Opening Reception: Friday, June 19th, 2026, 6-9pm
Show runs from June 18th - July 12th, 2026
Common Ground brings together two distinct artistic perspectives connected through landscape, memory, history, and transformation. Though working from different visual languages and experiences, Patricia Rucker and Dagmar Nickerson create a shared dialogue between past and future, personal memory and contemporary place.
Patricia Rucker’s work reflects an ongoing engagement with the evolving landscape and community of Golden, Colorado. Through her visual exploration of environment, movement, and human presence, her work considers the future — how people inhabit, shape, and respond to the changing world around them.
In contrast, Dagmar Nickerson’s IGNIS looks backward through layers of family history, archival reconstruction, and migration. The mixed-media encaustic installation reconstructs fragments of her German family history through archival documents, historical research, memory, and image transfer. The exhibition traces the lives of ordinary people shaped by political upheaval, war, imprisonment, displacement, and immigration. Drawing from surviving records — apprenticeship papers, military documents, ration cards, immigration manifests, and family photographs — the work explores how identity becomes mediated through bureaucracy, borders, and systems of power.
Nickerson’s family entered the United States through the postwar Refugee Relief Act of 1953, legislation created in response to the massive displacement caused by World War II. Separate from ordinary immigration quotas, the Act allowed refugees, displaced persons, and individuals uprooted by war and political instability to enter the United States through extensive sponsorship and documentation processes. The exhibition reflects this long bureaucratic passage through immigration manifests, identification papers, affidavits, military records, ration cards, and sponsorship documents — revealing how survival itself often depended upon paperwork, approval, and official recognition across borders.
Using layers of wax, burnt paper, transferred imagery, and embedded documents, Nickerson creates surfaces that function as both paintings and historical witnesses. Many scenes are reconstructed from archival evidence where photographs no longer exist, reflecting the gaps, silences, and erasures left by history.
While rooted in one family’s story, IGNIS speaks to broader contemporary questions surrounding migration, citizenship, nationalism, memory, and the fragile search for belonging. The work invites viewers to consider how large historical forces shape intimate human lives — and how memory persists through fragments.
Together, Common Ground creates a conversation across generations and perspectives — between history and contemporary life, rupture and renewal, displacement and belonging. Though approaching these themes differently, both artists ask viewers to reflect on what connects us across time, place, andshared human experience.
Banner Image: Dagmar Nickerson, “Manifest Passenger List Flying Tiger Line.” Encaustic on wood panel; 36″ x 24″.
