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April 11, 2025 – March 21, 2026
Patrick Kikut’s art is rooted in his love for the landscapes of the American West and his drive to continue exploring them. Kikut served as the lead artist on the Sesquicentennial Colorado River Exploring Expedition (SCREE), launching out of Green River, Wyoming, on May 24, 2019 – one-hundred-fifty years to the day after the famous explorer John Wesley Powell undertook a similar journey. The watercolors and large-scale oil paintings on view reveal the progression of Kikut’s artistic process, and provide a visual journey down the Colorado River, amplified by the presence of one of the 18-foot rafts employed on the SCREE trip. On this expedition, artists and scientists lived and worked in proximity with each other, harmonizing and coordinating efforts to ensure safe and successful navigation through long and sometimes treacherous expanses of river. The resulting cacophony of images creates a shared visual vocabulary. Once used to document and prove the existence of land, resources, and vistas, today, these images continue to reify places. Kikut’s landscapes, created as a result of this intense interaction with nature and other collaborators, are inherently and necessarily an act of sympoiesis, of making-with.
Image: Installation view of Patrick Kikut’s installation at the University of Wyoming Art Museum. All artworks on loan from the artist. AIRE 183R raft and other items that were taken on the 2019 SCREE trip are on loan from Jessica Flock.
Funded through the generosity of the Susan Moldenhauer FUNd for Contemporary Art, the Patricia R. Guthrie Special Exhibitions Gallery Endowment, WE Soda, and By Western Hands.
