Gina Pugliese

Tag: Contemporary Art

  • The Moniker Monk of Jeffery City, Wyoming

    A Day Well Spent With Byron Seeley of Monk King Bird Pottery

    Inside Monk King Bird Pottery

    I left Lander, Wyoming at the end of August, running away from another Fremont County winter. Slowly making my way to Albuquerque, I visited Byron T. Seeley, proprietor of Monk King Bird Pottery. You can read about him, his shop, and Jeffery City in the article I wrote for Southwest Contemporary.

    Byron Seeley outside of his shop and studio.

    Here’s a small excerpt:

    Despite local interest in him as an artist and muse, internet searches provide scant documentation of Seeley beyond some travel blog posts and YouTube videos, including one where he takes “pot shots”—shooting his work with a gun. You also won’t find much information about Jeffery City, the former uranium mining town in Central Wyoming that boomed in the 1950s and busted in the 1980s, holding onto a paltry population of twenty-two. 

    Seeley shares a work-in-progress “primordial soup dish.”

    Sometimes passersby mistake Seeley’s shop for a restaurant since one of his signs reads “Home of the Primordial Soup Dish.” The dish, in fact, is a plate he makes using the same multi-clay technique as his mugs. “They’re my Moby Dick,” he jokes, admitting that he has none for sale due to the difficulty of stripping the surface layer and polishing the clay with steel wool without puncturing it.   

    Pondering the mascots and monikers surrounding Seeley—cowboy, mad potter, jailbird, abstinent monk, and muse—he strikes me as best represented by a tumbleweed–blown into one dusty Western town after the next, attracting interest and curiosity. In a similar vein, Seeley reminds me of the Dude from The Big Lebowski (1998), which opens with the song “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” following one of the sagebrush before introducing us to the film’s protagonist, a Gen-X hippy with a zen-like level of chill. While Seeley’s equanimity makes him guru-like, and perhaps also fails to shield him from the hyperbolic chaos and evil of the world according to the Coen brothers, he certainly doesn’t share the Dude’s lazy lack of production. And, you can’t placate him with a white Russian. 

    Read the full article here. Check out a full list of my publications here.

  • Land Art in a Wyoming Uranium Mine Ghost Town

    Hyperlink and Land Report Collective Members Install Work in Shirley Basin, Wyoming

    Photo by Donald Fodness of a hand-drawn map of the Shirley Basin ghost town, noting the placement of a few artworks. The “cow” refers to a dead cow found on the property.

    Find my latest art review for Southwest Contemporary, where I witnessed Theresa Anderson, Tobias Fike, Alicia Ordal, and Julie Puma get ready for an exhibition in remote Wyoming.

    Photo by Donald Fodness of work by David Lawrence Jones

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Sitting forgotten on an unmarked county road on the East side of Highway 487, you probably won’t find Shirley Basin, Wyoming, a uranium mine ghost town founded nearly seventy years ago. Its remote coordinates place it beyond unimpeded prairie hills, thirty miles north of Medicine Bow and sixty-seven miles south of Casper. If discovered, your reward is an eyeful of unhurriedly toppling structures, letting you witness over three decades of ongoing decay and abandonment.

    Photo by Tobias Fike of work by Summer Ventis

    As Hyperlink artists Theresa Anderson, Alicia Ordal, and Julie Puma erected their mixed-media sculptures in the only copse of still-standing trailers, the town blossomed under returned human interest.

    These artists traveled from Denver to participate in Re-Activate, a group show in collaboration with the Land Report Collective, which shares Hyperlink’s mission to meaningfully unite artists with various communities. Including geographically dispersed members from Colorado, Georgia, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Washington, Wyoming, and more, these collectives also seek to connect creatives across physical and digital boundaries and barriers.

    Photo by Gina Pugliese

    On my own unguided treasure hunt for art, I found a small, windowless white building with an attached cylindrical metal tower, I trepidatiously tip-toed through the open door next to Patrick Kikut’s Snowman Hospice and Wellness billboard (2020), with a snowman advertising ice cream in Laramie, Wyoming. Although I wasn’t trespassing, I felt like an intruder needing a hazmat suit to explore the depths of this miniature Chernobyl. Yet no uranium was mined and no nuclear reactors exploded in this spot.

    Inside were tall boxes with switches, dials, and gauges–clunky technology from a bygone telecommunications era. A disorderly vomit of binders and files spilled across the floor. Above me hung Daisy McGowan’s Biopsychosocial (all works 2023 unless otherwise noted), a disco ball, which, at night, scatters luminescent confetti onto an uninviting dance floor.

