Andy Cline was born and raised in Red Lodge, Montana. He has a BFA from the University of Montana. His work has recently been exhibited at the Kolva Sullivan Gallery in Spokane, Washington; the Missoula Art Museum in Missoula, Montana; the Custer County Art Center in Miles City, Montana, which includes the Traveling Collection, a show stopping at several rural towns in eastern Montana; as well as a group show of emerging artists from Montana at the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, Montana. Cline currently lives in Missoula with his wife and daughters.
There is an honest irony in Montana’s contemporary landscape. I study what I see everyday, as it is, affected by my presence. I value Montana’s glorious, wild, unaltered landscape. I see it and then I look to the foreground, I look to the left. I am interested in the intersection of reality and the pristine. We want to protect and preserve this place and we want to access it. We live here. What does that look like?
I live in Missoula, Montana, and regularly make the 400-mile journey between my current home and the home of my childhood—Red Lodge, Montana. When driving, I meditate on my surroundings. My interstate examinations reveal people and products moving along the land—all with a destination and all isolated articles that pass by more of the same cruising objects.
My wife and I now speed through this scenery with our two small daughters. My practice has evolved to meet the needs of my family and I find that now, when I am not opening a fruit leather or straining to fetch a fallen book, I have increased opportunity to absorb still shots that I previously passed in a blur. There are more stops, more noises, more distraction, and yet I find this change has pushed me to see more. I have shifted my gaze away from the highway and onto a rotting roadside doe, a house on a hill, an ironic dead end sign.