Sandra Dal Poggetto
Watching from the Inside
A new vantage point.
Bozeman, 2024
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.”
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.
Like when I dream my own performance but am watching it from the inside.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 — An Ascetic Impulse Surfaces, Tears Leaves from Their Stems, from which the pull quote above is drawn — inspired the title of this show, and artwork by Dal Poggetto graces the cover.
Installation views
Landscape painter, watching from the inside.
A landscape painter of the American West, Sandra Dal Poggetto's art embodies a visceral convergence with the natural world. Her abstract paintings are concrete and representational, allusive and lyrical, expressing contemporary concerns while remaining in touch with the long tradition of art. Materials gathered from the land itself — dyed deer hair, feathers, fox fur — are woven directly into the work.
Dal Poggetto received her BA from UC Davis and her MA from San Francisco State, and resides in Helena, Montana. She has exhibited internationally and is part of museum collections in the West. She is a recipient of the Jentel Foundation Residency, the Helene Wurlitzer Painting Fellowship, the Pouch Cove Foundation Residency, a Playa Invitational Residency Award, and twice a Ucross Foundation Fellowship.