Dana Montlack | American, 1963 -
Dana Montlack has engaged in a decades-long exploration of nature themes with a more recent focus on biomedical and oceanic imagery. Her latest works utilize cellular images in combination with photographs of natural elements. Montlack strives to interpret nature’s mysteries through her photographic collages.
Montlack feels a profound respect for and connection to the unique beauty of nature and uses related imagery extensively in her art. In doing so, she works on hybridizing animate objects, which she may distort in order to delay time and to view images from the microscope’s edge, as it were.
Montlack considers each element that she uncovers via her layered collages - to be but one manifested piece of the universe’s essence. Her goal is to present works that blur the imagined borders between the perceived physical fragment and its true, more mysterious underlying reality. Through her works, she dissects and magnifies elements from the natural world, and then juxtaposes them in myriad ways. In so doing, she hopes to reveal a sense of the connectedness of all things.
The photographs of cells Montlack incorporates in her works, are as small as 0.2 micrometers and are magnified as much as 7766 times. Montlack captures her own photographs of nature’s bounty with a combination of micro and macro lenses. She then layers her selected images to create the collage. Montlack’s respect for nature combined with technological interpretation place her works in a category of its own.
Dana Montlack holds a BFA in sculpture from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and a MFA in mixed media from the Otis Parsons College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums nationwide, including the Museum of Art, Downtown Los Angeles, CA; Alexandria Museum of Art, Alexandria, LA; Albright-Knox Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; and CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, CA; Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, CA. Lewis-Clark Center for Arts and History, Lewiston, ID; Joseph Bellows Gallery, San Diego, CA; Monique Goldstrom Gallery, New York, NY; Sylvia White Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Flux Gallery, San Diego, CA.
Additionally, her work is featured in private collections at the Whitney Marine Biology Research Center; Florida State University; Atlantis The Palm, Dubai, UAE; Scripps Memorial Hospital, San Diego, CA; Nokia, San Diego, CA; Crawford Long Hospital, Atlanta, GA; Crown Plaza Hotel, Atlanta, GA; Merck Pharmaceuticals, San Diego, CA; San Diego Cancer Center, San Diego, CA; Hotel 1000, Seattle, WA; Marriott Timberlodge, Lake Tahoe, CA; and the Hilton Convention Center in Houston, TX; She has created three artists' books -- The Bagua Book, Text, and Suite Mary -- all published by PaperBrainPress.