THE BARN PROJECT : 2 - Aspen
Shining Mountain : 12.5.14 - 1.8.15
The mountains stretch away, the cloud mountains and the green mountains - Charles Wright
When contemporary art is exhibited alongside art from an indigenous culture there is a visual reawakening. A light is cast that illuminates a pristine, unexpected way of seeing that both shifts perceptions and pivots expectations.
The exhibition title --Shining Mountain-- is a metaphorical landscape that allows a viewer to see things differently from an unaccustomed place. This “place” is not a geographical location nor is it emotional terrain; it is not a psychological nor a visionary dreamscape. In this exhibition, “place” is defined as “change”.
The curatorial focus for Shining Mountain is to expose the bones of what has come before, how it looks in the “still” moment of today, and what provocative concepts “place” holds for the future. Some artists featured in this exhibition have taken the idea of “place/change” and have translated it literally, conceptually
and traditionally; others have used “place/change” as a springboard to deconstruct, reconstruct, redefine or restore.
The sources each artist draws upon are themselves evolving and their compositions are caught in that “still” moment of the present. Indigenous people have learned to cope with physical displacement and over time learned to understand change as a normal, fluid part of existence. Through this lens, their visual stories find deeper tap-roots into cultural ancestry. In contemporary culture, artists have operated on the margins and this displacement from the social center has allowed them a critical vantage point--an essential distance--to operate as visionaries and master the alchemy of change as they raise a mirror.
The hope is that this collaborative curatorial exhibition allows the viewer to negotiate cultural distances and construct unexpected visual connections that transcend expectations and welcome a new way of seeing under a shining mountain.
