'With love from . . ." — it's the kind of message an expatriate might pen. Implicit in it is the warmth in the offering, a written embrace.
As the title of an exhibition by Jarg Geismar at Nagoya's Gallery HAM that's running till May 2, there is too, in the marks of the ellipsis, the intimation of something unspoken: things to come, perhaps the possibility of the fitting together of a personality with a place. Geismar has collected his fair share of worldly destinations; born in Sweden, the artist studied at Germany's prestigious Dusseldorf Art Academy in the 1980s, when the school boasted as its professors the influential documentary photographer Bernd Becher, contemporary provocateur Joseph Beuys and groundbreaking video artist Nam June Paik. Since receiving his Masters of Arts at the New York's New School of Social Research, Geismar has studied, taught and exhibited at any number of places in-between New York, Europe and Tokyo, where's he has been based since 2004.
Perhaps a loss of specificity has come from the accumulation of so many destinations and their accompanying sensations. At Gallery Ham, certainly, the turbulences of such movements and of things partly seen are born out by "with love from . . ."