An exhibition by Todd Stewart and Robert Bailey at Nature, Environment, Science & Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder
May - September 2022
Photographer Todd Stewart and art historian Robert Bailey present In Progress, an interactive installation comprised of images and texts drawn from the archive of material they have built over the course of their collaboration. The work enables reflection about the ongoing forms that Manifest Destiny continues to take despite the idea’s clear wrongheadedness. Focused on themes including colonial history, scientific method, resource extraction, and artful craftiness, Bailey’s texts supply a complex apparatus for drawing connections with Stewart’s array of similarly themed images that address the contemporary shapes taken by thoughts and actions long ongoing in the American West. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to share in the process of meaning making by sifting through the materials presented and thinking about what progress means now.
Since 2015, Stewart and Bailey have pursued a collaborative research-based practice that combines artistic and scholarly approaches to investigating traces that people leave on the land in the western United States. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, their exhibitions and publications experiment with the perception, representation, and transformation of place. Stewart and Bailey have exhibited at Oklahoma Contemporary (2020), Southern Utah Museum of Art (2019), and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (2016) among other venues. They are based in Norman, Oklahoma, where they teach in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma.