Tyler Macko
Pudding Pie Hill

March 16 – April 27, 2024

“While the smallest or simplest body or bit may indeed express a vital impetus …. an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces. A lot happens to the concept of agency once non-human things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonoms but as vital materialities.”  — Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

Pudding Pie Hill is an exhibition of two new sculptural works by Tyler Macko, made in collaboration with his partner Leila Spilman. The two artists liken making an artwork together to making a life together, working with found materials that bear significance to their experiences as individuals and union as a couple. Many of the materials come from the land and buildings surrounding their rural property in the Shields River Valley of Montana, between the Bridger Range and the Crazy Mountains. A wagon wheel band made of wrought iron, a magpie nest, barnwood- included by Macko alongside remnants of fabric and leather used by Spilman to make clothing and furniture, oil paint found at garage sales, and house paint from the mistinted shelf at the hardware store.

Macko’s folk art sensibility draws on the materiality of interior decor and home-making because of his interest in panmnesia—the memory that lives in objects and their potential for storytelling. In his symbolic language of macro and micro, pennies and ladybugs are potent metaphors. A single one taken alone isn’t much, but together their value or “loveliness” (the name for a group of ladybugs) is substantial. Like an instrument in an orchestra, or a single star in a constellation; everything has objecthood, but deeper meaning is made when individuals come together in collaboration. 

Spilman, a multidisciplinary artist who primarily works with time-based media, contributes a video to the largest sculptural work “Ashes.” In the foreground, two threaded needles wind together to make a knot in the shape of a heart, framing a tiny screen in the center of the sculptural wall work, surrounded by a pile of rocks and colorful beads. The screen plays a recording of a ritual enacted by Spilman. Born in Santa Fe, she returned to New Mexico to be tattooed by Aron John Dubois, one of The Valley’s represented artists. She describes this act as “the closing of a loop,” a symbolic act of closure and transition. In the video, a single banded line is tattooed around her ring finger, representing her union with Macko and a transfer from the family she was born into to the security of a chosen family. Ritual unions of many kinds have been designed to commemorate this experience. The name of Macko’s exhibition is taken from one; Pudding Pie Hill is an ancient Burial mound in England which has become a site frequently sought out for weddings because the lore of this place dictates that a prayer will be answered if you run around the hill nine times. In the video, the creation of the single fine line around Spilman’s finger loops over and over, an expression of their bond in infinite multiples of nine. 

Concentric circles of symbols significant to the artist pair abound in these works. Both artists approach making from an unconscious space, looking for relationships between images, materials, and language. Whether foretelling or connecting to the past, objects serve as conduits for personal and collective narratives. Emphasizing the agency of objects, viewers can interpret their own associations, while recognizing how meaning is sorted through the mesh of Macko’s and Spilman’s personal lexicon of symbols and stories.