Invisible Prairie: Sensing and Sounding the Plains
“Afterglow”
Group Show on View July 8 - October 14, 2023
Tinworks Art | Bozeman, Montana
Afterglow is a series of interactive sculptures and paintings on view as part of the Invisible Prairies group show at Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana. Invisible Prairie offers a unique opportunity to connect to the poetry, fragility, and mystery of America’s grasslands through sculpture, video, painting, and audio works.
The show includes work by A.K. Burns, Abby Flanagan, Suzanne Kite, Tracy Linder, Julie Ann Nagle, Layli Long Soldier, Laurel Sparks, and immersive soundscapes by Jeff Rice from the Acoustic Atlas sound archive. It has been organized by Dr. Melissa Ragain, curator, author, and Associate Professor of Art History at Montana State University.
Wood, mirrors, glass lens, the bones of mammals, reptiles, birds, fishes, dinosaurs native to the prairie, and insects native to Montana
Viewers can gently rotate the eyepiece of this large kaleidoscope. As it turns, insects and bones from mammals, reptiles, fish, and dinosaurs within it reconfigure. They are refracted in mirrors, creating reflections between beautiful and grotesque. They provoke foresight of evolutionary potential or allow one to read their own future in scrying visions.
A Seed to Eat the World, 2023
Fallow Field, 2023
Acrylic, phosphorescent, and glow in the dark paint on curved canvas, glass beads, wire, blacklight flashlights
8’ x 16’
Fallow Field is part of the Afterglow series. Layers of phosphorescent paint flicker as viewers seek-out hidden aspects of this painting with blacklight flashlights- illuminating plants, insects, root systems, and things that exist at the margins of our ability to perceive them because they are invisible, delicate, or small. Made using the silhouettes of pressed grasses and forbs foraged from the Prairie of the American Mid-West, it combines the literal and fantastical in one image. This panoramic landscape immerses the viewer in a vast prairie terrain.
Fallow Field, details, 2023
Acrylic, phosphorescent, and glow in the dark paint on curved canvas Glass beads, wire, backlight flashlights
Snow Mountain Colorado, 2019
Acrylic and phosphorescent paint on un-stretched canvas, Glass beads and brass wire
While visiting Colorado in 2019, Nagle learned about the abundance of naturally occurring radon seeping out of the ground in large parts of the state. Aspects of this landscape painting are illuminated by a second phosphorescent image, which appears in darkness or under blacklight, to allude to the duality of the invisible dangers in this sublime terrain.
Night Spinning, 2021
Glass beads and brass wire
8’ x 8’
Blaze, 2019
Acrylic paint on un-stretched canvas
6’ x 5’
