The University of Montana Western Fine Arts Gallery is honored to present “The New West” by artist Terran Last Gun. The gallery will host an opening reception on Friday, January 26, from 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. in the Fine arts Gallery located in Main Hall. The reception is free for all to attend and will feature light refreshments. “
Terran Last Gun, Saakwaynaamah’kaa (Last Gun) (b. 1989, Browning, MT) is a contemporary visual artist and citizen of the Piikani (Blackfeet) of Montana—Piikani is one of four nations that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy.
Last Gun’s work focuses on color, shape, and the visual documentation of nature, cosmos, narratives, and recollections. Employing geometric aesthetics through various media, ledger drawing, printmaking, painting, and photography, Last Gun works with Piikani (Blackfeet) visual aesthetics, cultural narratives, and modern sensibilities that create a continuum. His work often revolves around land, cosmos, shapes, and color and can be considered Indigenous geometric abstraction. Montana and Alberta’s ancient Blackfoot Confederacy territory inspired half of the ledger drawings in this solo exhibition. The other half represents his interest in pursuing the semicircle shape and its visual qualities by reconstructing it in various ways. He is interested in imagining the semicircle shapes turned into conical structures, such as a lodge cover, which have protected Indigenous Peoples of the vast Great Plains for thousands of years. All of the works depict powerful shapes and are of aesthetic importance.
