Issue #8 - Distortion, Oddness, and Impact
by Don Bergland
When people encounter my work, I don’t expect them to analyze it, dissect it, or piece together a hidden story. I don’t create narratives, and I’m not offering a riddle that needs solving. Instead, I aim for something much more immediate: impact. My goal is for viewers to feel something—right away, without explanation. Oddness, for me, is that moment of pure, unfiltered reaction. It doesn’t require thought. It just is.
Oddness is like stepping into a sideshow tent and seeing a two-headed dog for the first time. There’s no need to analyze it or ask why it exists; the impact hits you immediately. “That’s odd!” your brain says, and in that instant, you’re pulled out of your usual expectations of the world. That’s the kind of experience I aim to create with my art—an encounter with the unfamiliar that forces you to stop, feel, and react.
Distortion is the tool I use to craft this oddness. I start with reality—the familiar shapes of faces, bodies, and spaces—and I stretch, twist, and reshape them until they’re no longer what you expect. I want the distortion to hover just on the edge of recognition, where it feels both familiar and alien at the same time. That tension, that moment of something is not quite right, is where the impact lives.
There’s no need to deconstruct this experience. Oddness isn’t about logic—it’s about sensation. It’s not something you process intellectually; it’s something that hits you like a jolt to the midsection. That’s the beauty of it. Oddness bypasses the rules of narrative and meaning, speaking directly to the part of us that desires the unexpected and the strange.
I don’t see my work as something that unfolds over time or requires contemplation to unlock. It’s immediate, like a sudden slap or a burst of bright light in a dark room. The distorted faces, disjointed features, and surreal forms in my compositions don’t ask for interpretation. They exist to be felt. If someone looks at my work and their first response is, “What am I looking at?” or “That’s strange!”—then I’ve done my job.
I often think of my art as a kind of modern sideshow. Instead of a tent filled with curiosities, I create a gallery of distorted figures and surreal spaces that evoke that same visceral reaction. Like the two-headed dog, these images don’t whisper or nudge—they announce themselves with immediacy and force. They don’t linger in the realm of thought; they dive straight into the subconscious.
Ultimately, oddness is universal. It transcends language, culture, and context because it taps into something primal—a deep-seated response to the unfamiliar. I don’t need viewers to “get” my art in a traditional sense. All I want is for them to feel that jolt, that spark of recognition that says, “This doesn’t belong here, and yet, it does.”
Art, for me, is not about telling stories. It’s about creating moments of rupture—experiences that stick in your mind not because they explain anything, but because they refuse to be ignored. Oddness, distortion, impact—that’s what I strive for. And whether you embrace it or recoil from it, I hope my work leaves you with something you can’t shake off.