Opening reception Friday, October 10, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Artist talk at 6:30
For years, O’Malley’s artwork has been rooted in an environmental consciousness derived from her concern for the Earth’s rapidly declining health. By forming and pairing earthen materials and up-cycled detritus into monumental sculptures, O’Malley creates tension in her work that highlights the danger of our compounding climate catastrophe and underscores humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world. O’Malley’s forms are influenced by objects she encounters in her daily activities, representing: warnings, the imbalance of our ecosystems, widespread carbon footprint, and the means for sustainable living.
Cross+Roads explores our ever-changing ecologies and humanity’s relationship to the Land. Humankind continuously makes choices that drastically affect the Earth’s local and global ecologies. We need to be conscious about how both beneficial and detrimental actions affect our precious, limited, natural resources and the Earth’s inhabitants. According to Canadian scientist and researcher Dr. Max Liboiron, “pollution is not a manifestation or side effect of colonialism but is rather an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to land.”
Sculptures representative of human-constructed land impositions serve as metaphors for establishing healthier boundaries with nature, allowing the Earth to heal from misuse and abuse. Fences, property markers, and scars on the land (extraction sites, construction sites, superfund sites…) are as integrated into the Western landscape as flora and fauna. They act as boundaries and barriers: protecting, blocking, identifying, guiding, and containing. They also symbolize colonization and the destruction colonialist values bring to the land: capitalist-driven overconsumption, Victorian lawn care, land division, the forced removal of Indigenous Peoples from the National Parks…the list goes on.
By showing the wreckage resulting from colonialist morals, this exhibition advocates for an anti-colonialist approach to the present-day eco-emergency. Presently, due to exploitative values, humankind’s boundaries with the natural world are a tangled mess. To prevent complete climate collapse, humanity must redefine our relationship with nature. Ethics of stewardship and respect must be at the forefront of decision making.
We are at a crossroads; which direction will you pursue?
“The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.”
-Greta Thunberg
Danielle O’Malley is a Montana-based sculptor whose hand-built, large-scale ceramic work increases people’s environmental awareness. O’Malley received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth in May 2021. In addition to an active studio practice; O’Malley teaches, exhibits nationally, and serves her community as Executive Director for the Art Mobile of Montana and Coordinator for Montana Clay.
O’Malley’s work is monumental in both scale and symbolic message, and inventive in supportive materials (crocheted plastic bags; up-cycled fabric; woven flagging from construction sites). Her surprising combinations of scavenged materials, re-contextualized via textile processes, in concert with her earthen forms, are startling in scale, so viewers feel an urgency about the eco-crisis. O’Malley’s forms are influenced by landscapes (exemplifying nature’s magnitude) and industrial objects (indicative of warning) she observes daily: traps, grids, smoke stacks, and fences. The confrontational feeling of larger-than-life work in one’s space is unavoidable and instrumental in underscoring concepts of environmental concern and warning. Exaggerated scale increases the artwork’s significance through unexpected surprise and challenges the viewer as they experience altered scales of familiar forms.
Most recently, O’Malley was juried into two NCECA Annual exhibitions (exhibited at the Crocker Museum of Art and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art) and is a part of the Montana Museum of Modern Art and Culture’s inaugural 19 under 39 emerging artist exhibition. She was interviewed on the Tales of a Red Clay Rambler; Not Real Art Podcast; recognized and chosen for publication by: Ceramics Monthly, The Surface Design Association Quarterly Journal, The NCECA Annual Journal, and The Studio Potter Journal. She has received multiple local, state, and national grants. Her work is in permanent collections at the Northwest Art Gallery, the Taoxichuan Art Center, and numerous private collections.
