Art by J. Daniel Graham, Jordan Lienhoop-Crump, Loren Myhre, McKenna O’Hare, Tim Robertson, and Michael Winters

Six artists backpack into the Daniel Boone National Forest together for three days and then make art in response.

On view November 1, 2024 - January 5, 2025

RECEPTION + ARTIST TALKS: Friday, November 1, 7-9pm with live folk tunes by Brittany & Darren Jennings and Daniel Graham.

In the summer of 2023, the six of us hefted on backpacks and followed each other down into the Red River Gorge. Some of us were seasoned backpackers and for some of us, this was the first time. The idea was to enjoy the place and each other’s company, and to afterwards make art that speaks something of “wilderness,” inspired by the particular gifts of Kentucky’s forests.

Under a large rock shelter shaped like an inverted amphitheater, after wandering around like curious children, we gathered and responded to the question, “What’s different about you when you’re here versus when you’re in your everyday life?” A shared awareness emerged as we together felt how present we were to our surroundings, each other and ourselves. 

Wilderness as a concept doesn’t have precisely defined boundaries. Edward Abbey wrote of wilderness that though we scarcely know what wilderness is, “the word itself is music.” When we enter into wilderness, we enter a different mode of being. Author Wendell Berry and photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard created a book together about Red River Gorge in 1971 with the title The Unforeseen Wilderness. Among other brilliant insights, this book includes one of Berry’s most extended writings on visual art, specifically art photography. He contrasts the tourist-photographer “who goes to a place, bound by his intentions and preconceptions, to record what has already been recorded and what he therefore expects to find” with the photographic artist whose “search is a pilgrimage, for he goes along ways he does not fully understand, in search of what he does not expect and cannot anticipate.” 

Working in different media and styles, the six artists in this exhibit have pilgrimaged together and now share the records of that journey. In their various forms, these artworks reflect on various aspects of wilderness and the human experience of entering into it. Red River Gorge and the larger Daniel Boone National Forest have been our muse.