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Don Mundt, owner of Gallery 709, stands among pieces in an Open AIR exhibition, "Toward a Totality of Effect," on Tuesday afternoon. Mundt has opened his gallery space for the program's resident showcases.
Emily Ryan Stark, a fiber artist, was a resident at Home ReSource through Open AIR artistic residency program last year. She constructed a series of dollies that reference labor and support asked of women in society. The works are on view at Gallery 709 at Montana Art and Framing.
Aaron Cobbett, a fiber artist, was a resident at the Missoula Public Library last year.
Miya Hannan, "Beneath the Feet 6" (watercolor on paper, phonebooks, soot; 25 by 16 inches, 2020.)
While a residency in western Montana in spring, summer or fall might sound idyllic, reality can always intrude. As curator John Knight notes in his statement, the summer of 2021 was also marked by the pandemic, wildfires and rapidly rising cost of living and other complications.
The threads are visible in “Toward a Totality of Effect,” an exhibition of last year’s Open AIR artists’ work, now on view at Gallery 709 in Montana Art and Framing. Traces of the locations where artists set up around western Montana for up to five weeks are visible, often through fresh eyes and new voices.
The Open AIR exhibition, “Toward a Totality of Effect,” is on view at Gallery 709 at Montana Art and Framing through Aug. 22. To read artist interviews and see more examples, go to openairmt.org.
It was overseen by Knight, an independent curator who’s worked mostly outside of Montana. He’s based in Missoula, where he was most recently the registrar at the Missoula Art Museum. (He left to take a position with Humanities Montana as programs manager.)
For instance, Eric Siegel, a poet, applied for a residency at the Paradise Guard Station in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Whatever ideas he had about his stay in a remote area had to be thrown out after an injury sent him back to Missoula.
“Instead, he had this kind of collapse of expectation and had to reorient himself to the wilderness,” Knight said, and he had to write about the mountains and forests from a distance. One of his poems, “When Paradise Doesn’t Work Out,” addresses those surrounding issues.
Another example Knight offered is Christopher Baldwin, a graphic novelist who’s worked with Mad Magazine among other outlets. A New Mexico resident, he was looking forward to a summer at the Flathead Lake Biological Station. His zines in the exhibition display what happened, through inviting hand-drawn panels: He arrived, then the fire near Finley Point cut their electricity, and he was relocated to Missoula.
The residences are means of making connections, some that prove lasting. Taylor Clough’s residency was in Philipsburg (the broadest residency “site” of them all.) A recent graduate of Yale with an MFA, she took a job teaching art at Salish Kootenai College. Her painting, “Pink Pastures, Loud Waters,” is described as a “visual of recent everyday moments, symbols and scenes from life in Pablo and Polson.” She joins imagery of wildlife, cattle, and Super 1 Foods, joined by abstract striping.
Maria Ylvisaker, who was embedded at the History Museum at Fort Missoula, produced a triptych that has a “really specific relationship to artificast and ephemera” in the collection. Her watercolors, each 25 by 40 inches, depict vintage Highlander Beer cans, the curling typography rendered at a scale much larger than life.
Miya Hannon, who was in residence at the Moon Randolph Homestead, produced striking works that address death and the place of fire and memory in Japanese culture. She burned phonebooks inset in watercolor renderings of what looks like vintage kitchen linoleum.
The show was exhibited in the Imagine Butte Resource Center before traveling to Missoula. It included just over 20 artists who participated in last year’s residencies.
Part of the idea of the program is that it offers time and space to create without an exhibition deadline, or the need to be in “production mode.” You can see the results that have gestated over time. Last summer, Gillian Harper, a Louisiana sculptor, spent weeks in the reuse mecca of Home ReSource formulating ideas.
The result is visible now: Her sculpture, “Louisiana’s Vanishing Coast,” is constructed of humble materials: Styrofoam, acrylic, nylon hex screws and hardware. The Styrofoam makes for a bleakly industrial frame for the centerpiece: Harper traced a satellite image of the “infamous” Louisiana coast, as she calls it in her statement, and used a laser-etcher to cut its white tendrils into the glass, nearly black as oil.
Knight said her work draws connections to the history of mining in western Montana, where “it might not be oil leeching down the river, but we have heavy metals.”
When applying for a residency, artists can specify preferences on locations — Knight originally applied as an artist but was offered the opportunity to curate this exhibition, which involved checking in with artists last year and following up over the course of months to prepare the show.
The program plugs the notion of “place-based art,” which probably implies “landscape art” to some people. The exhibition includes art with aspects of the natural world, sometimes direct, and other times more obscure.
Those who chose the Montana Natural History Center created work that’s more representative, if not always strictly representational, of that location’s collections.
Madison Mayfield, for instance, is a “natural history artist, scientific illustrator and taxidermist.” Her work in the Gallery 709 show includes a “replica” of her own work station: A large drawing of a bird, surrounded by replicas of birds that she made.
To him, it's exciting to show the contrast of science-minded artists like Mayfield’s alongside fiber Aaron Cobbett, who infused fiber art with abstraction and ideas while making his work at the Missoula Public Library.
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Don Mundt, owner of Gallery 709, stands among pieces in an Open AIR exhibition, "Toward a Totality of Effect," on Tuesday afternoon. Mundt has opened his gallery space for the program's resident showcases.
Emily Ryan Stark, a fiber artist, was a resident at Home ReSource through Open AIR artistic residency program last year. She constructed a series of dollies that reference labor and support asked of women in society. The works are on view at Gallery 709 at Montana Art and Framing.
Aaron Cobbett, a fiber artist, was a resident at the Missoula Public Library last year.
Miya Hannan, "Beneath the Feet 6" (watercolor on paper, phonebooks, soot; 25 by 16 inches, 2020.)
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