ARTISTS

TINWORKS ART ENCOURAGES ARTISTS TO FREELY PURSUE THEIR DREAMS, WHICH BRINGS A HIGH LEVEL OF LIVELY AND ENGAGING ART TO THE COMMUNITY.

— JAY SCHMIDT, TINWORKS ART ARTIST, 2021

In 2021, Tinworks Art curated a multimedia art experience entitled “The Pursuit of Happiness” at two historic locations in Bozeman: The Rialto and Story Mill.

The exhibition explored topics such as unity in democracy, individual and collective wellbeing, lateral power structures, and more. Local artists, carefully selected from the Montana arts community, were set in conversation with artists working nationally and internationally.

Community and educational programming — from workshops to interactive experiences — activated the static works of art and transformed them into catalysts for conversations about what it means to be happy in a democratic society.

Curators, Dr. Melissa Ragain and Eli Ridgway
Curatorial Assistant, Angela Yonke
Education and Fabrication Intern, Gabriel Avis

HE’S FRIENDLY

by jesse albrecht

Since 2001, Jesse Albrecht’s work has focused first on the impending war following September 11, and then his subsequent deployment to Iraq in the fall of 2003 which interrupted his graduate art education. In the fall of 2019, Albrecht spent seven weeks at the Trauma Recovery Unit at the VA Hospital in Helena. Along with other veterans, many of whom were Native American, he continued the long process of healing from the trauma of war.

In the intervening years he has achieved newfound levels of health and happiness, much of which was facilitated by his family and especially his daughter. From “Beauty and the Beast” to Kung Fu Panda, Albrecht has discovered powerful resonance with the optimistic and empowering culture of her world.

For Tinworks Art 2021, Albrecht created an ambitious array of new vessels and updated red-clay vessels that were started seven years ago, before his recovery. Seeking to expand his imagery from that focused on war and the human capacity for evil, he incorporated observational landscapes as well as hopeful imagery created in collaboration with his daughter.

War and its aftermath continue to be explicit themes. However, Albrecht’s focus has shifted from the scale of the military-industrial complex to the more intimate world he touches directly. His new work considers the complex and often contradictory positions he finds himself in as a veteran, a white man, a patient, a friend, and a parent.

QUIESCENCE OF IALDOBOATH

BY ROLLIN BEAMISH

The title and salient motifs for this work were inspired by Gnostic assertions about the nature and origin of the universe. Most of these sects believed that an intermediary creator — the demiurge — was responsible for the creation and organization of the material world. However, this demiurge is a capricious and often malevolent being, unaware of its derivation from the true, hidden God. Thus, Gnostics argued that what was presented in this material world was deceptive, and that true salvation could only occur in pursuit of hidden insight (the name derives from gnosis: the Greek for knowledge based on personal experience or perception). “Ialdabaoth” was a cool name some sects (like the Sethians) used to refer to this false creator. 

Regardless of one’s beliefs about the creation of the universe, the story of the demiurge is perhaps redolent of an over-fixation on the ahistorical primacy of certain collective institutions or structures of political economy. To be sure, categories like capitalism and “the market,” “the media,” and/or varied political or governmental institutions, could be (and often are) bandied around as signal arbiters of the material world and existence — in other words sui generis creative “forces” that transcend material history and social determination. To what extent such structures could be thought of as “false creators,” ignorant of their own histories, is perhaps an amusing and instructive game one can play to shift perspective on ideas often taken for granted. The main difference from Gnosticism might be to simply eschew fixation on some kind of “true-truth” that will be revealed as a final insight. 

At the very least, this installation was made in the hopes of casting a jaundiced eye upon the vagaries of capital and “the media” — and to hopefully amuse as well. The quiescence referred to in the title is a ward against the continued lethargy of our social and political categories and institutions. Once revolutionary, dynamic, or apocalyptic in their own right, perhaps their time has finally come. We can hope, at least.

An Eclipse of Moths

by GREGORY CREWDSON

“Eclipse” is the collective noun for a group moths, an appropriate choice since moths gather around and consequently blot out light. “An Eclipse of Moths” is also the title of this new body of work by world-renowned photographer Gregory Crewdson. 

Since the late 1980s, Crewdson has used photographic mises-en-scène to explore themes of alienation, and dislocation within American culture. His surreal images are often melancholic, offering ambiguous narratives that blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. Working with large production teams to scout and shoot his images, his photographs have become increasingly complex as if they were a motion picture production, requiring dozens of assistants, Hollywood-style lighting, and specially crafted stage sets. 

