November 5, 2012

 

Contacts:

Contacts:
Dr. Leanne Gilbertson, Northcutt Steele Gallery Director, 657-2903
Dan Carter, University Relations, 657-2269

 

MSU BILLINGS NEWS SERVICES — The Northcutt Steele Gallery at Montana State University Billings will feature the work of encaustic painter Lauren Eisen in the next month, showcasing art that explores the relationships between humans and the natural world, and the effect of those relationships on native plant and animal life.

 

Lauren Eisen's art

The solo exhibition “Effigies” will be on display from Nov. 15 to Dec. 13. An artist’s reception will be held on Thursday, Nov. 15, from 5-7 p.m. at the gallery.  The reception and exhibition are both free and open to the public.

 

Eisen’s mixed-media collage art skillfully integrate encaustic — a process of painting with pigments suspended in hot wax — with found natural and industrial materials, processed food items, and animal effigies. Her richly textured and layered works explore the relationships between landscape, architecture, agriculture, horticulture, and other aspects of industry that affect native plant and animal life. In her compositions Eisen offers reflections about human consumption of natural resources that allude to a variety of relationships between human-made structures and naturally occurring forms: inspiration and imitation, digestion and destruction, cultivation and captivity.

 

Eisen is assistant professor of painting and director of foundations at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. She has an active exhibition record of solo, group, juried and invitational exhibitions and has work included in a number of private and institutional collections across the nation. She received her MFA from Tulane University in 1991 and her BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design in 1989.

 

The Northcutt Steele Gallery is located on the first floor of the Liberal Arts Building on the MSU Billings university campus and is open Monday-Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, go to www.msubillings.edu/gallery or to www.facebook.com/northcuttsteelegallery. To contact the gallery director, call Dr. Leanne Gilbertson at 657-2903 or e-mail her at leanne.gilbertson@msubillings.edu.

 

PHOTO ABOVE: Lauren Eisen’s “Hybridization/Reversion” features encaustic, metal, paper, grass and clematis pods on wood.