I invite you to visit my work this season at Emerson Center for the Arts and Culture in Bozeman, Montana.

The works in this exhibition are an extension of my 2018 Artist Residency at Glacier National Park, and point to the enmeshment and permeability of environments, minds, and bodies. Emerging from a process of layering and often subtraction, they attempt to bridge the enduring with the temporal, the visible with the invisible, the prosaic with the poetic.

If you would like to attend the Artist Talk via Zoom, please register here:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMkcOigqj8sEtyxckjdaOY04AOPxvO93YQp

Please note that all events will occur on Mountain Standard Time.

Feather Woman Wailing

Feather Woman Wailing is both a personal reification of grief and madness, as well as a response to a passage in the novel Fools Crow by Blackfeet author James Welch.

He awoke to the blue light of false dawn…The woman was gone. He looked down at the small orange glow of the fire pit and felt a quiet sorrow spread through his body, and he couldn’t account for it. It seemed to enter him from outside, as though the lodge itself were filled with sorrow.

Once, as a child in the big-wind moon, he had crouched on the brow of a hill and watched the geese coming and going, and he was blinded by their flashing wings in the gray sun. The large, shallow lake was covered with the flashing wings, and the commotion excited and frightened him. But it was the noise, the thousands of voices yelping shrilly in his ears, that caused him to fear for himself. For many sleeps after that he heard those voices, and they echoed and echoed deep within him until he thought he had become crazy and would die.

Now the winter geese were even closer, their cries entering Fools Crow’s ears and plunging into his heart…Fools Crow quit the woman’s lodge and began to walk toward the alder grove. The flashing wings and cries were all around him now and he knew that his power was gone, but he walked ahead as a man does who is dreaming. And like the dreaming man, he did not see the geese, for they were all within him and they consumed his power, and he walked among the gray trunks of the alders in the false dawn.

—James Welch, Fools Crow

Insides and Outsides

Insides and Outsides is inspired by the multicolored stones abundant in Glacier National Park. These stones were formed by sediments deposited into an inland sea over 1600 million years ago, and carried into lakes by glaciers 2 million-1200 years ago. The piece reflects my perception of these stones as interconnected bodies of a once united whole—a whole whose ancient interiority is now open to the forces of the world. What was long ago an “inside” is now an “outside,” and what today cannot be touched, may one day experience the sensation of wind, rushing water, or even a human hand.

'Light Inside the Body' at Emerson Center for the Arts and Culture