Exhibit: Silent Middens, by Allyson Montana

"Faced with little information, we often assign narrative to the unknown. While this can be the realm of creativity and imagination, it can also be the source of great misunderstanding. My artwork explores the human need to construct stories, interpret ideas, and connect with others. 

As an unwritten story and with so much room for interpretation, archaeology can mislead, misinform, and misrepresent. Because the archaeological record is ahistorical, it becomes a mirror into our own culture, bias, and folly.  When we remove the human voice and the written word, what stories do symbols tell?

In this series of paintings I explore symbols and material from several archaeological sites including Teachers College as an archaeological settlement. At times, I incorporated materials I collected for the TC middens into paint and media and layered these onto canvas and board. These embedded layers from the TC midden are distributed throughout many of these paintings as stratigraphic records of my interviews and discoveries over the collection period. 

To represent stratigraphy, I layered paint, media, midden material, and sand on canvas. Between layers I made marks and inscribed messages. The meaning of these messages is obscured by the materials and unremembered by me. At times, symbols may appear from distant archaeological sites as silent reminders of our profound need to story the past. At other times, an outline of the Teachers College blueprint provided by Gottesman Libraries' staff appears in a painting as a territorial map to trace the boundaries of the active 'zone of human habitation.' The many layers of media, paint and collected materials are meant to obfuscate the meaning over time, and yet individual marks and images find their way through the layers. 

In some of my paintings, I  explore images from Catal Huyuk, a complex Neolithic archaeological site from Anatolia, with a unique mural. In 1958, James Mellaart excavated the site and published that the mural was a map of the square dwellings of the city of Catal Huyuk and the nearby volcano, Hasaan Dag. This 'first map in history' story is still prominently featured in Gardner's Art Through the Ages, even long after Mellaart was exposed as a fraud and a forger. 

Instead of constructing a story for the people of Catal Huyuk, I have formed a kind of apology. Through layers of paint, collage, and other materials I unremember the stories told about the people of Catal Huyuk and invite the viewer to examine the symbols found at the site with fresh eyes. 

We can learn a lot by examining what we discard. In archaeology, middens are a valuable archive of human activity. Trash middens typically provide a glimpse of domestic life, daily habits, environment or trends, but cannot give us a full picture of a civilization. The latter reminds us that constructing a story based on a midden is an imprecise science.

Core samples of trash middens offer a snapshot of the Teachers College Civilization. These samples, taken from August to December 2023, include air, story, ideas, earth, and myriad materials found and offered in various departments in the college. The planning, teaching, learning, thinking, social customs, and emotions behind this material record must be inferred. 

The TC Middens invite us to view our settlement with fresh eyes as well. We are a community of many voices and ideas. What stories will be told about us one day?" 

-- Artist Statement

Please contribute to the TC midden project! TC is an active community of learners, thinkers, colleagues, and friends. All are encouraged to submit to the TC Midden project by leaving behind an object that expresses their story and records their presence in the gallery.

Bio

Allyson Montana, 2023 Myers Awardee, is a painter and doctoral student in the Art & Art Education Program at Teachers College. Allyson’s work explores unwritten stories from the archaeological past. As a world without directions, the archaeological record is an open stage for interpretation. The content of Allyson’s work plays with the metaphor of interpretation, narrative, and authorship. Allyson layers media, paint, and other natural materials in her paintings, to deliberately obscure mark-making and meaning. At times she uses symbols from specific excavations in her work and at other times she incorporates her own “field notes” on a subject. Like in the Paleolithic record,  layers of information become concealed over time and are easily misinterpreted. 

Allyson’s background in ancient history and East Asian Languages greatly informs her work. She is an educator and has participated in Fulbright Fellowships to study art history in Japan, India, and Sri Lanka, as well as fellowships in Korea, Taiwan, and China. Allyson has exhibited her large scale, mixed media acrylic paintings in various settings throughout the Northeast. Allyson is also a current doctoral fellow in the Art and Art Education program at TC where she enjoys working with students teaching workshops and summer courses. 

This exhibit is made possible through the generous support of the Myers Foundations.

Where: Offit Gallery

When: December 6, 2023 - February 2, 2024

Art Talk and Opening Reception: Thursday, 12/7, 4-5:30pm

Images:

Border and poster images, by Allyson Montana,  courtesy of the artist