• Opening Lecture: Thursday September 4 at Light Hall, 6PM
• Opening Exhibition Reception: Thursday September 4 at McCray Gallery, 7PM
  

Both lecture and reception are free admission.

Flagstaff-based artist Shawn Skabelund has spent more than three decades creating over eighty site-specific installations that he describes as “collaborating with place”—a process of listening to the land and its history to craft powerful sculptural narratives. Using materials drawn directly from the natural world, from ponderosa pine pollen and charred logs to crow and coyote specimens and even discarded water bottles, Skabelund transforms these elements into thought-provoking works that confront ecological degradation, historical trauma, and humanity’s complex relationship with the land.

His latest exhibition, Thinking Like a Mountain, will be presented at Western New Mexico University.

“Thinking Like a Mountain” is Shawn Skabelund’s rumination on the life of Aldo Leopold as it intersects with his art, which has focused on land health, land ethics and justice for over thirty years. Skabelund’s work aptly reflects two of Leopold’s most important themes: “the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.” Skabelund believes that to think like a mountain is a creative process akin to collaborating with a place. Driving through the landscape of the Mogollon Highlands along U.S.
Route 180 helped him focus and develop the four place-based installations in the exhibition. The drive, or the route, became his studio, and the landscape out his car window, where Leopold once lived and worked, the place.