James Lavadour: Horse Stories
February 15 - May 25, 2012 // Lynda M. Frost Gallery Contemporary
American Indian Gallery
First Friday Artist's Reception: April 6, 5-8 PM
Artist's Gallery Talk: April 6, 7 PM
Tour and Reception: James Lavadour and Raphael Chacón, April 7, 1 PM

MAM is delighted to host James Lavadour: Horse Stories, one of the region's most celebrated and respected artists. James Lavadour was born in Pendleton, OR in 1951. Today, he lives and works on the Umatilla Indian Reservation, where he is artistic advisor to the Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts. Lavadour has been described as a self taught
painter, but the works featured in this exhibition speak more than ever to a mature, savvy,
driven and hard working contemporary artist. The paintings featured are Lavadour's first ever Montana exhibition.

The exhibition includes three large works, all oil on panels including, Deep Moon, from 2005 (on loan from Jordan D. Schnitzer), Hollow, from 2007, and finally the most recent work Straight Ahead from 2010. By featuring these three works viewers will experience both a progression and a consistency, and a collected assembly of works and actions. By placing one panel next to another, the artist composes a complex experience with intense earthy colors and sensitivity to the organic properties of paint itself. Standing close one is exposed to the physicality and actions of the artist at work, stepping back, you realize that the panels allow the elements to work together in a more complex experience.

Doug Russell: Confluences
February 16 - April 22, 2012 // Shott Family Gallery & Helen & F. Morris Silver Foundation Gallery
Artini: We Too Like to Make drawings, February 16, 6-9 PM
Artist's Reception and Gallery Talk: February 16, 7 PM
Master Class with Doug Russell: February 18, 12-3 PM

Doug Russell is a visual artist who lives and works in Laramie, WY. His exhibition, Confluences, is a large, concise body of work encompassing three separate series of drawings. Each series explores the passage of time and cyclic changes through Russell's visual language of layered, evolving marks and transparency centered on monumental compositions.

Edifice, which comprises seven mixed media works on paper, is a literal study in time, process and evolution. In continual progress since 2005, Russell explains of the series that "the drawings reveal the passage of time through years of mark-making choices and changes." The final phase of the drawings, recently realized in 2011, was to use the architectural forms common in his recent work to "develop and flatten the illusion of space". Empire is a series of eight drawings that employ pencil, ink, graphite and China marker on Mylar, a semi-translucent surface that seems made for Russell's intricate, layered marks. Of the Empire works the artist states, "they are explorations of improvised gestural drawings of imagined monumental architectural forms." Where the Edifice series reveals years of marks from Russell's enveloping style, Empire gives the viewer the foundation of his most recent series of refined, colossal drawings. Ebb and Flow is a series of twelve large drawings completed in 2010 and 2011. The works range in size from 40 inches by 25 inches, to a large-scale installation- a monumental drawing of quiet, chaotic decay and slow, organic re-growth, larger than eight feet square. Ebb and Flow is Russell's "reflection of [his] perception of the compression of history, culture, and time" - and indeed these imagined, compressed civilizations are marvelous worlds unto themselves.

MAM is excited to introduce Missoula to Doug Russell with this exhibition of original drawings. More often than not, drawing is used as a tool by artists to explore ideas that are later formalized in other media, be it painting, sculpture or printmaking. Russell, on the other hand, readily absorbs the influences from these media to educate his visual investigation and inform his visual language while remaining rooted in the traditions of drawing. The body of work exhibited in Doug Russell: Confluences leaves no doubt
that drawing is a powerful and beautiful medium on its own.