ARTISTS

Tinworks Art presented Invisible Prairie, a new place-based exhibition from July through October, 2023 at Tinworks Art, 719 N Ida in Bozeman’s northeast neighborhood. Invisible Prairie was a multimedia art exhibition that offered a unique opportunity to connect to the poetry, fragility, and mystery of America’s grasslands.

Invisible Prairie featured eight artists, each of whom explored the sensory experience of the prairie, with a special focus on the importance of sound and the cultural acts of speaking and listening. Intimate and thoughtful, their works collectively encouraged meditation, contemplation, and close attention to the place we call home. The exhibition included work by AK Burns, Abby Flanagan, Kite, Tracy Linder, Layli Long Soldier,* Julie Ann Nagle, Laurel Sparks, and Jeff Rice.

Through stories of land, people, and objects left behind; a region defined by wind, erosion, and never-ending sky; and an openness to the grasslands’ unique ways of speaking, Invisible Prairie shed light on the past, present, and the future of this complex region.

*Layli Long Solider’s outdoor works for Invisible Prairie, Day Poem: Sun Mirrors and I don’t trust nobody but the land, are still on view at Tinworks Art.

Curator: Dr Melissa Ragain
Curatorial Assistant: Ash Gingery

A.k. BurnS

* mirrored glass

A.K. Burns created * mirrored glass a series of hand-ladled glass, mirrored with silver nitrate and embedded with various materials and burnouts that disturb the ability of the mirror to reflect the outside world. Instead, they reflect an interior cosmos. The combination of disturbances and various orifices oscillate between being read as faces and punctuation.

Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and associate professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College, City University of New York.

Working at the nexus of language and materiality, Burns troubles systems that assign value and explores their socio-political embodiment.

Burns’ 2023 Tinworks Art installation included * mirrored glass 2019-ongoing, : Leave No Trace (vinyl & poem) 2016, and Untitled (eclipse) 2019.

akburns.net • @aaykayburns • AK Burns for Tinworks

ABBY FLANAGAN

TRACT

Abby Flanagan’s site-responsive tract series was installed in situ in the Tinworks Art “pigbarn.” The tract series was an expanded experiment of materiality, presence, landscape, and abstraction. While making each tract, Flanagan sorted, poured, and placed granular materials inside polycarbonate panels which then settled into quiet geological patterns. Over time, the granules she poured accumulated at the bottom of the channels, building up an image that evoked sedimentation, seismographs, feathers, fish scales, and other natural rhythms and phenomena.

For tract (tinworks), Flanagan gathered materials directly from the Tinworks site, as well as materials related to prairie ecosystems such as soil, wildfire char, animal fur, and plant matter. The tracts were landscapes by other means; they translated what one sees in the immediate environment into the colors, textures, and patterns of an abstracted composition.

Flanagan is an artist living and working in St. Louis, MO. Her work investigates the nature of perception through the techniques of drawing, sculpture, and installation. Underpinning her process is an ongoing inquiry into interconnections between the environment and the shaping of self.

Flanagan’s 2023 Tinworks Art installation included tract (tinworks) 2023, tract (wildfire) 2023, tract (ongoing) (15 iterations) 2023, Fort Logan (Formerly Fort Baker) Birdhouse 2023, and Fort Logan (Formerly Fort Baker) Blockhouse (wall drawing) 2023.

abbyflanagan.com • @absflan • Abby Flanagan for Tinworks

KITE

IRON ROAD

Kite made Iron Road in collaboration with Corey Stover and Becky Red Bow. The video was installed on the floor and documented conversations with her family who did not appear on screen. Instead, drone footage of South Dakota set the stage for the expansive stories they related about family history, important dreams, and the significance of stones in Kite’s family. The story of her great-great grandmother Elizabeth Iron Road escaping the Wounded Knee Massacre on foot was a central part of the piece. Near the monitor, the video’s central story was recounted in Lakota geometric language. Using a design methodology developed by Sadie Red Wing, the speakers in Kite’s video conveyed not only a story about her ancestors but also provided the listener with a lexicon for ‘reading’ the geometric arrangement of stones on the floor.

Kite (Suzanne Kite) is an award-winning Oglála Lakȟóta artist, composer, and academic based in New York. Her scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology (the study of beinghood in Lakȟóta), artificial intelligence, and contemporary art and performance.

Kite’s 2023 Tinworks Art installation included Iron Road in collaboration with Corey Stover and Becky Red Bow, 2021; Wichahpih’a (a clear night with a star-filled sky of a starlit night) 2020; Tho Win (Blue Woman I) 2019; Šuŋg’íkteowápi (Poison Map I) 2023; Wičháȟpiowápi (Star Map I) 2023; and her solar eclipse performance, Aŋpáwi Aíyokpaza.

kitekitekitekite.com • @kitekitekitekitekite • Kite for Tinworks

TRACY LINDER

/weTHər/

Tracy Linder created /weTHər/ for the Tinworks Art site. The artwork consisted of a 64-foot-long suspended sculpture with animal rib bones arranged to mimic the swirls of wind, whirling clouds, and lightning strikes on the prairie, where Linder works as an artist.

