BY KAREN BOSSICK

Caroline Monnet incorporates birchbark biting, in which the Ojibwe, Cree and other peoples folded thin layers of birch bark and used their teeth to bite floral, geometric and animal designs, into her work. Demian DineYazhi employs ancestral knowledges in a new neon sculptural commission.

These are among the artists whose work will be displayed in the Sun Valley Museum of Art’s new exhibition “Memory of a Future Once Imagined,” which opens tonight at The Museum at 191 5th St. E. in Ketchum.

The opening reception will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. tonight—Friday, March 13. And DineYazhi and Paul Mullowney of the Portland-based Mullowney Printing Company will lead a community printmaking activity during the opening.

A free panel discussion will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday, March 14, at The Museum. It will feature Erin Joyce who curated this exhibition in conversation with DineYazhi and artists Adnan Razvi, Laura Skehan and Rodrigo Valenzuela.

It’s very exciting, as it's very rare to have that many artists under the museum roof at one time during an exhibition!” said Ava Scanlan, director of marketing for SVMoA. “Plus, the guest curator Erin Joyce is here as well!”

The “Memory of a Future Once Imagined” exhibition is the third and final exhibition in the Museum’s series “Landscapes of Migration.” It considers the ways migrants continue to engage with the places and traditions they have left behind.

This particular exhibition challenges colonial understandings of time and histories of movement, migration and land, said Joyce, who has organized more than 40 exhibitions and public art projects across the United States. Artists propose alternative frameworks for understanding place, belonging and future possibilities through photographic installation, video, sound, painting and sculpture.

“The works look at ancestral memory as not something of the past, but a living entity that informs present and future moments,” said Joyce. “From Adnan Razvi’s work looking at ecological and water memory in his on-going series MAWIMBI, Laura Skehan’s investigation into foodways and memory in her commissioned sound installation, Caroline Monnet’s fusing of Anishinaabe birch-bark biting as a visual language with industrial materials, Rodrigo Valenzuela’s invitation to viewers to question photography’s construction of truth through histories of labor and architecture, and Demian DinéYazhi’s invocation of continuum of ancestral knowledges, revolution, and Indigenous futures in their new neon sculptural commission, the artists participating in this project share critical perspectives to lived realities.”

THE ARTISTS:

DEMIAN DINÉYAZHI'

Portland, Oregon-based transdisciplinary artist Demian DinéYazhi’ contemplates ways a marginalized body navigates and resists assimilation. For Memory of a Future Once Imagined, SVMoA and the exhibition curator worked with DinéYazhi’ to create a site-specific neon installation for the museum’s front window considering time, renewal, resistance, and Indigenous futures. 

LAURA SKEHAN

Working between Dublin and Berlin, Laura Skehan premieres a newly commissioned installation titled In the Absence of Resolution, We Break Bread. Incorporating recordings from intimate dinner gatherings in Berlin, the sound and light installation reflects on foodways, migrated histories of sustenance and the cultural impacts of colonization. Skehan’s practice—spanning moving image, sound, and sculpture—examines the non-hierarchical rhizomatic structures that shape human relationships to the natural world and to one another.

CAROLINE MONNET

Anishinaabe and French-Canadian artist Caroline Monnet, based in Montreal, works across film, installation, 3D printing, and fashion to focus on bicultural identity, Indigenous lifeways, and the reimagining of contemporary systems through Indigenous methodologies. The exhibition features Monnet’s new short film PIDIKWE, a wearable textile sculpture, and two-dimensional works inspired by the Anishinaabe practice of birch bark biting. Translating this traditional art form into contemporary visual language, Monnet bridges ancestral knowledge and present-day expression.

ADNAN RAZVI (WITH TAYLOR CLEVELAND)

Dallas-based Ugandan Pakistani American artist Adnan Razvi presents large-scale works from his ongoing MAWIMBI series. Razvi travels globally to bodies of water, where he creates multidimensional paintings on linen using sediment and materials gathered directly from each site. These textured, abstract compositions serve as metaphors for the movement of peoples across geographies and generations. The exhibition also includes a collaborative video installation created with Dallas-based artist Taylor Cleveland, animating the MAWIMBI works through a blend of futurism, documentation, and temporal layering.

RODRIGO VALENZUELA

Los Angeles-based artist Rodrigo Valenzuela contributes Future Ruins, an installation that merges photography, sculpture, and constructed environments. Born in Chile, formerly a day laborer in the United States, and currently an Assistant Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA, Valenzuela interrogates the histories and lived realities of labor through references to art and architectural history. Utilizing materials such as scaffolding, pallets, metal, pipes, and cinderblocks, Future Ruins blurs the boundaries between photography as documentary evidence and photography as constructed narrative, inviting viewers to question assumptions about truth, authorship, and permanence.

“It’s a pleasure to be able to share nationally known curator Erin Joyce’s exhibition with our community here in the Wood River Valley,” said Courtney Gilbert, Assistant Director and Curator at Sun Valley Museum of Art. “Her project brings a remarkably diverse group of artists--in terms of personal histories, geographies and artistic mediums--together in a fascinating conversation about how we understand time, history, and movement.”

The exhibition will run through June 10.  The Museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays. Admission is free.

OTHER EVENTS ASSOCIATED WITH THIS EXHIBITION:

EVENING TOURS

Thursdays, March 19, April 16, and May 21, 5:30 p.m.

The Museum, Ketchum

FREE, pre-registration is recommended.

Film: A Revolution on Canvas

Ara Nodjoumi delves into the disappearance of a hundred-plus “treasonous” paintings by her father--Iranian-born Nicky Nodjoumi.

Wednesday, April 1, 5 p.m.

Merlin’s Magic Lantern, Ketchum

$10 member / $12 nonmember

First Fridays: Damian Rodriguez

Friday, Apr 3, 5-7pm

The Museum, Ketchum

Free

Memory of a Future Once Imagined is made possible with support from the Robert Lehman Foundation, The Idaho Commission on the Arts/NEA, Sharon Twigg-Smith, and other Wood River Valley donors. Demian DinéYazhi''s sculpture is made possible through  support from The Ford Family Foundation. Laura Skehan's sound installation is made possible with support from Culture Ireland.