The Emerson Center for the Arts & Culture is pleased to host its newest shows featuring emerging artists from our community.
Jane Herzog, Carly Schoen, Tuk Vaughankraska and Anglea Yonke showcase Naptime, their collaborative work, in the Weaver Room Gallery.
Close your eyes and drift to sleep. Let the collective unconsciousness wash over you. Dream beneath layers of thread and fabric. Possibilities and alternate realities await you. The presenting artists have a passion for working with fabric and sewn mediums. This show gathers together blankets, quilts and textile works from each.
Herzog is a printmaker and textile artist from Minnesota, living and working in Bozeman. Schoen is a multimedia artist, also from Minnesota, who lives in Livingston, where she runs a custom sewing business. Vaughankraska challenges conventional notions of textiles, transforming them into expressive portraits that delve into the complexities of both hidden and shared interiority. A multimedia artist in nature, Yonke’s work blends together photography, video, installation, performance, sewing and textiles, clay and sculpture.
Montana paint artist Ophelia Easton unveils Made for These Times in the Jessie Wilber Gallery.
This body of work is about how it feels to be a young woman, born in the windblown plains of North Central Montana, facing an era of great change and pressure from all sides.
“These pieces are about survival, saying ‘hell no,’ and standing up for what I love. Growing up in Montana, most of the art I have seen is rooted in desire, fantasy, and possession: a wild horse that would soon be broken, a life of camping under the moonlit sky, a group of stereotypically picturesque American Indians. Though easy on the eyes, these pictures never felt like an echo of home to me.
“Sure, I’ve spent days fishing a clear creek, making camp in the backcountry, hunting for game in the hills. But Montana has always had another side to it, rooted in poverty, addiction, violence and exploitation. The Montana I grew up in didn’t have remote jobs, Teslas, or fashionable workwear. It had $1.39 lg. fountain pop, 4 inch blades in pants’ side pockets, and piles of sawdust to catch the blood of the elk carcass hanging in the garage.
“Since the great influx of pandemic Yellowbellies playing cowboy, the subsequent housing crisis, and amplified political division, life in Montana has changed for everyone. My home, my family, and my body, things I used to feel free with, have become something I now feel the need to defend. Montana women have a reputation for being fiercely independent and self-made. Now, more than ever, we all need to apply our strength to togetherness, clarity of vision, and radical joy.”
Both exhibits are open the public, on display through Jan. 31st. 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. •