Running the length of Tinworks’ Asterisms (Chris Fraser, 2019) space, the white bones starkly contrasted the darkened room and created shadows against the interior walls and floor. Linder developed this idea out of a concern for the history of eastern Montana and how it is changing, especially given current drought conditions.

The title /weTHər/ is a homophone for both weather and whether. 

Linder grew up on a family farm and now lives on the vast windswept prairie of south-central Montana where she sources material. Linder uses found and natural objects such as bone, leather, seeds, leaves, and grasses, often combined with resin and beeswax.

Linder’s sculptures and installations address our integral connection to the land, the sanctity of our food sources, and the innate survival skills of all species.

Linder was awarded a Tinworks Art 2021 Artist Grant.

tracylinder.com • @tracylinder • Tracy Linder for Tinworks

LAYLI LONG SOLDIER

Day Poem: Sun Mirrors

In January 2023, Layli Long Soldier released a series of eight poems, commissioned by the Holt/Smithson Foundation in Santa Fe.

Long Soldier is known for her keen attention to how a poem’s visual language can contribute to its content, just as written language does. She conceived her first large scale sculpture Day Poem: Sun Mirrors for Tinworks Art using excerpts from her Day/Night series, creating a dynamic, spatial experience of language.

Long Soldier is an artist, poet, and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She lives in Santa Fe, NM.

Long Soldier’s 2023 Tinworks Art installations included Day Poem: Sun Mirrors 2023 and I don’t trust nobody but the land 2023. Both artworks remain on view at Tinworks Art at 719 N Ida and Cottonwood.

Long Soldier for Tinworks

JULIE ANN NAGLE

AFTERGLOW

Julie Ann Nagle’s project for Tinworks Art, Afterglow, combined sculpture and painting to create an interactive environment that rewarded close looking. While visiting Colorado in 2020, Nagle learned about the abundance of naturally-occurring radon seeping out of the ground in large parts of the state. She had also been working with a new strategy for making paintings such as Blaze using foraged materials from the western landscape, particularly “ecotones,” or zones where two ecosystems meet. The result was an unexpected combination of acrylic and phosphorescent paint on canvas, brass wire, and beads. She illuminated certain aspects of this landscape painting by using a second phosphorescent image, which appears in darkness or under blacklight, to allude to the duality of the invisible dangers in this sublime terrain.  

Nagle is an “unarcheologist,” creating and accumulating layers of narrative for viewers to disassemble. She lives and works in New York, NY.

Nagle’s 2023 Tinworks Art installations included Afterglow 2023, A Seed to Eat the World 2019/2023, Night Spinning (webs) 2022-2023.

julieannnagle.com • @julieannnagle_studio • Nagle for Tinworks

JEFF RICE

Hidden Soundscapes

Jeff Rice’s Hidden Soundscapes featured a series of rare and fleeting sonic moments. Visitors were dropped into the middle of a bison herd. They walked through a dawn chorus of songbirds and heard the cacophony of tens of thousands of sandhill cranes. The proximity of the microphone provided a close-up and unique perspective on the often hidden world of prairie soundscapes.

Grasslands, where they exist, support some of the richest biodiversity on earth. This exhibit documented and celebrated that biodiversity while acknowledging the fragile beauty of prairie ecosystems and the need to preserve them. With the help of Tinworks, Rice presented these sounds — from coyotes to chorus frogs — in a fully immersive multi-speaker audio format. Recording locations include Montana’s American Prairie and sites in Texas, Indiana, Nebraska, and Washington. 

Jeff Rice is a Seattle-based sound artist with a long-standing interest in natural soundscapes.He is the co-founder of the Acoustic Atlas at the Montana State University Library where he curates a collection of thousands of natural sound recordings from around the western United States.

ecosystemsound.com • Rice for Tinworks

LAUREL SPARKS

Settler Séance

Settler Seance was an environment of geometric patterns and objects based on genealogical research into Sparks’ working class Bozeman history.

Sparks is the great-great granddaughter of Julius Lehrkind, who stowed away on a ship from Germany to escape war with Denmark and eventually settled in Bozeman to start a brewery. The project was site-specific, as Tinworks Art is located in the heart of the historic brewery district developed by Lehrkind in 1895. Settler Seance acknowledged and paid tribute to four generations of the Lehrkind family who lived and/or frequented family gatherings at the historic Lehrkind Mansion.

Settler Seance included a 15-foot geometric wall painting that diagramed her maternal bloodline. The painted wall and existing black and white checkered floor were overlaid with paintings and wooden sculptures created as ceremonial objects for each family member. Using Hermetic Magic correspondence systems, Sparks translated the letters of 24 names into colorful patterns to unlock their hidden resonances. In tandem with paintings and objects, a video screening synthesized oral histories, field recordings, and text with corresponding musical chords and color sequences composed by Shawn E Hansen.

Laurel Sparks is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work applies esoteric correspondence systems to materialize structures outside of perceptible reality.

laurelsparks.com • @sparxxx • Sparks for Tinworks