Standing in the River

The Standing in the River exhibition and catalogue began when I received a letter from Barbara O’Brien in January 2023 about working together on an in-depth project. Barbara is the former Executive Director of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. My first experience of Barbara was hearing her keynote talk at the International Encaustic conference in Provincetown, MA, when she spoke about the encaustic work of artist Petah Coyne. Barbara has developed a particular interest and expertise in artists who work in the medium of encaustic.

Following that conference, I reached out to Barbara to write a catalogue essay on my Dialogue series, ten encaustic paintings that used my father’s US patent images along with his own handwritten notes and drawings as a probe of the imaginal (as opposed to imaginary) realm that connected us forty years after his death. The 2013 Soundings exhibition was a collaborative exhibition with the creatives in my family based on my father’s legacy as a physicist, mechanical engineer, and inventor. It was shown at the Ucross Foundation and a catalogue was produced to accompany that show, for which Barbara wrote the primary essay. That was eleven years ago.

In the past few months, I have worked closely with Barbara as she selected the work for this solo traveling exhibition. I have worked with both Barbara and her designer Claudia Marchand to envision the exhibition catalogue. We assembled a ‘faux show’ for the catalogue photography so that the images emphasize the relationship of the paintings and sculptures in space. This offers the reader who may not experience the show first hand a sense of the conversation that takes place between the paintings, the sculpture and the viewers themselves. This spatial interaction is a primary concern for me as an artist.

Standing in the River, 2023
encaustic on Encausticbord, 72” x 108”

Standing in the River is the title of the largest painting in the exhibition, which is a 72” x 108” encaustic painting that is immersive experiential. The sensibility of standing within the environment of a painting echoes my all-encompassing experience of open land, water and sky in Montana, which was a major shift in my work when I moved here in 1991. This body of work created from 2022-2024 embodies the inextricable link between the land I inhabit and the work I produce. It is a step back, a meditative effort to let human thought and opinion cease in order to give voice to the living earth around me.

Four exhibitions are currently being scheduled for the following venues: the Montana Museum of Art and Culture in Missoula, MT; the Art Museum of Eastern Idaho in Idaho Falls, ID; the Danforth Museum in Livingston, MT and Montana State University’s Helen E. Copeland Gallery, Bozeman, MT.  Caleb Fey, our MSU galleries director, is sponsoring this traveling exhibition through the Montana Art Galleries Directors Association or MAGDA through January 2027. Watch my Instagram for forthcoming details on the dates for these exhibitions!