Invisible Prairie
Tinworks Arts
July 7 - Oct 14, 2023
Bozeman Montana
"Invisible Prairie is a multimedia art exhibition that offers a unique opportunity to connect to the poetry, fragility, and mystery of America’s grasslands. The show features seven artists, each of whom explored the sensory experience of the prairie, with a special focus on the importance of sound and the cultural acts of speaking and listening. Intimate and thoughtful, their works collectively encourage meditation, contemplation, and close attention to the place we call home."
From the Exhibition website:
Flanagan’s site-responsive tract series is installed in situ in the Tinworks Art “pigbarn.” The tract series is an expanded experiment of materiality, presence, landscape, and abstraction. While making each tract, she sorts, pours, and places granular materials inside polycarbonate panels which then settle into quiet geological patterns. Over time, the granules she pours accumulate at the bottom of the channels, building up an image that evokes sedimentation, seismographs, feathers, fish scales, and other natural rhythms and phenomena.
For tract (tinworks), Flanagan has gathered materials directly from the site, as well as materials related to prairie ecosystems such as soil, wildfire char, animal fur, and plant matter. The tracts are landscapes by other means; they translate what one sees in the immediate environment into the colors, textures, and patterns of an abstracted composition.
Fort Logan (Formerly Fort Baker) Birdhouse is a scaled-down replica of Fort Logan Blockhouse made into a lightweight sculpture made of blaze orange construction mesh that sits atop a 20 ft pole. The original Fort Logan was designed as a lookout tower and is currently marked as a historical landmark located eighteen miles northwest of the town of White Sulfur Springs, which is about 100 miles north of Bozeman.
Through the subtle movement and quiet sound inherent to her chosen materials, she invites participants to stand near the ghost-like suspended birdhouse to detect the movements, subverting the sensory experience of the solid walls of the original Fort Logan structure into an ‘echo,’ a new version of the Fort that incorporates the landscape into the sculpture rather than orienting the landscape as something to be viewed at a distance.
Included works:
Fort Logan (Formerly Fort Baker) Birdhouse, 2023, aluminum, orange construction mesh, steel, 38” x 43” on a 17’ steel pole
Fort Logan (Formerly Fort Baker) Blockhouse (wall drawing), 2023
cattle marker, chalk, Dimensions variable
tract (ongoing) (20 iterations), 2023, Polycarbonate, wood stands, (Bale Tuff Freedom Wrap, Eagle Industries construction mesh, sage, larkspur, balsam root flower, bear canyon soil, charcoal from wildfire area, dried corn, dried grass, dried peas, golden currant flower, horse manure, juniper, plaster, rose hips, rust, safflower seed, sand, wood shavings) ,each iteration 3.5” x 5”
tract (tinworks), 2023, polycarbonate, rock, granular materials (Bale Tuff Freedom Wrap, Eagle Industries construction mesh, sage, larkspur, balsam root flower, bear canyon soil, blue paint and soil from Tinworks site, charcoal from wildfire area, dried corn, dried grass, dried peas, golden currant flower, horse manure, juniper, plaster, rose hips, rust, safflower seed, sand, wood shavings), 8’ x 4’ x 1’
tract (wildfire), 2023, polycarbonate, rock, granular materials (Eagle Industries construction mesh, balsam root flower, bear canyon soil, charcoal from wildfire area, dried corn, dried grass, dried peas, horse manure, juniper, plaster, rust, safflower seed, sand, wood shavings), 8’ x 4’ x 1’
Documentation by Blair Speed and Ryan Parker