Art Exhibit:
Palimpsest

Through painting, mixed media, and narrative imagery, artists Tinam Valk, Sabine Carlson, and Jenny Kanzler explore the multilayered nature of identity, memory, and place, drawing upon a shared heritage rooted in German, Eastern European, and American cultural exchange. As with the manuscript pages from which the exhibition takes its name—painted, erased, and layered—their works bear the visible traces of earlier personal and collective histories.

Sharing a love of the language of painting, they fuse separate sensibilities and so facilitate a conversation with their pasts and with the viewer – acting as a transatlantic conduit, using their personal stories to facilitate a broader narrative. 

Their artistic practices echo traditions of Central and Eastern European narrative art, German expressionism, and the Eastern European folk-surrealist lineage, while also engaging contemporary questions of identity, belonging, and psychological intrigue.

Tinam Valk creates an atmosphere of ambiguity in her paintings through figures embedded in layered landscapes and bodies of water. Using mixed media, including acrylic and oil paint along with organic material, she builds a multi-faceted terrain of memory, evoking fragments and recollections of the past. Her figures and imagery echo a sense of place, loss, destruction and reconstruction.  

Sabine Carlson focuses on the transitional body—figures poised between states of belonging, between land and water, rootedness and movement. Her symbolic imagery—ice skates, flotation devices, hybrid birds—evokes the realities of migration and cultural dislocation. With bright color and delicate tension, her paintings reflect the legacy of displacement and the fragile search for home within a fragmented world.

Jenny Kanzler draws on a visual language of tragicomedy, using allegorical figures and uncanny domestic scenes to mine the tension between personal vulnerability and inherited anxiety. Her work is animated by a blend of wit, darkness, and psychological depth—that reflects traditions of moral parable, folktale, and philosophical introspection.

Together, these three artists construct a space of reflection and resonance. This exhibition invites viewers to consider how history is embedded—not only in ruins or archives—but in the human psyche, in material surfaces, and in the images we carry forward. In the hands of Valk, Carlson, and Kanzler, painting becomes an act of excavation, translation, and renewal.

We look forward to welcoming you at the museum!

Take a look at photos of the exhibit from our recent Meet the Artists event.