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Bonnie Lambert: "I can hear the almost unhearable sound of roses singing." Mary Oliver
Photograph with gold foil
24" x 18" image, 30" x 24" framed
Bonnie Lambert's work evokes a mood as much as it stirs the urge to compose a narrative. In the end, perhaps, they amount to the same thing, but what she accomplishes in these photo constructions underscores what all good art - from architecture to music to novels and plays - does, which is to inspire and mood; a mood that endures beyond the ephemerality of the art itself, a mood that stays with us after we've left the building, and returns to us in the small hours to remind us that the world is a delightful place.
"I construct photographic narratives, sometimes somewhat autobiographical, often stories I would like to 'read.' I invite the viewer to make their own narrative."
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Leah Cupino: Water Guards' (of Helena's Chessman Reservoir)
Acrylic and pastel on canvas panels with simple wooden frame
48" x 24"
Leah's gestural marks subdivide sky, ration rivers, tumble down escarpments, float freely through currents and inhabit new domains. She employs elements of her natural surroundings as key players in the balance of time, place, symbolic relationships, and legacy.
"I hunt for a rapid instinctual affair of building on a surface. A reckless advance in the studio, brush and fingers consort for color. I melt, mix, smear, scratch, drip, and drive into what I can touch right now. I often think of the element of my natural landscape as deeply integrated. They are co-observers, captivated by all the happenings around them, processing long, long lives with soft secrets to tell. In each painting I begin again, birthed inside these newly-imagined, inviolable spaces, wholly my own."
Artist Website
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Robert Harrison: Blue Too Serpentine Houses
Extruded glazed whiteware with china paint, ceramic decals and gold luster
4" W x 4" D x 4" H each
Robert Harrison is a practicing artist who lives and works in Helena, MT He has built his career in the site-specific large-scale architectural sculpture realm along with smaller-scale studio activity. His exhibition and installation record is extensive and global.
"Space is a primary component of my work and the consideration of interior or exterior space is elemental to the challenges of working in any scale, be it monumental projects or the intimacy of a handheld studio object. The Architecture of Space has defined itself as the focus of my artistic exploration. Over the past decade, I have had several opportunities to work with national and international porcelain, brick and clay pipe factories. The challenge I have set for myself is to explore the potential of these industrial opportunities and utilize the resources and tools they offer to further my creative pursuits in both large and small scales. Regardless of the opportunity or application, my continued effort is to respond to the environment (site), utilize the given space, and create work that resonates with a ceramic echo."
Artist Website
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Ryan Parker: Construction site View from West Lake Park, Bozeman, MT
Archival pigment print
24" x 30"
Ryan Parker is a lens based artist and documentarian based in Bozeman, MT. His work is concerned with the altered landscape, specifically the relationship between industrial standardization and economic factors which lead to upheaval in small communities. His large format photographs document the hinterland, the space subtly forgotten.
"Accepting that nature as a linguistic ideology is limited by the vernacular connotations rooted within its etymology presents an aesthetic opportunity, one which introduces anthropocentric material interpretations of objects. The problem with how to represent nature and define the natural in the period of the Anthropocene is defining the non human in a landscape which is utterly human-altered. Wilderness is no more, leaving land between its productive use the only place left to be defined as nature or non-huma. But it is those very spaces on the edge of the cultivated landscape which reveal the encroachment of the coming drought."
Artist Website
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Julietta Paige Viera: Euphony
Acrylic, graphite, watercolor, and gold leaf on canvas
36" x 40"
Juliette is a self-taught artist working with mixed mediums, paint, graphite, and clay. She takes inspiration from transformation and the use of recyclable materials combined with natural subjects. As a Helena native, she has recently moved to Missoula where she taught the Elementary Afterschool Art Classes at the Missoula Art Museum and worked as an outdoor/arts educator for Clark Fork School. She currently leads a local day program for adults with special needs.
"I express myself through color and line. With paint, there is an added texture that I love to layer and take away. Abstract in nature or dreamlike placement, I'm interested in the spiritual symbolism of the essence of animals and their connection that resonates with each of us in mysterious ways."
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Jon Lodge: Cumulus Undulatus Interruptus (Cloud #351)
Carbon particle substrate, polymer photogravure, surface tension, gesso on canvas
2020, 30" x 24"
Jon Lodge was born in Red Lodge (1945). Growing up, he played in the concrete and steel of the abandoned coal mines in the town, loved drawing lines with a ruler, studied jazz performance and composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston, then evolved into the Berklee photographer and art director. All these experiences led to his morphing into an audio and visual artist. Lodge's current work fuses systems and methodologies of music and visual art with experimental materials and processes to operate in what he calls a planned system of randomness.
"I think of my work as pictures of nothing - no specific narrative, story, representation, or meaning... it's just a purely visual experience, what you see is all there is."
Artist Website
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April Werle: "Naginid, the Dream Messenger"
Acrylic on wood panel
36" x 36" x 1.5"
April Werle is a mixed Filipino American artist and muralist. Werle is the first born child to an immigrant mother. She reflects on Filipino diaspora, and the effects of immigration on family, culture, and identity. Werle uses her own hands as central subjects in her works. Skin color and other body parts are intentionally absent. By omitting her ethnically ambiguous characteristics, she is able to tell storis of her own cultural experiences without her appearance invalidating her identity.
"Naginid, the Dream Messenger" is a work based on Filipino Folklore. Naginid is the Bisaya deity represented by a snake. In traditional Bisaya beliefs, snakes appear in dreams with important messages from a person's ancestors.
"Naginid, the Dream Messenger" was featured in Werle's solo exhibition Mga Hunghong Sa Diwata: Whispers of Spirits at the Holter Museum of Art. This painting was also featured in the juried show Spiritual Visions at the Fontbonne University Fine Art Gallery where it received an honorable mention.
Artist Website
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Helen Rietz: Entering the Stone House
Watercolor
2020, 21" x 14"
Helena Rietz' love of American lands and history and her artistic creativity come together in her paintings of the sites, scenes, and icons of the disappearing West. Art is a second career for Rietz. Raised in rural Michigan, she was always an avid reader, interested in history and seeing the world. She has traveled the world extensively, and found home in Montana, and in watercolors. She ways of her work, "In truth, I'm a portrait painter. To me, everything has a face, and I'm painting that face not just 'as it looks' but as it wants to be seen. My role is to show its power, its poignancy, its beauty."
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Jon Lodge: Pulse
Graphite, carbon colloid substrate, gesso on canvas
2023, 30" x 24"
Jon Lodge was born in Red Lodge. Growing up, he played in the concrete and steel of the abandoned coal mines in town, loved drawing lines with a ruler, studied jazz performance and composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston, then evolved into the Berklee Photographer and Art Director. All these experiences led to his morphing into an audio and visual artist. Lodge's current work fuses systems and methodologies of music and visual arts with experimental materials and processes to operate in what he calls a planned system of randomness.
Artist Website
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Cancun Paradise Vacation
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