Open AIR artists bring new styles, perspectives

That’s how the Open AIR artist residency program works. Some of the final products are on view in the Zootown Arts Community Center this month for “In-Habit,” which collects artists’ work from sites around western Montana during residencies in 2023.

For instance, take a series of drawings of wildflowers. To the program’s executive director, Stoney Samsoe, it’s a “melding of the circumstances of life meets place-based work,” Samsoe said.

Erin DiGiovanni, an artist based in Tucson, Arizona, was spending the summer hiking in Glacier National Park and working at a restaurant in East Glacier, the Two Medicine Grill. Open AIR had lined up another artist for its residency at the Castle Butte lookout in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, but they dropped out. Samsoe reached out to DiGiovanni, an alum from a previous year’s residency.

She spent two weeks drawing from life, including plants and wildflowers. In the show, you’ll see an unusual canvas: used checks from the restaurant, with orders written in large, loopy print.

“That’s one of the things that you see in all of these pieces,” Samsoe said. “The artists are bringing themselves along in each of the pieces they create. They show up as people, filled with thoughts and experiences and questions, and their presence on site is always a negotiation of what they’re bringing to that experience and also what they’re discovering while they’re there.”

For instance, Charlie Dov Schön came from Massachusetts for a residency at the Flathead Lake Biological Station. She’s represented in the gallery exhibition by two textile pieces. One work, titled “home/land,” includes those two words in pink and bright yellow. She knitted the yarn into a horizontal heating vent that, when framed, doesn’t signal its original purpose.

A set of two weavings titled “delta” could appear at first to be striped wall hangings in black and green. As she explains in her Instagram post, the stripes’ gradations are based on data of the lake level.

“Each weaving measures water level from June 1-Sept. 30 in the respective year. A bright green row means the level went up from the previous day, grey it stayed same, black it decreased. From the concentrations of green and black it can be seen that this year the lake level dropped far earlier in the season than in 2019. This has been attributed to a lessened snowpack in the glaciers that feed the lake, as well as regional drought.”

The Open AIR program began back in 2019 as a collaboration between Samsoe and Hadley Ferguson, a Missoula painter and muralist. The nonprofit held its annual auction in November at the Missoula Public Library and raised $40,000. Over time, it’s expanded its sessions, which run from spring through fall, and added more locations.

For the upcoming year, new sites include the Dry Cottonwood Field Center outside Anaconda, in a partnership with the Clark Fork Coalition; and the Imagine Butte Resource Center. Applications for all sites are open through Jan. 18 at openairmt.org.

This year, they had their first collaboration with American Prairie, a nonprofit reserve in north-central Montana.

The three artists are Brandon Reintjes, a painter and the senior curator at the Missoula Art Museum; Melissa Kwasney, the former Montana poet laureate, and Delia Touché, a printmaker, bookmaker and quilter. Kwasney is represented with two poems, written in single-word lines, printed on maps of AP’s acreage.

Touché, a member of the Spirit Lake Tribe from North Dakota, is exhibiting a quilt, “Runnin’ on Indian Time,” in a stair-step geometric outline, with internal patterns that are equally free, except for a bison figure tucked into one section. In her artist statement, Touché cited the influence of the color relationships of the area and animal silhouettes. She explains the title is a play on a phrase that’s often derogatory, but can also mean “you leave/arrive/whenever the spirit moves you,” and “it will be done when it was meant to be done.”

“Time didn’t really exist during my residency,” she wrote, adding, “I didn’t need to be in a hurry to get somewhere or do something. I ran on my time.”

Reintjes applied without a particular project in mind other than his main body of painting, which Samsoe told him was fine: If you have too firm of an idea going in, it might not pan out and you’d have to start from scratch on site.

While the connection between often geometric two-dimensional abstract painting and landscape might seem vague, he sees it directly.

“All the activities that I do are about landscapes and mapping,” he said.

Think orienteering, hunting, hiking and backpacking. He also finds a spiritual component to locating one’s place on earth and ties to older visual spiritual traditions.

However, it was an unusual fall, with hot weather that made painting difficult — the paint could dry, and even when it didn’t, bugs might get stuck in it.

He ended up taking long walks of 5 to 6 miles every day, and noticed the spine-like rough symmetry of his environment.

He switched to black-and-white ink drawings of bison bones, the Judith River, tree branches, owl feathers.

“Antler Shed,” with its mirror form, indeed looks like an antler shed, but if you didn’t read the label it might not come to you on its own. While the works have a direct reference, he said he wanted them to be mysterious and not too literal.

He said they had discussions about the residency as a whole: Why are they there? Is it to render that place or to burrow further into their own work?

“It can’t just be about replicating or reproducing,” he said.

“You have to have some sort of an interpretation in there, or a filter through your experience,” he said.

Justine Lai, a New York artist who works in hand-drawn animation, applied for a residency at the Missoula Public Library to get access to the equipment in the MakerSpace.

“She was using the laser engraver to help create supportive architecture for her to make her handmade films faster,” Samsoe said.

A loop of the splashy animation, which has all the flowing, messy sprawl that’s gone in finely calibrated digital works, plays on a large-screen television in the gallery.

Touché’s not the only textile artist present. Samsoe said the program has had a number of applicants in fiber and textiles. “It’s such a flexible medium,” she said, and one that “speaks to the boundary between craft and fine arts and gets into a conversation around accessibility,” who makes art, women’s work and more.

Hannah Allen, a Kentucky artist, works in the medium of quilts. She used the MakerSpace’s laser engravers to create templates for quilt patterns. Her piece, “Both Sides Now,” is a two-sided quilt that’s arranged vertically like a sculpture, rising in the shape of a wide, cumulonimbus cloud.

She was “thinking about landscape and sky and the ephemeral nature of that,” Samsoe said.

While the residencies are open to all media, writers are less common. One writer last season was Ryn Stafford, a Black playwright from St. Paul, Minnesota, who applied for time at Travelers’ Rest State Park in Lolo. She drew on the site’s history, the Corps of Discovery, by writing from the perspective of York, who was a slave of William Clark’s.

The text, “Four entries, written by york,” is printed and on display in the gallery, are imagined excerpts from his diary, in which he savors the freedom of days when he can focus on hunting; and his thoughts while he’s forced to attend to Clark, and rumination on his cruelty and arrogance.

In her statement, Stafford wrote that she studied the history, with help from staff and local historians.

“As I was filled in on the journey’s details, my impressions of what York might have been feeling and experiencing developed. Thus were these fabulated journal entries written by myself in hopes of providing a fuller account of York for our historical record.”