MISSOULA, MONT.- The Missoula Art Museum presents multimedia and installation works Mary Ann Bonjorni in Head and Heart. From the perspective of a ranch hand, range rider, poet, and artist, Bonjorni’s wall constructions and large installation works investigate the myth of the American West and human relationship with the land and wildlife of “the West,” from the romanticized past to the Anthropocene present.

Bonjorni says, “As an artist, I’m interested in how visual vernacular represents cultural complexities—perhaps even influencing customs and values. . . . I rely on the viewer’s ability to relate referentially to images and objects as cultural puzzles with a Western twist.”

A consummate draughtswoman, Bonjorni is able to deftly and naturalistically render, for instance, the human form or a horse in action—but the artist’s conceptual power strikes the viewer who enters Head and Heart. The artist incorporates taxidermy, video, garage-door openers, and old farm tools and equipment so that the experience of the artworks is necessarily visceral and grounded in material culture. The constant motion of the eponymous trailer and wall-spanning video in East Idaho from the Spinning Trailer series creates an unsettling and monumental background for the altered bodies of bear and deer that visitors can relocate or displace through the push of a garage-door opener in Best Practices of the Anthropocene, Stage I.

The artist says, “The majority of my works are intentionally monolithic, yet tenuous, with an underlying vulnerability delivered in a concrete manner—memories and feelings, imagined and real—seeping to the surface much like our perceptions of the West itself.”

Bonjorni earned her M.F.A. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1986 and joined the School of Art at The University of Montana in 1991, rising to the rank of Associate Professor and then Professor. In the course of her 30-year career at UM, she served as a senior member of the painting and drawing areas and taught both undergraduate and graduate students.

Mary Ann Bonjorni: Head and Heart is on view at Missoula Art Museum through Dec. 14, 2024.