blue is the color of distance, 35 mm digital print, 2011
Whitney is a multi-media installation artist exploring the embodied, poetic language of land. She currently lives in Montana and her experiences within the vast landscape and farming ancestry continually influence her practice. She received her MFA in Studio Art from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, Washington University in St. Louis ('14) and her BFA in Ceramics from The University of Montana ('08). In between, she taught 2nd grade in New Mexico on the Navajo Reservation. Her work is exhibited nationally, most recently at Mildred Lane Contemporary Art Museum (’14), New York Center for Photographic Arts ('13), and included in the permanent collection of the Montana Museum of Art and Culture. Solo exhibitions include Collective at the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art ('11) and Re-Mapping the Stars at Northcutt Steele Gallery, Montana State University - Billings ('15).
CONTEXT STATEMENT
My relationships with place play a significant role in my artwork. I spent my childhood learning to listen to and interpret the physical language of place – all the particular sights, smells, sounds, textures, and tastes as something more than. Over time, natural phenomena and forms not only foreshadowed natural outcomes but also represented transparent layers of dialogue. Within these layers, half-stitched understandings surfaced in loose contours of emotion, imagination, and memory - poetry and myth were a means to grasp towards the intangible as places became an intersection of the physical and the non.
This feeling of place, the ineffable qualities allusive to both touch and tongue, are the experiences I seek to suggest for others with my site-responsive installations. Throughout my process, the prevalence of line, repetition, rhyme, alliteration, and vastness from surrounding lands structure the poetic, formal backbone of each work. A narrative is suggested, metaphors left unraveled - an open space waiting to be unearthed.
In addition to the multi-media pieces, I am constantly drawing. Drawing functions as an archive to record en mass information and I have begun to incorporate video, sound, performance, and photography as part of this process. The different layers within each work are a representation of my ongoing dialogue as I dissect my understanding and translate the world around me. Primary concerns are related to spatial relationships between contours and a linear articulation of gesture.
