Paid Parking

Exhibition by Kate Robinson & Heidi Zenisek 

February 10-14, 2026

Reception: Friday, Feb 13th | 6-8P

More About Paid Parking 

Run, don’t walk, to Iceland’s hottest new attraction. If you’ve never been to Gjaldskylda, you’re missing out! At least that’s what the hundreds of tourists tagging it on social media would like you to think. What is it, you ask? A parking lot. More specifically, it’s a parking lot that requires payment. Iceland has a specific online identity, carefully crafted by the Icelandic Tourism Board. The Land of Fire and Ice, renewable energy, Northern lights, geothermal spas… but as a trip to Gjaldskylda will illustrate, social media can be deceiving. 

What is Iceland beyond the oversaturated Instagram photos of waterfalls and TikTok drone footage of mountains? This exhibition is a collection of works that inadvertently explore this question. Heidi and Kate have had transformative experiences in Iceland over the years, returning time after time to recharge their creative batteries and weave themselves into the culture. Upon return home, moments of these trips find their way into their practices. This show is the result of their curiosity about the overlaps in their work inspired by Iceland and how their similar experiences have manifested in different ways.

More About Kate & Heidi 

Heidi is an exaggerator of the sun and was raised by the moon. Surrounded by dirt, corn, cows, and rust, she was born in a barn to humble farmers. Soon after, she became an Eastern Iowa 4-H child prodigy, winning more ribbons than one can count. With those glory days well behind her, she now spends her time making work that doesn’t necessarily depict the land, but is of the land. 

Having witnessed firsthand the whimsy and brutality of nature, her farmstead childhood has uniquely shaped the lens through which she views the world. Time is measured by the color of the fields and when babies are born. Vast expanses of crops are raised, harvested, and migrated. Large quantities of material are vigorously used for months, then discarded or replaced, and certain animals are only as valuable as their ability to procreate. Though her work often shifts in form, material, and concept, those experiences will always underlie her practice. Heidi’s rural upbringing has taught her the difference between looking and seeing, hearing and listening. 

It defined her understanding of good and bad

Collapsed the distance between life and death

Then showed her how to explore what lies in between.

With the rise of social media and AI, Heidi has become interested in how we interact with what’s real. Throughout history, from cave paintings to cathedrals, from Monet to Ansel to Olafur, humans have sought to capture and recreate nature. Before smartphones, we made film slideshows, traded shot glasses painted with palm trees, drew sketches, collected rocks, pressed flowers, and wrote songs.  Today, we extend that impulse into the digital realm, archiving obsessively with phone cameras and uploading as a souvenir, proof, or memory. 

Heidi’s work questions whether this pursuit of simulating the isness of nature and the phenomena of the cosmos can be achieved. The wonder of the aurora borealis, the solitude of standing in an infinite field, the shimmer of moonlight on the ocean that causes something in your chest to expand–they are reminders that awe is as much a physical experience as it is an emotional one. Can that be recreated? 

Learn more about Heidi: heidizenisek.com / @theheidz_

Kate Robinson

A magpie of the first order, collector of trash and trinkets alike, Kate spent her early years in the mountains of Appalachia perched on top of boulders, flipping rocks in cold streams, and perfecting mud pie recipes under the treetops. She grew up learning that the land sings from every little nook and cranny when you know how to listen. 

This current body of work is in its infancy. Through it, she’s thinking about how the stories we tell (and visualize) about the land determine our relationships with it. How do folklore and mysticism factor into the ways we care for our environment? And what does meaningful mythmaking even look like in a contemporary context so often removed from local landscapes? 

These pieces start with drawings of observed/collected moments from the landscapes of both Iceland and Appalachia. Then she teases out less logical versions of that imagery in a search to unearth the ancient, jagged, wild, and unseen presences they contain. These presences watch over us, lurk at the edges of our pragmatic senses - on the periphery of what we can observe. These pieces are meditations on the bigness of tiny things - a recognition of how even the cracks, crevices, and crumbs hold the massive complex magic of a land, no separate from us.