I love process-based making, and I use my practice to think critically about the complicated lives  of things in the material world. My interest in material culture stems from my extended family’s  fraught relationship to objects and the non-human: everything is coveted, collected, hoarded  and hidden away. Like my family members, I am obsessed with stuff. I link our possessions, and  their cycle of acquisition and disposal, to how we curate and construct our identities. My work  is located in the intersections between printmaking, performance, and sculpture. My most  recent prints - relief monotypes - are printed directly from reclaimed family garments on paper  or commercial quilting cotton.  

My mother and extended maternal family live in rural Scott County, Tennessee. I see their  relationship to the material world as not only related to generational poverty but something  culturally deeper. I understand these family members, with all their ideologies and  idiosyncrasies, through their love of things. I collect and print from charged objects  including reclaimed clothing and wigs that belonged to a wealthy ex-debutante who employed  my mother. These prints reference the absent bodies of an aging generation of women  who performed an exaggerated femininity during the atomic age and later found themselves  invisible. The resulting monotypes subvert the static, fixed matrix that printmaking relies upon,  highlighting instead the materiality of the abandoned possessions and the owner’s absence. 

As I delve further into this practice I’ve become interested in complicating the narratives the  garments tell. Works like Late Bloomer and Granny Pearl’s House Dress were made out of my  grandmother’s discarded clothes. These objects outlived her and now speak for her from  beyond the grave. Do they give a sense of who she was or further obscure her individuality? Can I write new stories for the people the garments reference? Can I give new agency to  ghosts? These questions have pushed me to begin combining fabricated objects with reclaimed,  found objects, and playing with installation to introduce new signs and stories.  

Guen Montgomery 

Guen Montgomery is an artist and performer whose work investigates identity through studies of gender, regional narrative, and family mythology. Her recent work looks at the queer life of things, the longing to acquire, and how objects perform identity. Materially, Montgomery’s work is located in the intersections between printmaking, performance, and sculpture. Montgomery has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has work in multiple public collections including the Centre for Art and Design in Churchill Australia, and Mushashino Art University, Tokyo, Japan, with recent exhibitions in Nashville and St. Louis. Guen currently teaches in the Studio Arts program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she lives surrounded by everyday treasures with her wife, dog, and three cats.

guenmontgomerystudio.com/