ABOUT ME
Sabrina Hornung was born in Jamestown, North Dakota in June 1984, drifted around the prairie for some time and is currently residing in Fargo, North Dakota. She attended MSUM in pursuit of photography.
Her pieces serve as an ode to the Dakota prairie. Her roots play an integral role to her work. When not wandering the prairie with her camera, she serves as editor-in-chief at the High Plains Reader, a weekly publication based out of Fargo-Moorhead.
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She has also contributed a piece on The Enchanted Highway to the internationally acclaimed folk art publication Raw Vision.
Hornung has received multiple awards for her mixed media work from the JFAA annual juried exhibitions from the Arts Center in Jamestown ND, Pekin Days Art Festival in Pekin, ND, and The Badlands Art Association in Dickinson, ND. She also received a grant award from the NDCA traditional arts and apprenticeship program to pursue wycinanki and scherenschnitte ( the traditional arts of Polish and German paper cutting) under Meridee Erickson Stowman.
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Through her experience with practicing paper cutting from the aforementioned apprenticeship, she applied this practice while participating in the Art for Life program through the NDCA where she and Stowman engaged residents at Ave Maria Nursing Home in Jamestown ND in a large scale wycinanki tree of life. Not only is it a paper cutting project it also served as an oral history-sharing experience as well.
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She has participated in multiple group exhibitions including a three-woman exhibition entitled, “Prairie Trifecta.” She has participated in The Rourke’s Art Museum’s Midwestern Invitational since 2008 in Moorhead, Minnesota, and most recently her work has been featured in "Art50!" a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of The North Dakota Council on the Arts.
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She has also had solo exhibitions at Gallery 13, The Spirit Room Gallery, the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, the Joachim Museum in Dickinson ND, the Ellendale Opera House, the Rourke Art Gallery and Museum in Moorhead MN, and her solo show “Trail Dust and Sentiment” was chosen as a travelling exhibition by The North Dakota Art Gallery Association (NDAGA). Her pieces are featured in collections at both the Wurst Bier Hall in Fargo, the library of Kevin Carvell in Mott ND, and the Oskar Hornung Haus and Museum in Stutensee, Germany.
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The mixed media transparencies are influenced by the folk tales and folk ways of the prairie, personal anecdotes, and a strong German backbone using photo imagery as well as vintage ephemera ranging from Victorian greeting card imagery to vintage paper dolls and their outfits that often personify the flora and fauna of the prairie.
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Once she no longer had access to a dark room at MSUM (or any other place for that matter), she sought out yet another nontraditional way to express herself with photography and developed an interest in the alternative photo processes--especially cyanotypes.
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In 2010 she started a personal statewide mission to document areas of interest on the roads less traveled. She found herself documenting examples of folk art, ghost towns, pioneer cemeteries, and events that preserve pioneer ways of life, such as threshing bees and regional museums. She slowly started to realize that the North Dakota she grew up with is rapidly changing and therefore felt that it was in need of a roadside historian to share its tales (and learn many more) through a variety of mediums.
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While creating this work she had great hopes that it would travel and generate conversation between multiple generations.
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Photo by Shane Balkowitsch
