Museum Exhibition
The Gem State visual arts exhibition features work by four contemporary artists, all of whom are interested in the connections between geology, place and time. The exhibition includes newly commissioned work by artists Blane De St. Croix and Brad Johnson.
Northern California-based artist Mari Andrews works with natural materials, including stones and minerals, to create sculptures, two-dimensional works, and installations. Like much of her work, Andrews’s Coalgems, large pieces of anthracite that she carves and polishes, suggest the idea of transformation through time. Collected Topography, small lead aprons filled with soil collected from different sites around the world, reveals Andrews’s interest in the geology of place. The wide range in color of the different soil samples illustrates the diversity inherent in the earth’s surface.
Blane De St. Croix is well known for his large-scale sculptures and installations that recreate different kinds of geological and environmental sites of political or social importance, with a focus on the dramatic effects of climate change on the landscape. At SVMoA’s invitation, De St. Croix participated in a residency in the fall of 2019, visiting geological sites around southern Idaho. Inspired by the diversity of geological formations he encountered and the history of Sun Valley as a Union Pacific destination, De St. Croix has created a unique installation for the exhibition—a model Union Pacific train pulling cars that carry small sculptural models of the sites he visited during his residency.
The painter Cynthia Ona Innis has responded to geological sites throughout the American West for a number of years. Working with acrylic paint, ink and fabric, she creates striated, abstract artworks that suggest the collision of tectonic plates at fault lines, geothermal or volcanic activity, mountains and canyons. Innis made a number of pieces in this exhibition after a road trip through Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Others examine sites in her home state of California. Often her works invite the viewer to consider not just what they are able to see of a place, above ground, but the layers of geological history that lie unseen beneath the earth’s surface.
Based in Trout Lake, Washington, the multidisciplinary artist Brad Johnson has long been interested in the geology of the American West. SVMoA invited Johnson to create a new body of work for this exhibition with a focus on Idaho, and Johnson made several trips around the state, spending time at sites both well known (Hells Canyon and City of Rocks, for example) and obscure (abandoned quarries and remediated archaeological sites). Johnson uses photography and digital media to create works on paper that are sculptural in nature, using relief to evoke the textures and surfaces of the places he depicts. Johnson is particularly drawn to sites where human activity and geology intersect, and where he can illuminate the idea of time on both human and geological scale.
