present the unknown, a presence of absence and an absence with presence.
I am a bounty hunter in the spiritual zoo as a photographer where appearances are found in various cages and confines that are self-imposed (if there is a self) or are the results of communal/social intention and attention. As a painter I bend the zoo bars and fling my hat about with improvisational abandon.