Meticulously staged scenes like those in “Eclipse of Moths” undercut the bucolic and pastoral aesthetics of middle-class American with an ominous sense of foreboding. Crewdson’s large-scale photographs drop the viewer into the middle of an unfolding but opaque narrative, leaving them to fill in the details, like a detective searching for clues to a crime. Tinworks is pleased to present two works from this new series, Red Star Express and Royal Cleaners. While these complex and evocative images were created in 2018 and 2019, they are eerily appropriate to our new socially distant way of life. Figures sit or stand far away from one another and far away from narrative events, charging the space between them with mystery. In all of the images, the earth is damp from a recent rainfall. Steam rises from the hot, wetted ground as it cools, but it appears to provide little relief to the tiny characters that populate the scenes. Storms have long been used by American landscape painters and photographers as a visual metaphor for imminent or receding catastrophe. How one reads this particular storm may serve a Rorschach test for the one’s own faith in history in the summer of 2020.

the crossing

conducted by donald Nally

In partnership with the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Tinworks Art hosted two-time Grammy-award-winning choir The Crossing at the historic Story Mill in Bozeman, as part of the choir’s summer residency in Montana. The one-hour program focused on new commissions that address the American condition.

Gavin Bryars, “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” (1971/2021)
Renowned contemporary composer Gavin Bryars created a vocal arrangement of his 1971 looped composition “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet,” which was performed at Tinworks Art @ Story Mill in the summer of 2021. Bryars is one of Britain’s most influential living composers. His early work was notable for its use of indeterminacy, found audio, and minimal arrangements while his more recent catalogue fuses these motifs with the richness of choral and orchestral music.

Ayanna Woods, “Shift” (2020)
New to The Crossing, composer Ayanna Woods wrote the words for “Shift” in which she contemplates the reimagining of our monuments. The work built up through layers to its climactic arrival, "bursting through the cracks in the story you tell, America."

David Lang, “In Nature” (2020)
Lang’s “In Nature” was commissioned by The Crossing and WMPAC and was specifically designed for performance during the pandemic, when the performers had to sing at a distance from one another.

SPOT

by KAROLINA HALATEK

Installed in the historic Rialto Theater, light and fog formed a volume of light inside a circle fixed to the ceiling. Visitors were invited to enter and explore the center of the construct, illuminated by the continuous light cone. In doing so, they became the center of the work themselves, similar to a stage. Through the fog and the harsh light, the outside world was excluded; the focus completely shifted to the visitors, whose perception was challenged by the unknown.

Installation originally commissioned by EVI Lichtungen, International Light Art Biennale in Hildesheim, Germany.

HASINAI (Caddo) : Our People

by Raven halfmoon

Ceramic sculptor Raven Halfmoon answered the call for new forms of public art that reflect the values and realities of contemporary Americans. HASINAI (Caddo) : Our People, is monumental in scale and heft; the work is comprised of two stacked clay forms weighing around 400 lbs each. The sculpture reaches 9 feet high.

Halfmoon’s work is anchored in Caddo ceramic traditions which were revived most famously by Jeri Redcorn in the 1990s. Known for its bulbous forms, dark brown or black surfaces into which were carved intricate patterns, traditional Caddo pottery is much revered. Such traditions inform Halfmoon’s practice, as does her experience as a millennial woman: “[My] artwork is born from Caddo history, cultural heritage, political movements, conversations I have with people regarding native issues, music, fashion, and the internet. Through my sculptures, I want to tell a story both of how one understands self and culture, but also what defines these ideals in America today. ”

Halfmoon’s work frequently references the female form, often doubled or stacked to suggest the compounding of female experience over generations, as well as the multiplicity of identities within a single woman’s experience. The stacked figures also echo her studio process in which she coil-builds by hand forms that can reach up to six-feet-tall. Rather than a smooth polished surface, Halfmoon prefers to leave the marks of her hand visible as the result of an intensely physical production process and frequently uses glaze as a painterly tag.

Combined with her monumental scale, the labor-intensive process can be powerfully emotional but also wry, witty, and fun. The piece Halfmoon created with her 2021 Tinworks Artist Grant responds to the recent removal and reframing of public monuments connected to white supremacy and colonization. The result was an image of towering indigenous femininity, at once contemporary and enduring.

MOVEMENTS4MOVEMENTS

movements4movements.com | @movements4movements

Movements4Movements (M4M) is a collective based in Missoula, Montana. It offers dance and movement therapy workshops to communities such as underfunded schools, boys' and girls' clubs, veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress, Native American reservations, treatment centers, refugee camps, and many more communities encountering social, economic, and cultural barriers.

For the 2021 summer season, M4M collaborated with Tinworks Art in a series of performance-based installations. Students from M4M performed at both Tinworks Art venues, whenever a crowd formed. Audiences also gathered for special improvised performances by M4M founder, Quentin Robinson.

