The Emerson Center for the Arts & Culture is pleased to host its newest shows featuring emerging artists from our community.
Jennifer Combe unveils Flat Lens in the Weaver Room. Drawing from autobiography, she locates the essence of an experience and then distills her understanding into simplified, often geometric, forms which helps deconstruct cultural paradigms that complicate interpretation and meaning.
“My research and artistic work explore cultural constructs around gender and mothering, ability, and schooling. Working in the studio involves a form of meditation and contemplative translation of experiences and anxieties through the direct process of applying paint or fabric to various surfaces such as glass, panel, linen, or paper,” she states.
“Non-objective abstraction allows an ambient space for the ambiguities of memory and the tumult of emotion to be freely realized. Often working in multiples, I process experiences in singular works and then rejoin the simplified forms to make a complex, yet fleeting whole. My hope is to claim control over the ambiguities of experience and emotion, if even for a moment.”
Montana photographer Matthew Hamon showcases an array of his exposures in the Jessie Wilber Gallery. Selected photographs are from an ongoing project that includes landscapes, portraits and architectural images of the rural American West, that contemplate the drosscape between industry and wildlands, progress and stasis.
Hamon notes, “I’m interested in the legacy of the myths of the West, and the associated nostalgia, longing and melancholy in tension with the unknowable power of nature and the clumsy legacy of man that seems ongoing.”
Barns, Bovine & Botanicals showing in the Emerson Lobby is an exhibition by Shari Chandler. The body of work has emerged from the artist’s whole world being a series of paintings, being unable to view it in any other way.
She explains, “Daily, in the beauty around me; trees, clouds, snow, light, color, I am inspired, and already imagining the scene as a painting. Painting is my way of saying, ‘this scene, this is how I see it, this is the world I live in.’”
All exhibits are open the public, on display through September 1st. For gallery hours and more information, please visit www.theemerson.org. Located at 111 S Grand Ave., the Emerson Center for the Arts & Culture serves as a primary resource for the arts, arts education, and cultural activities in Southwest Montana. •