    Photo by Gina Pugliese

    Their gusto made me wish that I, too, was an artist invited to visually convey my perverse fascination with a place still bearing the scars of economic, ecological, and industrial devastation. Instead, I shared their productive curiosity about Shirley Basin and their excitement for an exhibition that compellingly blurs the distinction between art and detritus.

    Photo by Tobias Fike of work by Daisy McGowan

    Check out the full article and find a list of all of my publications here.

    Photo by Julie Puma of work by Alicia Ordal

  • Studio Visit with Esther Hz

    Curator and Artist Esther Hz Discusses Her Art and Soil In Her Studio In Denver’s City Park Neighborhood

    Esther Hz in her studio in Denver. Photo courtesy of the artist.

    Read my latest article for Southwest Contemporary about Esther Hz’s art practice, including her past as a farmer and recent biodynamic farm-inspired zoetropes for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition agriCULTURE (on view until October 1st).

    “Celestial Beings” on display in the agriCULTURE show at BMoCA.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Hz has always considered herself a practicing artist, but, as a former farmer, she found little time for art-making. Additionally, having attended a permaculture school in Eugene, Oregon, before urban farming at Produce Denver and then managing the urban Blue Bear Farm at the Colorado Convention Center, Hz remains passionate about agricultural work as an act of self and communal service—providing self-sufficiency and the opportunity to deeply nourish the masses. And, as Hz informed me, it all starts with good soil, the micro-biomes that line our digestive tracts, betraying where we source our food (which, under capitalism, is not necessarily where we live). 

    Hz and BMoCA’s curator, Jane Burke.

    Tones of spirituality, comedy, and healing emerge as powerfully legible focuses in Hz’s oeuvre. Occasionally working in the non-profit sector, including with girls and women from the foster care system, Hz has invited others to play with her in her studio, listening to their histories and visually replicating their stories into art pieces that might offer pathways to self-repair. 

    “Genesis”

    In her 2018 sculpture Genesis, Hz cast a young woman’s face in plaster, creating a visage in which oyster mushroom mycelium overtakes half of the head cast. Hz met this person, dealing with dying and deceased parents and substance abuse, through her non-profit work. Both Hz and this woman agreed that a mushroom mask justly represented her experiences. 

    “Many Eyes”

    Read the full article here. Check out more of my writing on Substack here. And visit my blog here.

    “Untitled”
    “Untitled”

  • Land Suffering/Land Healing: Marguerite Humeau’s Orisons

    The meek, reverent sculptures of Marguerite Humeau’s Land Art puncture 160 acres of unusable potato farmland in Hooper, Colorado.

    Read my review for Southwest Contemporary about the White Cube Contemporary Art Gallery artist’s land art, curated by Black Cube Nomadic Museum, on view in the San Luis Valley for the next two years. For more information about the piece, find Orison’s website here.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Competing with a backdrop of the Collegiate Peaks—a range of grandiose mountains each breaching 14,000 feet—and the bright, amorphous slopes of the Great Sand Dunes, Humeau’s numerous but camouflaged flora-and-fauna-inspired sculptures grovel before this macroscopic drama. Fortuitously arriving at golden hour, many of us remained distracted by the natural landscape, snapping pictures of ourselves in the pre-gloaming light, the dust storms on the horizon, and the play of our shadows stretching over scorched earth. Meanwhile, Humeau’s visual renditions of “prayers,” the definition of orisons, waited for reverence.

    While whimsical Americana characterizes the arguable Land Art of the UFO Watchtower, Humeau’s big, sundry thoughts make her work more difficult to specify, and subvert the impact of her small, poetic orisons. Despite Humeau’s extensive research and sensitivity, some melancholic lack haunts Humeau’s engagement with these 160 acres. Perhaps I wanted a more compelling motivation behind European Humeau’s “health report” (to use her phrasing) on a piece of indubitably struggling United States farmland undergoing unavoidable megadrought and the unprecedented effects of global climate change.

    As I beheld thirty-six spinning Spurge Dancer sculptures (numerically reflecting the artist’s age) on a patch labeled “150-year-old Sadness” on the Orisons map, I contemplated Humeau’s drive to offer such unavailing amelioration. I further pondered if I unjustly judged Humeau’s impulses to study, classify, map out, sanctify, and remedy a piece of land as too dangerously adjacent to ongoing and harmful settler-colonialist mentalities and epistemologies.

    This portrait of Humeau appears on her Instagram. She wrote the caption about her piece in the accompanying image (below). Since the publication of my review, she changed her caption, no longer referring to Orisons as a “health report.”

    Find a full list of my publications here.