M4M explores how emotions and trauma, as an individual experience, can feel and be isolating. Without support or a way to express our true feelings we can get lost in the heaviness of the task. By acknowledging that others may be going through a similar experience and through sharing, compassion and empathy we can connect to one another and support each other’s experiences, not taking away from our own experience, yet helping to elevate each other and heal. M4M hopes to demonstrate how powerful a tool movement can be to express, encourage compassion, and even empathy to connect one another in our experiences and support each other in healing. Movement is a powerful language and one that can be used to find unity through compassion.

To date, M4M has partnered with and provided movement opportunities to Camp Mak-A-Dream MT for those battling cancer and to the families of those battling and/or lost a family member to cancer, in local schools, Youth Homes, Soft Landing Missoula, along with many other communities and organizations.

STRANGE MATING CALLS

by nervous theatre

Strange Mating Calls was a live theatrical performance that reimagined Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema. The original film centered on an upper-middle class nuclear family in Milan who is visited by a mysterious guest. The guest radically disrupts the family structure, only to depart as suddenly as he arrived, leaving the family to confront their own ‘bourgeois’ identities and assumptions.

Pasolini’s sparse script — only 923 words spoken in the entire film — serves as a neo-Marxist allegory, begging the question: What happens when we are suddenly forced to really look at ourselves, our ideologies, our identities, our place in society, our repressed desires, all at once?

Nervous Theatre’s adaptation, Strange Mating Calls, borrowed the central ‘event’ of Pasolini’s film, dropping the family into the here-and-now. While much of the structure of the piece was pre-determined, the dramatic content was largely informed by the cast and the performance space of Tinworks Art @ Story Mill.

tucker nichols

tuckernichols.com | @tuckernichols

Tucker Nichols created this large-scale, double-sided mural of flowers and mountains during his time spent in Bozeman in the summer of 2021. Raised in California, Nichols’ depiction of the area represents an outsider’s vantage, exploring ideas about how place is represented and how different people see the same landscape.

GUERRIERS DE L'INNOCENCE

by RAISON D'ÊTRE DANCE PROJECT

Exploring Tinworks Art’s summer exhibition prompt “The Pursuit of Happiness,” Raison D'être Dance Project (RDDP) and local musician Mark Levy collaborated to create this work specifically designed for Tinworks Art @ Story Mill. Guerriers de l’Innocence was performed in the warehouse space; dancers moved seamlessly among existing art installations by Jim Zimpel and Tucker Nichols.

Throughout Guerriers de l'Innocence (warriors of innocence), the dance and music were a synchronic conversation that highlighted the collective. As RDDP described it, “The musician keeps a militant measure of time, camouflaging fragility with its steady beat. At birth we enter the world as pure biology. Fear is not yet known to us. The dancers expand into the space to explore through movement conversations how virtue is born and how its purity can be preserved. Our collective shreds of innocence combine to empower and strengthen us.”

ACCESSION

by WENDY RED STAR

In Accession, Red Star presented a new series of prints based on her research as the Native Artist-in-Residence at the Denver Art Museum. Red Star discovered a trove of hand-painted card catalogs from the Works Progress Administration era that detailed the museum’s holdings of Native objects, including such items as clothing, moccasins, leggings, belts, and elk tooth dresses.  On one side of each 5x8-inch card was a watercolor illustration of the object beautifully rendered by anonymous artists, who were often out-of-work commercial illustrators assigned to the Museums Extensions Projects during the 1930s-1970s.

Red Star felt an instant kinship to the works, “I felt a connection with the artists who created the work, and I was jealous of the time they got to spend with my ancestors’ materials,” she explains.

She took digital copies of forty of these cards to the Crow Nation’s annual Crow Fair, held every third week in August since 1904 along the Little Bighorn River. Nearly 50,000 people attend the fair, including around 11,000 enrolled tribal members, almost 80 percent of the Crow tribe. Every family constructs a camp, and members of the Apsáalooke gather every morning during the weeklong celebration for a parade symbolizing the moving of camp, an action that expresses the deep-rooted cultural tradition of movement in Apsáalooke society.

Using the objects depicted on the catalog cards as points of reference, she took snapshots of similar Crow material worn during the parades. Waiting at the gathering place for the parade to begin, she identified individual parade goers and paired them with the most appropriate item cataloged on the cards, isolating intimate moments in the photographs and removing the backgrounds. In doing so, the subjects, the detail of their outfits, their facial expressions, and their finely-adorned horses came into sharper focus, highlighting the richness of Crow culture and giving context to the catalog cards themselves.

