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West of Everywhere
McMurry Gallery
Marcus Amerman, David Bradley, Anne Coe,
Jerry Cornelia,Tom Foolery, Bill Schenck
January 20 to April 6, 2006
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Featuring works by six prominent Western artists, West of Everywhere explores - through humor, satire, irony and social commentary - many of the enduring Western American myths and conventions that pervade Western art and culture: the iconic and clichéd hyper-masculine cowboy figure; the stereotype of the stoic or defeated Indian; the relative absence of the history of women in the West; and the inherent sentimentality of traditional landscape painting and wildlife sculpture. The exhibition touches on important themes in art, history, sociology and community.
The works in West of Everywhere comprise a fun, yet fundamentally serious, inquiry into some of our most enduring, often troubling and divisive regional and cultural stereotypes. The artists included in the exhibition are:
Marcus Amerman (Choctaw), Santa Fe, New Mexico,
David Bradley (Minnesota Chippewa), Santa Fe, New Mexico,
Anne Coe, Apache Junction, Arizona, formerly of Jackson Hole, Wyoming,
Jerry Cornelia, Sydney, Montana,
Tom Foolery, Dillon, Montana,
Bill Schenck, Santa Fe, New Mexico, formerly of Jackson Hole, Wyoming
This wildly diverse and visually rich exhibition includes large-scale paintings, sculpture, and mixed media works, illuminated miniature tableaux installed in antique theater lights and vending machines, as well as clothing and fashion design. The exhibition includes a beautiful brochure with an essay by Dr. Bruce Richardson, a professor of English at the University of Wyoming/Casper College Center. The brochure was made possible by a grant from the Wyoming Council for the Humanities.
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A Reflective Nature is an extraordinary group of 50 paintings of birds and water, a traveling exhibition from the collection of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin.
Water, in its many forms and temperaments, has inspired artists for centuries. When combined with bird imagery, the challenges posed by continual movement, a glimmering, reflective surface, and the unpredictable nature of both water and winged creatures increase exponentially - creating always-intriguing interpretations. Though these works are alike in that each features birds and water, they differ in the 50 different ways the artists have interpreted these two infinitely variable subjects. A Reflective Nature is made possible through the generosity of many of our community’s important oil and gas companies, including Wold Oil and True Oil, Anadarko, Kirkwood Oil and Nerd Gas. Additional support was provided by Audubon Wyoming and over ten additional oil and gas-related companies.
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