Terry Karson: Human/Nature: A Retrospective (1950-2017)

Terry Karson: Human/Nature: A Retrospective (1950-2017) at the Missoula Art Museum through July 27, 2024

It has been seven years since Terry Karson passed away in 2017 (1950-2017). I was with him when he died after his brief bout with cancer, and my promise to him was to carry on his legacy to the best of my ability. I am now in the stage following his death to consider how I might best accomplish this while at the same time, focus on moving our shared artistic vision forward through my own work.

When Terry and I met in Billings in 1991, we were already both avid ‘recyclers’, having both come from states that had active recycling programs. But in a state where only 19% of waste was recycled, we became obsessed with considering our responsibility to the natural world on a day-to-day basis. Our first collaboration was a circular garden based on Rudolf Steiner concepts, in which we planted both flowers and food in concentric rings. Later, we moved to an acre of land and created a much larger garden with the same circular structure surrounded by multiple beds. There we built a shared studio building that looked out onto the garden. We moved seamlessly between our art and gardening practices. That reciprocity between working the soil and making work in the studio grounded us and formed us as artists. We witnessed the life and death of garden cycles, allowing those natural processes to unfold in conversation with our studio work. That relationship was fundamental to each of us in our own ways, and our artistic concerns grew out of our connection to the natural world that surrounded us.

One day (circa 1996) Terry and I were sitting on the studio porch when he slowly took a drag on his Camel cigarette and said: “I know what I am going to make my art out of for the rest of my life.” Curious at his determination and resolve, I asked what that would be and he said, “recycled materials”. We both began to explore, out of poverty and revelation, to gather clean ‘waste’ materials (our own and that of our friends) to use in our art. From aluminum beer cans and cardboard packaging to bottlecaps, seed packages and bits of plastic, all of it became grist for the creative mill. In 1996, I returned to encaustic painting (my first encaustics were done in Italy during my junior year abroad in 1977) after painting in oils since grad school. I employed encaustic as a ‘collage’ medium to embed the recycled ‘flotsam and jetsam’ of our everyday lives into the surface of my paintings. At the same time, Terry did his first Specimens piece, butterflies cut out of cardboard packaging and placed in a shadow box frame, his first ‘unnatural history ‘collection. On October 2nd, 1996, Terry wrote in his journal, “Andy Warhol glorified pop culture. I want to turn it in on itself. Question our values, contrast cultural vanity with its own waste.” We had our first of eighteen two-person shows at the Morgan Gallery in Kansas City in Spring, 1997.

Five years before his death, Terry’s installation Commons was shown at the Missoula Art Museum, which was a realization of his lifelong vision that combined his commitment to transforming trash with his passion for architecture. Terry’s use of the house form recurred throughout his career, from the early birdhouses to the large-scale structures in our collaborations (Indian Flats and Perdidos) to the co-design of our home and studios in Bozeman. While designing our house, we read A Pattern Language followed by A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets by architect Christopher Alexander, in which he explores the microstructure, color and ‘animate’ expression in the best of early Turkish carpets. After my hire as a tenure-track professor at Montana State University in 2003, I received two research grants (2004 and 2007) to travel to Turkey to study the use of pattern and design in early Turkish carpets. Terry and I were deeply affected by Turkish architecture, particularly the mosques and ‘tekkes’ with their tiled surfaces covered in Islamic calligraphic text. That experience led to Terry’s realization of the installation Commons and to my immersive, stop-motion animation installations of Black (W)hole and CAVE (2011-2017). My recent large-scale painting and sculpture installations engage painting as a space to walk into, challenging one to perceive painting beyond pictorial or retinal perception. From the materialities of painted surface to sculptural object to architectonic space, I consider painting as a site, a situation, an ever-changing field of operation that is not flat, still or imagistic. I want to give the ‘non-human’ objects the capacity for speech, enabling inanimate things to reflect upon themselves, their histories and the conditions that surround them.

This panoramic view of Terry Karson: Human/Nature: A Retrospective (1950-2017) at the Missoula Art Museum was taken by Josh DeWeese. Following the reception on June 7th, 2024, I have been in dialogue with Chris Karson (Terry’s brother) and Carl Stewart (Terry’s best friend) to situate Terry’s papers and works in a permanent home. I have begun writing an experimental book that engages Terry in a dialogue through his journals from 1994-2017. Stay tuned as that progresses…

“Recycling As Art” by Cory Walsh, Missoulian, 27 June 2024