Montana artist opens show at Collage gallery, exploring how her father shaped her family

The new show opening at the Collage Gallery on Friday is about family.

Montana artist Sara Mast is opening Soundings, a multimedia exhibition featuring encaustic paintings, video, sound and installation based on her father, who was an inventor and passed away when Mast was 15.

She enlisted the help of her brothers, nieces and nephews, several of whom are artists and musicians.

They looked through his archives and studied what he was like, which was a real learning experience for the younger generation who had never met the shows inspiration.

“I thought well here are my nieces and nephews who never knew this person, “ Mast said. “They had only heard stories.”

They worked on the show for about a year and first opened it in 2013.

Mast created 10 24x24 encaustic paintings for the show, that incorporated her fathers’ handwriting and notes.

In addition there is a text piece, a video and an interactive component to the show.

The interactive piece, called Mapping Love, is essentially a family tree in a cellular struture. The piece interacts with an iPhone, which reads heartbeats.

“The viewer puts their finger on the iPhone and their reading shows up on the painting,” Mast said.

While part of the inspiration for the show was allowing her nieces and nephews to learn about their grandfather, the show is about family as a whole and how an identity is shaped.

“Part of the show is really about how stories create a history and family identity,” Mast said. “I really wanted to look at how my identity was formed through him, and how other identities through generations were formed. It’s kind of an exploration of how family forms a person.”

Since she first opened the show in Wyoming a year ago, Mast’s mother passed, inspiring her to create a few more pieces about her mother to add to the show.

The show seems to keep expanding, and Mast isn’t sure where it will go from here.

But it’s that focus on family that Mast thinks makes the show speak to a wider audience.

“We all have parents, we all come from a mom and a dad,” she said. “Really everyone has that story. It’s a creative act just to reflect on that and build work from that place. I hope it kind of inspires other people to reflect on their own stories.”

Mast’s opening at Collage is part of Bigfork’s Last Friday event. Downtown galleries will open their doors from 5 to 8 p.m., and many will offer refreshments.