Sandra Dal Poggetto, in her new work, Watching from the Inside, has arrived at a new vantage point.

While deeply schooled in the art historical Euro-American landscape tradition, Dal Poggetto’s mature work, informed by a deep awareness and participatory engagement in the natural world, contradicts and stretches those formerly accepted conventions:

“Not only was I seeing with my eyes, but touching, feeling with my skin, stepping on and through, smelling and hearing. It was really picking up where I left off as a girl, playing in the outdoors, but now I was a painter with an abiding love of the long history of art. These sensations sunk in and down and also made me think anew.”

Dal Poggetto discovers, through a reconciliation of a painter’s appreciation for, as well as a reassessment of, our historical and present relationship to the land, a new observation post. With a deeply introspective mindset informed by her quiet study of the land, the artist considers a post-human worldview, decentralizing our role in the life cycles of the earth.

Her physical expressiveness in these environs, has, in turn, excavated the psyche, a thing, like the landscape, which is perennially germinating, sprouting, dying and re-emerging. This humanness has been inextricably woven into the landscape over time and, Watching from the Inside, archives this process.

Also featured in this exhibition is a new book of poetry by Melissa Kwasny, former Montana Poet Laureate, titled, The Cloud Path. A poem from this collection inspired the title of this show, and artwork by Dal Poggetto graces the cover.

Excerpt from: AN ASCETIC IMPULSE SURFACES, TEARS LEAVES FROM THEIR STEMS

“Is there a word for my new point of view? Surely not first-person nor third, not domesticated or wild, something artisanal like the potter’s clay slip, the flautist’s embouchure, the painter’s palette knife, like when I dream my own performance but am watching it from the inside.”