OMAHA, NE.- On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan stood in front of the famed Brandenburg Gate, a checkpoint between East and West Berlin, and before a crowd of 20,000 cheering Germans, urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Russian-born artist Kon Trubkovich (b. 1979, Moscow) does not recall watching this fateful speech. For Trubkovich, the events of June 12, 1987, belong to a shared consciousness, forming a pivotal moment in history that happened to everyone and no one at the same time. Trubkovich, who immigrated to the United States when he was eleven years old, explains that he feels little connection to his life in the former Eastern Bloc, largely because the Soviet Union he knew no longer exists. As such, the notion of disconnection—from places, people, and experiences—features prominently in his work.

Trubkovich’s Riley CAP Gallery exhibition at Joslyn (June 20 through October 11) draws from a project the artist began in 2011 that calls upon his own memories as well as our collective capacity to remember. Once finished, this new body of work will encompass 48 paintings — 24 depicting his mother and 24 featuring Ronald Reagan. Each set of paintings correlates to one second, or 24 frames, of video footage, the former taken during a going away party before the artist’s family left Russia, the latter from the Brandenburg Gate speech. While viewing video footage on a screen, the artist isolates specific frames by pausing the tape. He then translates these moments into drawings and paintings, distorting and abstracting the original images to mimic the visual disintegration inherent in the video medium and to call attention to the fragility of memory. The artist is adamant that painting something repeatedly does not stem from a desire to forge a connection with a lost memory, but rather is a way to unload an image of its connotations and remind us of how powerful the passage of time can be. At Joslyn, Trubkovich presents a Reagan painting completed in 2014 alongside a selection of small drawings created specifically for this exhibition and a recently-completed video piece inspired by the folk song “House of the Rising Sun.”

A 500-square-foot space in the Scott Pavilion suite of galleries, the Riley CAP Gallery showcases nationally- and internationally-recognized artists, as well as emerging talent, selected by Joslyn curators. A rotating schedule of carefully focused exhibitions will examine how artists engage with the world and respond to the issues that challenge them creatively, bringing new perspectives on contemporary art to Nebraska.

Admission to Kon Trubkovich is included in Joslyn’s free general Museum admission.