TOBIAS FIKE
Tobias Fike, who works in Denver, CO, is an interdisciplinary, contemporary artist. The form of his work is incredibly varied and he approaches a range of concepts, from his personal experiences of family, place, and grief, to humankind's temporal relationship with the universe and observations of time.
Fike was born in Lincoln, NE in 1975, moved to Kansas City when he was ten, and then later returned to Lincoln to attend the University of Nebraska, where he earned a BFA in 2000. He received his MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2011. Fike has done multiple national tours showcasing his rich performance and collaboration-based projects. He is part of the Flinching Eye Collective, which was a 2014 Grantee of The Idea Fund, funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Additionally, one of Fike’s collaborative works with Matthew Harris, a longtime colleague, is in the Kadist Art Foundation, Video Americas Collection, now housed in San Francisco, CA.
Fike's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with exhibitions in many cities, including Berlin, Germany; Coimbra, Portugal; Shanghai, China; Houston, TX; Tucson, AZ; and Chicago, IL, to name a few.
Tobias Fike’s featured work in the Vicki Myhren Gallery installation of The Space(s) Between is Scenic Viewing Point, 2021, metal frame and wood plaque.
Among the things Fike considers in Scenic Viewing Point, are the notions of the horizon line and the frame as conceptual and visual modes. Fike himself doesn’t delineate between the horizon line and the frame, though historically the two have had various theoretical relationships to one another. The tension between various understandings of the horizon and the frame in art proved to be the perfect jumping-off point.
Fike particularly thought about art critic George Dickie’s book The Art Circle. in one portion of the book, Dickie relays a story in which famed surrealist Salvador Dali pointed to a pile of rocks and called it art. Dickie argues against that with intent and context as his primary reasoning.
Fike says, “I have always wondered if moving the “pointing” to the gallery changes that? What if Dali actually did that from a gallery or museum out a window, or whatever? What if directions or coordinates to a location were placed in the white cube? Continuing that thought, what changes by building four walls around the pile of rocks? Can context and intention be addressed by this act without affecting the rocks? I think so but then you begin to question what is the art, the walls? The act? Probably all of it.”
“With this in mind, I also thought of photography as a way to show the same pile in an accepted form of art. What allows for this? One factor is the frame edge. This boundary gives us the ability to look at artistic elements like composition.”
The “scenic overlook” is a continued interest of the artist. Fike feels that such sites are their own kind of “finger-pointing” but are also subjective, decided by people who might think beauty is universal and reserved for the sublime or grand scenery. Fike’s “frames” to the scenic view at VMG are accommodated by signage that gives some direction to the viewer to consider their position to the frame to adjust the placement of the horizon line and other compositional elements within it. It also has an “ideal soundtrack for viewing the American West” as its info by cell component. The frame operates as a stand-in for the artist pointing to these scenes, which don’t even need pointing to because he is placing them in front of vast, unavoidable landscapes.
Fike also finds humor in the idea of flattening a 3-D space into something two-dimensional, adding “As a photo undergrad, Stephen Shore’s The Nature of Photographs was very influential on me. One section talks about the flattening of space that comes from photography. My accompanying signage addresses this by suggesting closing one eye. With the monocular view and a frame, you can see this same type effect [ in the work] that is associated with photos.”