The Strawberry Thief
February 19 - April 3, 2022
Opening reception February 19, 6pm
Longitudes with Neil Rolnick, Justin Houser, 7pm doors, 8pm show

The Strawberry Thief is a two-person exhibition featuring Illinois-based Bill Conger and Oklahoma-based Colin Tuis Nesbit. Originally shown at Helmuth Projects (San Diego, CA) in November of 2012, the exhibition centers on viewer experience and perception.

In 1883, poet, painter, and, most notably, textile designer William Morris produced the classic pattern “The Strawberry Thief.” The pattern depicts thieving thrushes with their strawberry loot amid a multi-hued, flowering thicket. Set within the context of sculpture and installation-based works, this exhibition takes its title from this most famous of Morris's patterns and uses the thieving subject as a point of departure to implicate strategies used within this exhibition and within the contemporary art practice. The installation's austere simplicity – sculptural objects chosen by Conger placed within a light-based installation by Nesbit that mimics moonlight – becomes even more haunting in "light" of the Morris pattern.

As viewers enter the space they are immersed in “moonlight.” Projected at approximately 1 LUX, the faux moonlight leaves the viewer without the ability to properly render color. The effect is seemingly black and white, however if left in the space long enough, the viewer will experience “The Purkinje Effect."

The Purkinje effect (sometimes called the Purkinje shift, or dark adaptation and named after the Czech anatomist Jan Evangelista Purkyně) is the tendency for the peak luminance sensitivity of the human eye to shift toward the blue end of the color spectrum at low illumination levels.

This result leaves viewers with blue and black vision.

Within this environment the viewers are left to contemplate the following:

-Contemporary reprinting of Morris’s “The Strawberry Thief” in the form of blue-on-blue wallpaper.

-A collection of objects (mostly black) on a low pedestal including:
-USB drink-chiller and chilled “Old Fashioned” cocktail
-Megalodon shark tooth
-Natura Siberica Absolut Anti-age Lifting Eye Cream, 15 ml.
-meteorite fragment
-Campo del Cielo, Argentina, 5.1 grams
-vinyl-cut QR code that links to www.thestrawberrythief10.com

Colin Tuis Nesbit holds a BFA in Lithography and MFA in Drawing and Printmaking and Phenomenological Studies. Nesbit has worked in the museum and gallery field for over a decade, including positions at Herron, Murray State University, and The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Currently based in Tulsa, OK, his studio practice is focused on the study of consciousness of light and space.

Bill Conger is Chief Curator at the Peoria Riverfront Museum and is formerly the Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at University Galleries of Illinois State University. Beginning in 1993, he has taught painting, drawing, and color theory at both Illinois Central College, Bradley University, and Illinois State University where he also received a Masters of Fine Arts in painting.

A practicing artist for over thirty years, Bill’s painting and sculpture has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as Germany, Poland, Ireland and New Zealand. He has presented numerous lectures on his work at venues including Drake University, Southern Illinois University, the Herron School of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Brigham Young University, and Golden Parachutes Gallery in Berlin, Germany.