Caleb Harman

Artist Bio

Caleb Harman is a multimedia artist with a BFA in Drawing from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and an MA in Studio Art from University of Missouri-Kansas City. Harman creates multimedia exhibitions that utilize aspects of installation art as a method of expanding on the tradition of oral narration. While Harman’s subjects vary, his overall interests lay within the region of Missouri River Valley. By using regional history, folklore, fictional and nonfictional narrative, his work attempts to explore our relationship to the spaces that we occupy. Caleb Harman lives in Kansas City.

“I Want You to Stay”
Artist Statement

I love a good story, especially one that involves the paranormal. One of those stories is of the haunting of the Sallie House in Atchison, Kansas. In the summer of 2020 while the country was shut down I found the podcast “Astonishing Legends” which had an exhausting series on the Sallie House. I was shocked to realize that the Sallie House, considered to be one of the most haunted houses in the United States, was less than an hour away, and could be rented out for overnight stays.

“I Want You to Stay” is about my experience at the Sallie House in early June. Combining elements of the stories of the house and our own recordings and imagery, the body of work is created to be a perplexing conveyance of information. As with most stories of the paranormal, they exist primarily in disparate anecdotes with no clear narrative format, which is reflected in the installation of the exhibition. I want the viewer to explore the narrative both intellectually and emotionally. For I believe the best ghost stories are not just told, they are felt.