Items once draped on horses, cars, or the arms and bodies of Apsáalooke women, men, boys, and girls are linked to each of the illustrations on the catalog cards. “I am amazed by the similarities in the coupling of a photograph of a martingale on my daughter's parade horse with a WPA artist’s brilliantly-crafted drawing of a beaded geometric martingale from the 1930s,” says Red Star, “Sweat stains from the horses and grass stains from playful children offer insights into the utilitarian beauty of objects meant to be in motion. It demonstrates the strong cultural connection that the Crow community maintains through the generations.”

THESE ARE NOT FABLES

by macon reed

These Are Not Fables was a large-scale sculptural installation reflecting on individual and collective experiences of COVID-19. During vaccinations, waning infection rates, and glimmers of hope, this project proposed an intentional transition into an eventual post-pandemic life: What did we learn? How do we honor what has been lost? What do we want to remember from this strange and difficult year that may get lost as “normal” life opens up?

What do we want to commit to changing, and how do we do that? What are rituals for remembering? In a series of altars for reflection on these questions and a variety of pandemic themes, These Are Not Fables offered viewers simple rituals to understand our shared experience in the larger context of plagues across human history.

The wide opening of the installation structure, lined with hot pink velvet and a hand-painted checkerboard floor, narrowed as viewers crossed it. At the end of the passage, a large tarot card sculpture slow spun over two chalices, suggesting that a decision needed to be made. This tarot card traditionally suggested a moment of either total destruction, or necessary de-construction leading to healing and growth. While spinning, it asked the public to consider how they wanted to see the moment we lived through together: as an opportunity for rebuilding or devastation. Altars in the space were dedicated to distance/ isolation, the passing of time, failed attempts at treating plagues from across history (AZT from HIV/AIDS, 1918 breathing machines, bleach from COVID, blood-letting from the Bubonic plague), ecological impacts, protests, and more. A coffin sculpture meant that people could lay down in to contemplate their own mortality, in the spirit of being more mindful of how we spend our time here on Earth.

OK, BOOMER

by jay schmidt

The images that populate paintings of Jay Schmidt originate in the darkest parts of our political present. OK, Boomer, painted in black-and-white across (TKKT) canvases and totaling 22 feet long, harkened back to Picasso’s most well-known political work, Guernica, which protested the bombing of innocent civilians during the Spanish Civil War. Schmidt’s work is similarly topical and journalistic, unfolding from a stream-of-consciousness painting process during which images from popular culture, art history, and political rhetoric combine and recombine into a roiling phantasmagoria. 

Working within the tradition of the satirical grotesque, Schmidt’s paintings simultaneously convey pain and disgust with our proto-Fascist present alongside self-deprecating humor and a total lack of preciousness. The work’s title Ok, Boomer, for example, coopted the frankly ageist catchphrase of Generation Z. Schmidt, born in 1952 and part of the baby boomer generation, happily played up his role as the abject harbinger of ecological, ideological, and financial collapse. OK, Boomer was painted over a previous painting titled the Four Horsemen; the new work maintained the four-part structure, recasting its boomer protagonists as a mythological riders that ushered in the apocalypse.

hat, set, portrait series

by jim zimpel

HAT COMPRESSOR, 2010 ( ongoing )
hats, plywwod, dowel rods

SET (WOOD), 2011
wood scraps, wood putty, plastic, stainless steel, enamel paint

PORTRAIT (WADERS), 2012
Grandpa George’s waders hung on a nail on a dark pencil line 5’9” (my height) off the ground.

UNTITLED (FIRST COLLABORATION), 2016
oak, rope, tarp, fishing net, orange chair, plywood, knives, baby food jars, hardware, steel, enamel paint, garden hoses

UNTITLED (DISPLAY FIXTURE | GEORGE'S WORK | COBBLE), 2018
cobble (steel mill mishap) , melamine, mirror, enamel paint, walnut

UNTITLED (GEORGE BUST), 2019
pink insulation foam, gorilla glue, rebar (steel), rubber, tape, enamel paint, bondo, concrete, gel medium, office chair components

In this grouping of three sculptures, Zimpel explores his relationship to his grandfather, the titular George, and the aesthetics of American masculinity and kinship formation. The language is that of the suburban garage —insulation, plywood, tape—all of which express bonds of intergenerational affection through acts of construction, repair, and service. Zimpel pays homage not only to the products of George’s workshop but also to the elaborate and innovative storage systems that he used to order a thrifter’s array of used and reusable materials. Despite all attempts at uniformity and control, these systems are always idiosyncratic and specific, exemplifying a form of care-work acceptable for American men. At the same time Zimpel’s attention to these idiosyncrasies creates a loving portrait of George.