Taking the Waters
Studio Ahead—Rock Plinth,features a rock from Northern California's Yuba River, paired with a Montana Columbine (it's also a vase) and a postcard from the now abandoned Modernist architecture of Camas Hot Springs Bathhouse in Hot Springs, Montana. All photography by Meg Jeunker
Taking the Waters, on view through July 30th—organized by Colin Frazer, who has spent the last 15 years as a professor of graphic design, with a vocation in brand identity. We invited 11 designers / craftspeople / artists to create work in response to Colin's topic of land use, architecture, and cycles of humans' response to the enduring natural hot springs of Montana. In his words:
Someone built a pool. Helena, 1889: the largest indoor natatorium in the world by its own billing, with Moorish arches, stained glass, and a forty-foot granite waterfall, opened the same year Montana achieved statehood. Before all that, the Salish, the Kootenai, the Blackfeet, and the Shoshone knew these springs as neutral ground; the water rose hot from the earth and nobody owned it. The pattern repeats across Montana. Bathhouses were built, burned, rebuilt, and burned again, and the promise survives every collapse, from 1907 railway pamphlets to the mineral immersions of the present. Robert Smithson called such structures ruins in reverse: rising into ruin before they are built. The artists in this exhibition are the latest in a long line of people who could not leave well enough alone. The springs rose before us, they still do.
What resulted was an incredible mix of interpretations, with studios from Milan to San Francisco, and each time zone of the United States represented. Wood, glass, electricity, motors, foraged rocks, aluminum, weaving, mushrooms, coral, plexiglass, a lava lamp—materials and styles that span from the 14th century to present day.
We are once again heartened, impressed, and encouraged to continue to exhibit design & fine art through this platform. We are awed by the talent we present to our audience.
Henry Merker—Valet of the Radiancea towel rack shaped by hand and brought to a blade finish. It is a closed edition of 4. The first edition has been aquired! Commissions for 3 more available, lead time 12-16 weeks.
Cameron Lasson, Bath Stool—The stool is based on a vernacular bench in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It is built from eastern white pine and laminated in a marbled institutional rubber flooring using a grid of nails. It is built using the vernacular building methods settlers used to make practical everyday furniture. The rubber stone flooring mimics the rational-grid segmentation of land in the settler maps of Montana which turn an organic/living landscape into something that can be broken down into parts to be owned.
Yik Heng Lee, Bathtub—Cotton, perle cotton, pinewood, viscose; jacquard-woven textile framed in custom pinewood frame. One of a series of four weavings that explore the communicative capacity of textiles and the grid as a narrative structure, drawing on Rosalind Krauss' writing on the grid. Each depicts a charged domestic space—drawn from present-day queer film stills (Call Me by Your Name (2017),Queer (2024), All of Us Strangers (2023), History of Sound (2025)) coalesced with photographs of Yik's own lived space—to sketch the quotidian life of an imagined young queer man. The Bathtub piece grew out of the bathroom scenes between Oliver and Elio in Call Me by Your Name, combined with a photo of a bathtub on the RISD campus.
Mothership Studio, Preening-lamp—mixed hardwoods, abalone, electrical components. CNC cutting and inlays. Mothership Studio is focused on the beauty of natural materials, folk art of the Upper Midwest, and creating objects with an inherent life.
Carl Durkow's Pressure Makes Diamonds—aluminum, rock, submersible pump provides the exibition with a continuous reminder of water in motion.
*Visit our website and Instagram for additional work from Edizioni Brigantino, Heidi Norton, Jake Coan , Kira Wilson, and Matt Barton
