at the water's edge

The inaugural Montana Triennial opened this past Friday evening and will run through September 24. Beth Sellars, curator of site-specific installations for Suyama Space in Seattle, curated the Triennial. She chose 88 pieces out of 1,800 for the Montana show, pieces ranging from polished silver, to video installations, to photography, to oil and acrylic paintings, to encaustics, to wood-block prints, and to a variety of other pieces in between. As Joe Nickell wrote in the Missoulian, the Montana Triennial focuses on place.

It would be difficult to be an artist in Montana and not focus on place because Montana is a vast state where there is more landscape than architecture and plenty of space to consider the natural world around us. At the very least, it is a state where the concept of place hits you more squarely in the eye than getting hidden in any concrete jungle. And Montanans are proud of their place - often deeming it "the last best." Typically, however, popular Montana art is about realistic landscapes, horses, bears, elk, moose, and fish.

In the Missoulian,* Nickell's writes:

Sellars is the first to call out her own biases. As she culled through the works – initially without the benefit of any information whatsoever about the artists who created them – she quickly eliminated the large volume of traditional Western art that many of us would recognize from art fairs and commercial galleries around the region.

“What tended to bother me the most with so many of those works, it wasn’t like they were replicating what they saw around them, but rather what they’d seen other artists paint or sculpt,” explained Sellars. “I look for work that is taking the subject matter and pushing it in a personal way; so what would normally just be a landscape, to take it to a point where it’s not necessarily recognizable as landscape. … That kind of work is coming from within rather than strictly from without. I feel very strongly that if you’re going to do art, have it come from you.”

Now back to my art and the initial purpose for this blog. Yes, my art comes from within and it is often an interpretation of place. My piece in the Triennial is Behold! The trees., and it is about my trees, the trees on or surrounding my property. It is not a realistic depiction of those trees. I don't care to replicate exactly what I see because a photograph can do that better. Rather, I get at the essence of the place.

Behold! The trees. is one of my Shred Edit pieces. Shred Edits are collages made from my shredded writing, in this case notes about the trees on my property (an enormous silver maple, a tiny and delicate Japanese maple, an unruly apricot, a struggling aspen, a new autumn ash, a caragana, two lilacs, and towering neighboring firs) and my notes to the trees, letting them know that I care for them and will return to them (will return to Missoula) after each of my travels away. These notes were written in black and brown ink and pencil and then shredded. (I do not keep a copy of the writings that I shred.) I then adhered the shreds with acrylic medium to a 25" x 19" birch board panel. Watercolor thinly veils the final piece, which is then sanded down to smooth out the rough paper edges, and a glossy acrylic gel is the final finish.

My Shred Edit pieces are about essence and process. I carefully choose my papers, some of which I have dyed beforehand; I write; I shred; I separate the shreds into categories; I determine which shreds to adhere; and then I let the shreds swim and flow across the board as they will, with some exception. Only the elements I judge necessary make their way onto the board. Articles, pronouns, and prepositions are less of the essence than are nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The ascenders and descenders of chopped-up words have their role as well. Although they are not distinguishable as any specific parts of speech, they can be quite elegant in their randomness and lead to the overall ethereal quality. Perhaps you could equate my Shred Edits as visual music or poetry.

Not only have I created my art pieces, (whether they be Shred Edit pieces or not), with place as their intent, but I have also been aware that I am able to imagine, develop, and compose my art in its current direction because of the place I am in - its quietude, its colors, its location in the Northern Rockies - which has helped open my mind and allowed me to think, expansively.

How humbling it is, then, that this experience has also turned me into one of 60 Montana artists represented in this first-ever Triennial, hosted for the state by the Missoula Art Museum.

* See full article at www.missoulianentertainer.com