Donna H. Gans: It's What You Don't See

It’s What You Don’t See by Whitefish, Montana artist Donna H. Gans, is the most recent installation created by regionally important artists and hosted by MAM. Gans is an experienced painter who has used the landscape as a point of departure. In this installation, she borrows heavily from her experience and sensibility as a painter. Gans applies layers of paint with a variety of tools, adding and subtracting from the surfaces, creating a record of time. She has also incorporated found and discarded materials into her surfaces. In It’s What You Don’t See Gans has left the meaning unfixed and open.

Gans says of her installation, “I often walk into the working space and the room is beating with ideas. Scraps of materials on the floor, paint drippings on walls are alive, ideas, written, and visual are strewn about. Raw but unfinished pieces are randomly dispersed. I think of the studio as a living space. Not all of the work is shown in its entirety, rather sides or sectional glimpses. It is a reflection of our lives – fragmented, but active, stimulating.”

A graduate of Pratt Institute and Arcadia University, Gans has been widely exhibited and is represented in corporate and private collections. In addition to a residency at The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH, she has received grants from the Ford Foundation and the Montana Arts Council.

This exhibition is sponsored by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.