A child of so-called “War Children” (individuals born in the 1930s in Germany), Geyer grew up in the mountainous region of the Black Forest. Coming of age during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the artist experienced the employment of “memory culture” as a strategy for reckoning with the country’s violent history, raising a collective consciousness of the past to create a vantage point for the present. Deeply shaped by this cultural condition, Geyer insists on the dangers of ignoring difficult histories, as the ideologically driven omissions of the past can lead to an inevitably volatile present.

Reflecting on nature as a vessel for individual and collective memory, Geyer exposes the seemingly silent residue of fascist ideologies still present in U.S. culture today. The works on view reveal how personal and political histories are inherently connected, despite – or perhaps precisely because of – their dichotomies.