The Emerson Center for the Arts & Culture is pleased to host its newest shows featuring emerging artists from our community.
Montana-born multidisciplinary artist Jessie Moore showcases Finding, an array of her work, in the Jessie Wilber Gallery.
The show is a simple celebration of finding things, beautiful and satisfying. With this collection, Moore hopes to honor the pleasure of encountering things that strike a spark inside of viewers. Over the last few years, she has traveled around the open spaces and abandoned places of Montana, collecting both images with her Hasselblad film camera, as well as tangible things left behind, in creation of these pieces.
“I wanted to bring the photographs to life with the framing and the found objects incorporated into the final pieces,” she says. “I feel it lightens them up and brings some dimension and interactiveness to them.”
Brazilian paint artist Bruna Massadas unveils Mountain Pose in the Weaver Room.
The exhibition was born from visual mantras: I am a mountain. I am solid. I am grounded. After many dramatic changes in Massadas’ life, including the birth of her son, mantras like these have helped with coping in a world of impermanence.
“The term ‘mountain pose’ has two meanings,” she describes. “In one sense, it’s the name of a grounded position I often use when I’m seeking a brief moment of meditative silence. In another sense, the imagined mountains in these paintings are posing for me: much like sitters for a portrait, they have stilled themselves in my mind so I could capture them. These paintings are portraits of the quietest parts of my consciousness.”
New Objectives showing in the Emerson Lobby is an exhibition by photographer Steven B Jackson.
“I have a long fascination with the meanings we ascribe to objects,” he says. “The selection and arrangement of objects in my work is an exploration of ideas and experiences through a process of formal and conceptual constructions. Photography and digital technologies provide me with a means of collecting and manipulating the elements of my artistic process.
“Current works begin with sketches, studio assemblage, scans and digital camera images that evolve over several days or months through collecting, arrangement, juxtaposition and digital manipulation. During this camera, studio and computer process, ideas evolve conceptually, striving for a balance of object, idea and aesthetic improvisation.”
All exhibits are open the public, on display through February 23rd. 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. •
