Tinworks Art Announces 2024 Exhibition Season, The Lay of the Land

Since the 1970s, Stephen Shore has been capturing quotidian scenes that have defined the American experience, both beautiful and banal, and revolutionized color photography as an art form. After a move to Montana in the 1980s, Shore began familiarizing himself with the surrounding land so that he could have “perceptions about it,” before creating images that illuminate the material difference between land and sky. Forty years later, in the height of the pandemic, Shore returned to a consideration of the Montana landscape, taking advantage of the technological possibilities of a drone-mounted Hasselblad camera in order to present a new perspectival approach to photographing land that he “absolutely loves.” The resulting series of images, titled Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape, shot in Montana (and a handful of other places including New York and North Carolina) present views not possible from a terrestrial perspective. From this vantage point Shore reveals the friction of distinct adjacencies found in the American West, where the natural world meets the impact of human presence, demonstrating the idiosyncratic relationships, compositional complexity, and revelatory moments of beauty in land altered by humans and industry.

As a self-taught artist in a rural agricultural community, James Castle used materials at hand—soot from a woodstove, repurposed paper and cardboard, sharpened sticks and pencils—in the creation of an extraordinary body of work documenting the land and landscapes, buildings and structures, and interior and metaphysical spaces of the world around him. The selected drawings on view at Tinworks are grouped around four subject areas: the mountains surrounding his family home in Garden Valley, Idaho, where Castle spent the early part of his life; the family homestead in Garden Valley, depicted from several viewpoints and set within a variety of landscapes; the approach into and details of a paneled attic storeroom; and an interior space with distinctly patterned wallpaper. Drawn primarily from his memory, Castle’s works reveal a vast amount of information, nuance, and sensitivity. His introspective explorations of past environments and experiences through drawings, paper constructions, abstractions, handmade books, and bundled assemblages carry deep emotional resonance and convey the artist’s unique interconnection of nature, memory, consciousness, perception, and wonder.

A newly commissioned sound work by Robbie Wing engages the presence of another force that dramatically shaped the west—the railroad. The sound of trains carrying material for the Burlington Northern Railroad is a daily presence at the Tinworks’ site due to the proximity of the railways that border Bozeman’s northeast neighborhood. Over the past few months, Wing has taken field recordings of the passing trains for the creation of a site-specific sound installation composed of abandoned

railroad ties pulled out of the Tinworks’ field in preparation for planting Denes’ Wheatfield. Working with vibrational histories—the idea that the physical nature of sound can be frozen in time and the frequency elicited from inert material can act as a living entity that has agency—Wing will mix the field recordings with the vibration of acoustically placed speakers and microphones, pulling the frequencies back through the wooden ties to create their own song. “The physicality of sound can tell historical narratives,” Wing explains. “The railroad alters the landscape of many places across the U.S. and especially Montana. My question is, do I know how to listen to a landscape and what is it trying to tell me?”

Two works by Layli Long Soldier, one installed on the façade of a former grain storage building at Tinworks and one situated on the concrete slab at the center of the site, on view since their commission for the 2023 Tinworks’ exhibition Invisible Prairie, highlight lines from Long Soldier’s published poems. Day Poem: Sun Mirrors is a multi-dimensional exploration of Indigenous identity, cultural memory, and the interplay between language and landscape. Her lightbox sculpture, using material reclaimed from a former RV park and café on the Gallatin River, recontextualizes the poet’s experience during her annual solstice trip back to her Lakota homeland to speak more broadly for the diverse communities grappling with the rapid changes of the new American West. At a time when the fertile fields and rolling foothills of the Gallatin Valley around Bozeman are being lost to development and rapid urbanization, Long Soldier’s declaration “I don’t trust nobody but the land” could speak for many of us.

Artist in Residence

This summer Tinworks continues its program of hosting artists on site to conduct research and develop new work. Wills Brewer hand builds ceramic vessels whose forms are based on earth building techniques and traditional brick making the artist learned in the U.S. and Europe. Often made of wild clay, the works are also inspired by Agnes Martin’s repetitive, meditative mark making and her own forays into earthen construction at her home and studio in New Mexico. Brewer will explore the possibility of constructing, firing, and inhabiting a large-scale clay dwelling on the Tinworks’ site.

More information on the artists can be found at tinworksart.org.

Public Programs

Roots in the Sky, July 6 and 7. Montana’s premier chamber choir, Roots in the Sky presents performances of historical and contemporary choral works throughout the region. The group will partner with Tinworks for a two-night presentation of Scott Ordway’s The End of Rain.

Isabel Shaida, July 13 through September 4. Movement artist and community organizer Isabel Shaida will host free workshops for adults and families on the Six Viewpoints by Montana choreographer Mary Overlie, culminating in public performances on September 7 and 14.