Jim Westphalen
Echoes on the Land
Gilman Contemporary presents two parallel solo exhibitions exploring the layered history of the American West.
In Echoes on the Land, Jim Westphalen photographs the weathered remains of vanishing homesteads across the region. These structures once marked one of the most ambitious migrations in American history: settlers drawn west by the Homestead Act of 1862, promised 160 acres of land that was far from empty. The realities of homesteading proved harsher than the promise, and in the quiet decay of these structures, Westphalen honors the determination and sacrifice that shaped the land.
That history is layered. The ground that homesteaders claimed had long been home to Indigenous nations, and westward expansion is inseparable from the displacement that came with it. These fading buildings stand on ground that holds both memory and loss, reminders that endurance and hardship have always shared the same earth.
Shot on a vintage 4×5 camera paired with digital hardware, Westphalen’s images carry a painterly stillness, as if the buildings themselves are holding their breath. In seeking their quiet “souls,” he uncovers traces of long-ago labor and life. Echoes on the Land builds thoughtful monuments to a history that is neither simple nor finished.
Dana Hart-Stone
Western Charms
In Western Charms, Dana Hart-Stone creates colorful digital paintings from found vintage photographs, each composition repeating in rhythmic glimpses of everyday American lives. Raised in Montana, Hart-Stone draws on his own childhood spent exploring abandoned homesteads. The work is inspired not only by the settlers but also by the Indigenous people they displaced, particularly the geometry of gift-giving quilts and the textiles that hold collective memory.
“My work comes from wandering the vast, history-rich countryside of eastern Montana as a child,” Hart-Stone says. “On those walks I found abandoned homesteads left with evidence of the pioneers who’d settled there: cracked boots, torn lace curtains, rusted barbed wire. These objects suggested hard lives, and they left me wanting to know more.”
Hart-Stone adds, “One memory from that same childhood has stayed with me even longer. After a basketball tournament in my hometown, nine Native American women walked onto the court, each carrying a folded gifting star quilt, laid open across the painted lines for everyone to see. One by one, the winning coaches were invited out to choose a quilt as a gift from the home team community. The generosity of that moment, giving away something so beautiful, stayed with me.”
About 40 years later, Hart-Stone started collecting vintage American vernacular photography, and that same curiosity returned. “I began making work from those brief clicks of the shutter, aimed at people simply going about their lives while building a nation,” he says. “The circular, repeating structures in this work trace back to that basketball court. It is, by nature, about unknown America.”
1. Jim Westphalen
Savoy Schoolhouse
archival pigment print
42 x 42 inches
Edition of 5
(additional sizes available)
2. Jim Westphalen
Water Tower at Hauger Ranch
archival pigment print
54 x 54 inches
Edition of 5
(additional sizes available)
3. Dana Hart-Stone
Charlie
UV-cured acrylic on canvas
75 inches diameter
4. Dana Hart-Stone
Razzel Dazzel
UV-cured acrylic on canvas
60 inches diameter
661 Sun Valley Road | Ketchum
208.726.7585
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