Selected Artworks

New Growth, Old Growth

Angela Cieslewitz

charcoal, chalk pastels, watercolor, book pages on paper
2023

Artist-in-Residence at
Selway Bitterroot Frank Church wilderness

This series is born out of extensive time in nature and in solitude. Like most people in the last few years, I have been reflecting on changes to life on earth. I began this series after huge fires burned near my home and I responded by drawing old growth redwoods that have been logged or burnt, which for me embodies an image of irreversible change. Living in times of great change can feel overwhelming and I find that the attention and focus of drawing in nature brings me back to feeling connected to the world. I hope that these pieces will offer that feeling to others.

Copper Kings

Suzanne Hackett-Morgan

Oil on Canvas
2023

Artist-in-Residence at Historic Clark Chateau Museum

What I paint chooses me, and I do my best with any initial inspiration to infuse the depiction with feeling. I love my “Copper Kings.” I saw them sitting at Park and Dakota every day in Uptown Butte and asked them if I could take their photo. I offered them $20, which was the right thing to do.

Where the Water Goes

Kelsie Leonard

Printed dibond, enamel paint, gifted deer scapula
2023

Artist-in-Residence at Flathead Lake Biological Station

All the images in these two groups of work are photos I took while in residence at Flathead Lake Biological Station in October 2022. I was very interested in exploring the scale of the landscape of Montana and how vast it felt. Now that I have returned home to the Northeast, I have been trying to find a way to reach back into my experience and capture visceral moments I had in the landscape and memorialize them as I remember them.

Hidden Truth II

Gunhild Lien

Mixed media
2023

Artist-in-Residence at the Montana Natural History Center

Through the project "Hidden truth" - an artistic exploration of the hidden references from a post-memory material about Norwegian settler colonialism – my grandfather Tor Knutsson Lien's American photographs from Montana (1911-1918.) Forms of memories are explored in artistic and conceptual representations. Methodologically speaking, these forms of representation are "reused" and reassembled through, for example, the use of my own archive material and from the Montana Natural History Center’s archive, including maps, places, flora and fauna, and natural materials.

Lungs

Rachael Marjamaa

Oil on Canvas
2022

Artist-in-Residence at Philipsburg, MT

Lungs is a painting that was completed after reflecting on the residency. After not being able to work my dream career as a beekeeper, I was a little lost. The air conditions your body needs to overcome in the smokey summer months were too much for my body to handle, and I became very sick. As tough as it was to heal my body and find a new way to live, I have had many great experiences carving a new way.

Squash Collage

Jennifer Ogden

Collage
2022

Artist-in-Residence at Flathead Lake Biological Station

I mine through the paper contents of the mailbox, paper ephemera, and art paper in order to apply pattern, texture, and hue to my own people, places, and experiences. Collage is like creating a slowed-down painting where each "brush stroke" is a swath of printed paper glued onto a substrate. As the image emerges, I want to invite the viewer to sift through layers of time, memory, and experience.

Wildman Leaf Bug

Julynn Wildman

Video overlay
2023

Artist-in-Residence at Emlen Biology Lab

Amidst the charismatic animal weapons at the Emlen Lab are terrariums of quaking, climbing leaves. If you pause to look, you see only stillness. Coming closer, you may see the beaded eyes and probing antennae of a leaf insect, camouflaged both by their bodies and their environmentally responsive movement behaviors. I was immediately drawn to their quirky off-balanced lilt, which was a gateway to a larger exploration of insect physiology, sensory systems, and environmental camouflage.